"You know the pieces they want you to knock down are already set?"
I assume you’ve heard of Destiny, right? If not the game (somehow) at least its developers, Bungie, the company responsible for one of the biggest singleplayer shooters from about 15 years ago, Halo. From 2001 to 2010, they were entrusted by Microsoft with the responsibility to keep the franchise going, and four years later… They stopped. They worked on Destiny 1, its sequel and then dropped it to focus on their new game, Marathon. I aim to talk about Destiny 2, Marathon and what happened to both.
They released Destiny. A massive pay-to-play multiplayer first person shooter RPG set in the far future after humanity nearly came to an end. The game was a massive hit, with a story that entranced players old and new and brought more people to its orbit, as you became a space-faring, god-ending, humanity-saving guardian of legend. The game scratched tons of itches, as while it being simple to buildcraft fairly okay builds, there was a surprising level of depth if you went looking for it. They released story DLC upon story DLC, each building off and paying off surprisingly well by the time you finished. The story was never the main focus on Destiny (while it was a main ‘side’ focus), the main focus on Destiny were the raids. These were handcrafted missions lasting upwards to an HOUR of enemy content with a massive story payoff at the end.
These were often used to finish the story, so do keep that in mind. Eventually… Destiny 1 ceased development on 2017, as Bungie claimed that the game’s code was becoming exponentially harder to add weapons, armor, skills, etc. So they stopped supporting it… and then came…
Destiny 2 began similarly to Destiny 1, with a great starting campaign and more of what people loved from Destiny 1 with Forsaken, Beyond Light (which has an eerie but cool story) and The Witch Queen. Shortly after that though… we got Lightfall.
Now, I won’t deny the fact that I loved Lightfall. Not the storyline nor the character designs, the story ‘worked’ and the character designs looked horrible, but the gameplay. The concept of being able to grapple around, pop your ult and then destroy a horde of enemies always seemed fun, alongside the beautiful map of Neomuna on Neptune. This was the main content update that actually pushed me to buy a dlc for Destiny 2, as I had quit the game after D1 went down. However fun Lightfall was for me, however, it was not received similarly by the rest of the fanbase, with the agreed opinion being that Lightfall was garbage, and it sold horribly, being one of the worst sold DLCs in the franchise’s history. It was clear that something had to change, as Lightfall was the set up for the end of the storyline we’ve had since the first game. And then, a year later released the final mainline DLC for Destiny 2, The Final Shape.
The Final Shape was, short of calling it perfect, amazing. It released the ultimate subclass in the form of Prismatic, it had a beautiful map with The Pale Heart, and it had the thrilling finale to a storyline that’s lasted well over a decade with Zavala, Ikora, the return of Cayde-6, and of course, The Witness.
The Prismatic Subclass was the final subclass added in the game, letting you mix and match certain abilities, ultimates, and aspects from the other subclasses, allowing you to grapple as a hunter, throw your void orb after, and finish it all with a barrage of flaming knives. It also gave you an interesting ‘side’ ability in the form of Transcendence. Transcendence basically gave you lower cooldowns, a unique grenade for its entire duration and buffs to your damage and damage resistance. To activate it, you had to deal both light and dark damage, as Prismatic was all about balancing light and dark.
Unlike Beyond Light and Lightfall, which gave you their respective subclasses (Stasis and Strand) at the end of the campaign, The Final Shape gave you Prismatic at the very beginning of the DLC, with aspects, grenades, and ultimates being unlocked as you progressed through the story and as you found them in the Pale Heart. The reason for this massive change was because you had to constantly use Transcendence to defeat certain enemies, with them not taking ordinary damage without it.
The Pale Heart is as beautiful as it is mysterious, with it being a domain of memory within the Traveler, lush green hills, massive ghosts, remnants of the Tower both new and old, abandoned pavilions above ground and in deep caves, and of course, pieces of the Cosmodrome. The Pale Heart is beautiful but is at risk of being taken over by The Witness’ plan of the Final Shape, which was the eternal end of everything in an universe freezing moment of finality. And you can see it! Far away monuments, bricked buildings and statues of once-alive slivers of life before the Witness calcified it. The Pale Heart is a collection of memories of the Witness, and of you, as the Guardian (the player) is arguably it’s strongest one ever resuscitated, with one of your strongest abilities from the campaign coming from the mission where you revisit the Cosmodrome, or more specifically, your grave.
The Final Shape concluded the decade long storyline of Destiny 1 and 2, with fan favorite characters like Cayde-6 (voiced by John Nolan- I mean… Nathan Fillion) and focusing on other characters like Ikora and Zavala. Unlike my experience with other plotlines in the franchise, you, the Guardian are a massive point in this DLC, with a lot of the key events happening because of you.
The Final Shape is widely considered to be the ending of Destiny, with its final camera shot being a literal thank you to the player, as your character sits staring at the Pale Heart as the credits roll. After this, players asked, “What’s next?” I mean, we’ve defeated the biggest bad of them all, we’ve killed a god… So who could ever live up to the hype?
Well… they [Bungie] certainly tried. After the Final Shape, I guess they wanted the Guardian to become a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man character, as we began getting significantly smaller threats in Year 7, as Destiny 2’s plot became Episodic, with zero new areas, but rather alterations of existing areas beginning with Episode 1: Echoes. This episodic model went horribly, with people calling it mediocre to downright terrible, as most of the ‘story’ was listening to audio messages as you revisited areas to down some enemies, return to a vendor in the tower, rinse, repeat. The storytelling was at times solid, but what use is a good story if reaching it is an absolute slog? There was a bit of a flip though, on the final episode of this model with Episode 3: Echoes, which was considered fantastic yet bittersweet, as it was too little, too late, with thousands of players quitting before this third episode released. It served to set up the second to last story DLC, and the new antagonist of the next DLC, the Nine.
Episode 3: Echoes was the prologue to The Edge of Fate, and it was received just slightly better than Lightfall, but it failed at most of the things Lightfall was praised in, and succeeded in the things Lightfall was bashed on. The storyline was great, twists, eerieness with the Nine, and the mystery behind who Ikora was before the end of the world, alongside the new supporting character, Lodi, who is from over 1400 years in the past (1966). That was… where the praise ended, though.
Kepler, the new destination for The Edge of Fate, was small, ugly, and disliked, with hardly zero praise to be found within it. Additionally, instead of giving you a new subclass, they instead introduced Destination Abilities, which were to be used solely in Kepler, with the form of the ‘Matter’ abilities, like Matterspark. Because Kepler was so small, you weren’t allowed to use your Sparrow in it, so throughout specific areas of the map, you could use Matterspark to move faster and through smaller areas like vents, tunnels, etc. It was a fundamentally boring idea, and while expanded with three other destination abilities, even by the end, once you unlocked Matterspark as a proper ‘ability’ without needing to find it in the map, it was far too little. The rest were used significantly less, like Mattermorph helping you make paths to other places when backtracking was involved, and you couldn’t keep this permanently, rather only using it where the developers want you to use it,the Relocator Cannon, allowing you to teleport to specific places, and the Rosetta, a passive upgrade unlocked as you beat the campaign which allowed the Guardian to understand the Aionian language more and more.
And then… silence.
Rather than continuing the plotline with The Edge of Fate… Destiny 2’s last major DLC was Renegades. Or more specifically, Destiny 2: Star Wars: Renegades. Yeah. It was a collaboration DLC. Before you take this as me being vehemently against collaborations, I’m not! I’ve spent a LOT of money on collaboration items in other games with zero issues! My problem is when you ignore the cliffhanger and spend the next few months on a storyline which is mostly disconnected from the main plot!
Renegades was received worse than Edge of Fate, the expansion didn’t contain its own patrol area, rather a social hub with gamemode nodes on other maps. Most of the expansion was fan service, with you being able to own a lightsaber Praxic Blade. Renegades was the final stand for Destiny 2, as five months later, Bungie announced the final content drop for Destiny 2.
Monument of Triumph is the final content drop for Destiny, with it entering passive development (no major updates/content aside from small bug fixes). The drop contained the biggest combat rework to date, alongside new exotic weapons, a new gamemode, new maps for existing gamemodes, and lastly, some desperately needed story content.
The drop was received amazingly, with 167,000 peak players on launch, and it was a sad, bittersweet feeling, as Destiny as the world knew it… was over. The update tied up all loose ends, they finished the lore, putting it in a state of ‘The tale has ended… but the story is just beginning’, with a cliffhanger that didn’t feel like one. They re-added the Sparrow Racing League, a Mario-Kart-esque gamemode where you raced in sparrows, dozens of new weapons and exotics, tons of bug fixes, tons of alterations to combat, and everything was received amazingly, but it was too late.
Destiny… is over.
Now, Marathon is Bungie’s current focus. Marathon 2026 is a reboot of the original Marathon IP, which belongs to Bungie, and was previously a doom-like game. Nowadays, it was turned into an extraction shooter, following the likes of ARC Raiders, Arena Breakout Infinite, Escape from Tarkov, and more like it, only to be met with a small following of 4,000 players on Steam alone, and I’d estimate there’s only a total of at MOST 12,000 players combining all platforms, and Destiny 2, a game that is no longer receiving content has 35,000 players on Steam ALONE.
I’m not against Marathon, in fact, I think it’s the most visually distinct + visually impressive game I’ve seen as of late! I own Marathon, and I think it’s a pretty good game, all things considered, but Bungie abandoning Destiny for it feels like the worst possible idea ever, and I’m not alone in that thought.