Despite a February launch for the Lightfall expansion that saw record-breaking player numbers on Steam, what looked set to be a big year for Destiny 2 is off to a worrying start only a few months in. Reviews for the expansion sank to “mostly negative” due to its poorly received story and, as Season of Defiance has progressed, rampant stability issues and stealth nerfs and bugs have joined the mix to further taint player sentiment.
With a month left before the release of Season of the Deep, the community has reached a breaking point. A flood of posts on Reddit have recently gained traction, pleading with Bungie for communication on the state of the game, and prominent content creators such as Fallout Plays and Aztecross have also made videos covering the degradation happening in front of players’ eyes.
In lieu of any correspondence from Bungie in an official capacity beyond announcements from the support account acknowledging the rise in players receiving error codes, concern has only mounted. In one popular post, u/Hidden_Arecibo requested the Destiny 2 team to put out something similar to the “State of the Game” blog posts that the devs have done in the past specifically targeted at stability.
“Given all of the persistent server issues and bugs deteriorating to a point where players cannot physically play the game, I think it would be great if Bungie could at least acknowledge these issues to the community,” they said. “Bungie Help tweets saying that server maintenance is going live last minute don’t really serve as an effective outreach tool.”
Related: All raid challenges in Destiny 2’s Root of Nightmares raid
The thread underneath the post is filled with first-hand accounts of the nightmare experiences that players have had in Destiny 2 over the past few weeks. While there were issues before, it was April 18’s mid-season update that kicked off some of the worst problems players are facing. Certain activities now crash the game, a lot of mods aren’t working, and there are bugged quests—and that was before players discovered a variety of stealth nerfs in the patch that heavily damaged a number of popular builds.
“Error coded out of trials games twice in one card,” one commenter said. “I like when I get booted from Gambit, then the Bungie message pops up about players leaving Gambit early,” said another. Server issues do appear to be the most universally experienced issues at the moment, with the game either being entirely inaccessible or subject to frequent hitches in server performance.
“I don’t think they are going to have a response that’s going to make anyone happy,” suggested a reply from u/scissorslizardspock. “From the outside looking in, it feels like the combined weight of a complicated game that is aging, and the very real possibility that the live-ops team for D2 has been downsized to provide for their other, unannounced projects.”
The game’s age was a point of concern brought up in Aztecross’ video on the state of Destiny 2 as well. Most players had expected Destiny 3 to be right around the corner around the time of Beyond Light’s release in 2020, but Bungie opted instead to remain with Destiny 2 and build it as an indefinite live service property. While this has been a success for the most part, the game shows more and more signs of its difficulties handling the constant updates and expansions by this point.
Related: Destiny 2 Weekly Reset: Nightfall, challenges, weekly raid, reset time, and more
Another post even went as far as questioning how the game was going to live through another expansion, given the consistent issues faced since Lightfall’s launch. “This game is falling apart right in front of our eyes. The servers can’t stay steady for a single straight week,” u/Perzonic wrote. “Every week constant maintenance, and those hour long maintenances get extended to four hour maintenances. I will not be shocked, if the game just completely ceases to function by the time final shape comes around. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if by the third season of this year, this shit just dies.”
It’s a troubling time for the Destiny 2 community, and until any official response and explanation is provided by Bungie, the players left in the dark on all of these issues only find their worries exacerbated.
Published: Apr 25, 2023 10:23 am