I have played a lot of Destiny in the past 10 years. I have 1,186 hours in D1 and – at time of writing – 3,639 hours in D2. I’ve obviously played a lot of other games in that time too, but since the launch of D2 in 2017 I’ve dutifully logged in and at least done my weeklies, and typically would spend endless hours grinding out gear, pvp, chasing goals, chasing titles, chasing new exotics, bashing my head against raids, and in-between all this, I’d be finding time to argue with internet friends about what the worst part of the game was at the moment.

I’m also in my longest streak of days away from the game right now, at 52. I’m going to be ending that streak soon to chase some last-minute stuff from the current episode, but I think my time in D2 is basically coming to an end.

The writing was pretty clearly on the wall as early as mid 2023 that there were minimal ideas or plans for D2 after The Final Shape. My engagement had already dropped pretty hard as Bungie repeatedly missed deadlines, leading to several way-too-long seasons that failed to maintain my interest. The Final Shape itself was pretty good but not amazingly so, and unfortunately, as expected, the Episodic content that followed was some of the worst they’ve ever put out.

So what finally killed it for me?

Shift in Opinions Regarding Crafting#

Crafting in Witch Queen was an immense course-correction in the game for me. The grind in D2, especially regarding seasonal or raid guns, got to a point that it was untenable. I like raids, I don’t like grinding a potentially infinite amount of time to both get the gun I want to drop, and also get 4 perks and a masterwork to make it a “perfect” 5/5 roll. Crafting side-stepped this and ensured that you’d eventually be able to get a perfect roll, you just need 5 special red-border rolls and then you’d be able to craft whatever roll you wanted. It’s a hard and slow process, but not impossible, and as soon as one is done, it’s done forever.

That’s great for Checklist Gaming, but terrible for engagement because once you’ve got the title and all the craftable guns you have no reason to go back to that specific content source. Bungie finally realized this a little too late, and pulled back on crafted guns entirely with the most recent season, and in doing so tanked my interest in the game. The pool of perks on the seasonal guns is so immense that I simply do not care enough to even find out what kind of rolls I should be looking for. There’s effectively zero chance any of them are better than every other gun I already have – crafted or otherwise – and in the rare scenario that there is some new god-roll that you simply must have, there’s no chance that it’s so much better than whatever the nearest-comparable-roll I’ve already got that it warrants the amount of undirected grinding I’d have to perform to get said drop. Hundreds more hours of grind to get something that’s 2% better than 30 other rolls I already have is not something I am interested in.

They’re Going To Sunset Gear Again#

Late last year, in the midst of freaking out about the community evaporating because the Episodic Content has not been well received, Bungie posted a bunch of articles about the real future of Destiny 2, which will be starting at some point this year. In the first “major update” of the 2025-2026 “content year”, they’re expected to blow up both the weapon and armor systems, effectively sunsetting all existing gear again by introducing all-new item rarity classes and in the case of armor introducing entire new tiers of ability scores.

There is no way to interpret this other than “grind out literally all of your gear again or it won’t be competitive”. Hard pass.

Storytelling Took a Dive#

I mean, duh, you fire everyone in charge of narrative and you’re not going to get a spectacular narrative in your future content.

Quality Took a Dive#

We’re past the “funny” bugs like “the strike boss is 300 times the size he should be” and “if you move fast enough you can cram 12 people in a raid” and “reset the clock because Telesto has been disabled for the seventh time this quarter”. We’re now into “whoops we tried to make perks more random, but in the process made hundreds of potential perk combos impossible to attain” and “we couldn’t figure out how to make tether not crash the game, so we just disabled it in the new dungeon for several months” and “whoops none of the labels are accurate on any of the new greebles we based the entire season on” and so on.

It also feels like EVERY season is prone to a “we forgot to let Numbers Guy take a pass at these goal values, so the values we picked are insane” issue, so in the last week or two of the season they inevitably go “heeeey we just made all this stuff way easier to complete now, enjoy! … because our engagement stats are WAY low. Please come play the game. Please.” That’s why I waited this season! And I was rewarded! And my reward is “I get to play less of the game”! Worse, sometimes even after they do this late-in-season adjustment of goals, the targets are just still too insanely high. This season has one triumph required for the seal that asks players to grind out one of the activities for upwards of eight solid hours, and that’s just an insanely high number for me.

So put these all together…

  1. The content isn’t great. The narrative is at its lowest place in years. New guns are failing to have truly exciting new ways to gun. Everything is back to being fully randomized and fully grind-focused.
  2. The rewards can no longer be predictably earned week by week, because they cannot be predictably earned at all.
  3. The randomized rewards are all disposable, with a likely shelf life of 6 months tops right now.
  4. Even if you do decide to engage with the content, in spite of everything, there’s no telling if any of it will work, or be fair to the time you’re spending with it.
  5. Their stated plan for the future is for everyone to grind out all-new gear again. I’m not replacing all my gear AGAIN. I replaced it all between D1/D2. Replaced all my armor with Armor 2.0. Replaced all my guns post Sunsetting. Replaced most of my guns again with Crafting. I’m done. I’m tired. Leave me alone.
  6. If their plan for the future is a full reset, then any item that drops between now and that reset is useless, so why bother?

…so for the moment, I’m not bothering, or at the very least minimally bothering.

Can Bungie Course-Correct?#

To bring me back? Probably not at this point. I’m too demoralized by the future prospect of having to chase all-new gear. I’ll be heading back in over the next two weeks to try to wrap up my seasonal title, and I’ll check out what their third episode is this year because I’ve already paid for it, but unless they come up with some truly miraculous plan for how to make “re-grind all your gear lol” palatable I’ll probably dip for good when this year’s update drops.