This is an IGN opinion piece from writer Jeremy Peel. He’s an FPS fan who’s played 200 hours of Marathon and is currently blitzing a Heroic playthrough of Halo: Combat Evolved ahead of the remake.
Destiny 2 is dead. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that Destiny 2 has finally solidified, after almost 10 years in flux. At times, the mercurial FPS was expanding with new stories and dungeons; at others shrinking as Bungie battled with the associated bloat of a live-service shooter. With one hand, the developer rewarded players with new activities, subclasses and exotic weapons to chase down; with the other, it took away, diminishing the power of the gear that Guardians had fought so hard for with each seasonal reset.
Now, with the final Monument of Triumph update installed as a capstone, the lava has begun to cool. It’s OK to finally let it out: a sigh of relief. For many of us, who were intrigued by Destiny 2’s evolving space fantasy story but never wanted it as a second job, this newly static game is suddenly much more appealing. It allows for the prospect of slowly picking away at each expansion, unpacking the Light and Darkness Saga at a self-determined pace.
More than that, it’s a tangible way to celebrate the work of the Destiny 2 team, which is no more. As the news sinks in that 292 jobs at Bungie have been cut by Sony, it can be hard to feel anything other than morose or empty. But by picking up a pulse rifle and reducing some Eliksni to dust, it’s possible to transmute that feeling into something resembling gratitude.
Booting up Destiny 2 today is a little like sitting down to watch the 2010s heyday of the MCU, knowing that the character arcs of Cap, Stark and co are finite, and that the parabola will ultimately land with Avengers: Endgame. Destiny 2 even has a comparable stepping off point in The Final Shape, the 2024 expansion that concluded many of the game’s major storylines to the satisfaction of longtime players. Most agree that, like post-Endgame Marvel, the threads Bungie has spun since are comparatively insubstantial.
Starting out in Destiny 2’s Solar System isn’t as simple as it should be, however. While the game now has a defined middle and an end, it doesn’t quite have a start. It still bears the scars of Bungie’s most controversial decision – the ‘vaulting’ of much of its early material, including its launch campaign and beloved follow-up, Forsaken. In the long run, the ‘vault’ has proven to be an overgenerous metaphor – since very little that has gone into it has subsequently come back out. A more appropriate point of comparison might be a black hole.
Personally speaking, this history has left me in a rather peculiar place. Having played through the Red War campaign at launch and nothing else, I’m returning to a Destiny 2 that contains none of what I remember about its story. Back in 2017, the game opened with the destruction of the Tower at the hands of a chunky, squat fellow with a lizard’s face: Dominus Ghaul. What followed was an underdog plot to take back the Last City, rooted in a City-17-styled map called the European Dead Zone.
While the EDZ still exists, Destiny 2 now kicks off in Old Russia, at the Cosmodrome. It’s a striking and mournful environment – distinguished by its scrums of abandoned cars, chasmal staging sheds of rusted steel, and towering launch pads whose metal arms clutch for rockets they can no longer hold. There you rise from the dead, plucked from the scrapheap by a Ghost, your personal Light-giving drone. This is how the original Destiny began – Bungie repurposing that old piece of metal and welding it over the gap left by the Red War campaign.
There’s no escaping the sense that you’re playing catchup, however. Before long, Destiny 2 hands you a clutch of artifacts. Each is a holdall for a set of selectable perks, which combined with your weapons and powers can produce creative synergies, optimising the battlefield output of your character. But since these systems aren’t introduced in a piecemeal fashion anymore, they’re bewildering to begin with. A corner of your inventory you don’t dare look at for fear of frying your mind.
Out in the Cosmodrome, there’s a similar need to protect your brain by picking your own point of focus and ignoring all else. The overwhelm is immediate, as strangers sweep around the place on speeders, while dropships provide a light rain of goblinoid Fallen enemies throughout the day. You’re bombarded with pre-order bonuses for expansions from years gone by, and primers for tougher challenges you’re not yet ready for. It’s the crushing sensation of nine years of activities, updates and commerce, compacting inside your head all at once.
Finding your intended mission amid the noise is no small feat – and not helped by Destiny’s abysmal quest marker system, which always seems to be highlighting something other than your destination with larger symbols and brighter colours. During my first Strike – a three-person mission designed for a short play session – the biggest onscreen indicator steered me right back to the map’s communal area, far away from the tunnel I should’ve been delving down. By the time I’d trudged into Rasputin’s bunker, my teammates were merely mopping up, having handled a crisis without me.
Yet the gunplay is to die for – and I say this as something of an expert on the subject of death, having spent the best part of a decade as a corpse in Old Russia. By selecting the Hunter class, equipped by default with a triple-jump, a throwing knife and an authority problem, I’ve been able to zip around the battlefield in the manner of the Slayer in Doom Eternal.
Dashing sideways through the air, I can let loose a volley of solar energy to thin the crowd, before pulling in close to hammer the right stick and trigger a Finisher – an excessively animated third-person knife attack. With access to a full suite of artifacts, I’ve figured out a combination of perks that boost my armour when surrounded, and dole out health when finishing off minibosses with a knife. Let the glory kills commence.
Former Bungie designer Jaime Griesemer once famously said that, “if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game”. With Halo, the goal was to recontextualise those 30 seconds over and over, using different enemies, vehicles, and mission parameters. With Destiny 2, by contrast, I feel as if I’ve been made responsible for finding and perfecting my own 30 seconds of fun – homing in on the class, guns and moveset that bring me joy, then squeezing further pleasure from the tweaks and optimisations discovered along that path. Now that Bungie’s live service has wound down, the builds I uncover and develop will never be pulled apart or reduced by balance patches. They’re mine to play with whenever I like, for as long as I like.
To my tastes, Halo and Bungie’s latest FPS, Marathon, both punch harder during a firefight – somehow, Destiny 2 feels a little flimsier in the hands, never quite matching its cousins for heft. But there’s no doubt that Destiny 2 is the most flexible shooter Bungie has ever made, and therein lies its potentially endless charm. There’s only one way to play Halo – as Master Chief. But here, you’re confronted with a constellation of possible configurations, and asked to buildcraft your way to victory.
The Doom overtones of my chosen playstyle found a fitting home in Shadowkeep – the first expansion along the road to The Final Shape. There, against the backdrop of a haunted moon, the knights of the Hive have built towering red battlements that resemble broad blades, covered in blood. In a brilliant opening gambit, Bungie brings multiple fireteams together to fight a widescale assault on a castle gate. It’s in moments like these that you realise what mass-multiplayer can do for a story shooter in the mode of Halo – turning other human beings into bit players in your breathtaking spectacle, and allowing you to become part of theirs in turn.
Whenever Destiny 2 seems masterful, however, you can be sure it’s about to land you in a muddle. An NPC in the Tower suggested I play through a mission plucked from the otherwise deleted Forsaken expansion. Good idea, I thought: if I witnessed the death of the colourful and charismatic Cayde-6, I might have a chance of understanding why everyone was so grief-striken in the plot of Shadowkeep. Then the mission crashed, right before the critical cutscene – plonking me back in the social hub, and leaving me wondering where to turn for direction next.
But I’ll persist with the timeline troubles and snapped threads, because I can already feel that Destiny 2 is becoming my happy place for highly customisable shooting. And I know that, rather than threatening to become a chore, it’ll ultimately take its final shape and end. There’s a comfort in that.
Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs.
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