Obligatory "I hate Destiny 2, it's my favorite game."

For the context of this review, it is important to note that I have an additional 2,734 hours in this game on Xbox, prior to making the jump to PC in Aug. 2020.

Cannot recommend the game right now. The seasonal model has become stale pattern of lackluster drip-fed content, neither of the PvP modes have not received any sort of meaningful attention since 2018 (one of them has even been completely abandoned), the new player experience is abysmal, and returning players will find that over half the content they have likely paid for in the past is no longer accessible. On top of all of that, management is forcing devs to make changes to the game that are antagonizing the player base and refuse to listen to player feedback.

Thanks to the Destiny Content Vault (DCV), the entire vanilla campaign is missing, and the first 4 DLCs have had half or all of their quests, story, and world spaces removed. Over half of the PvP maps are gone. Five world space destinations are gone. About a third of the matchmade PvE content is gone. Five raids are gone. A slew of armor and weapons are no longer attainable, and even if you still have them they are no longer viable in 90% of the game due to "Sunsetting."

Every update and DLC seems to include less and less content, with more and more bugs, despite their claims that the removal of almost half the game would "speed up our ability to update the game with fresh experiences, increase our ability to innovate, and expedite our reaction to community feedback." (A quote from Bungie's initial DCV article,[www.bungie.net] albeit with adjectives inverted so as to fit the context appropriately.) Not only has Destiny 2 received less and less content, but so to has the community received less and less feedback from the dev team. The last two seasons have had zero marketing until the first day of each season, and the upcoming season on Aug. 23 is going to be the same. Responses from Community Managers have become more and more cryptic, and in some cases they have straight up lied to the community. (Removal of power level from Gambit in both the Beyond Light AND Witch Queen expansions, and the in-air accuracy changes.) In the two years since the introduction of the DCV, Bungie has also had to delay BOTH annual expansions. Beyond Light was delayed from Sept. 2020 to Nov. 2020, and Witch Queen was delayed from Sept. 2021 to Feb. 2022. Needless to say the DCV has failed to live up to the standards Bungie set for it.

A lot of this is because is not because the size of the game like the developers claim, but rather because Bungie is running off a decrepit engine. Tiger engine is an in-house engine created in 2008. You might say "that isn't that old," but it gets worse. Tiger is a fork of the Blam! engine, an engine created in 1997 for Halo: Combat Evolved. This makes it as old as Bethesda's Creation Engine, which is a fork of their Gamebryo engine from 1997. Bungie has attempted to mitigate these issues with major engine overhauls (one with the 2019 expansion and the other with the 2020 one), but both times these overhauls have created significant issues with performance and stability. The game is held together with string. Here is a direct quote from Bungie Test Lead Jason Briggs' first day on the job: "How the ♥♥♥♥ does this game even run?"

The fact that this game went from one where I would gift every DLC to a friend if they showed even the slightest interest in it, to a game that I beg them to stay away from at all costs is a tragedy. Management at Bungie is solely to blame. I wanted to see this 10 year saga through to the end, but now I just wish I had my time and money back. Highly doubt I will ever buy anything from this company ever again.


Original Review from Nov. 2020:
For almost half my life, Destiny has been one of the only franchises that has managed to keep me coming back for more. 2000 hours in Destiny 1, and almost 3000 in Destiny 2 (2,400 on Xbox.) This franchise quite literally saved my life. I was in a very dark place when I began playing, and some of the people in the community helped me pull through.

It can be a rough ride sometimes, but I'm here for the journey. There's a reason you don't hear about games being called "Destiny killers" anymore, and it's because this game continues to come out on top. 9/10 game. Bungie should be proud of what they've done here.

343 have somehow managed to turn yet another disastrous launch into something fun. PC performance is significantly better as of the Season 4 patch, and the game feels good on MnK now too. The store has been reworked so that you no longer need to wait for items you want to rotate back in, allowing you to purchase bundles directly from the customization menus. Career rank was also added in Season 4, giving players something to work towards outside of the battle passes. Season 5 is also adding some of the biggest features the community has asked for, like cross core on some armor coatings and all helmets (with more coatings and armor pieces on the way), and Firefight. They also finally gave us the ability to use campaign AI in Forge mode, something that we have been asking for since Forge launched with Halo 3 in 2007. Career rank finally has armor rewards as well, offering you Master Chief's full armor set as a kit for reaching max rank.

Overall though the issues with lack of content have been resolved, creating a very solid PvP experience. The current PvE options are finally starting to shape up, with an official Firefight playlist dropping later in Season 5 and community made Firefight and Campaign experiences available to players via the amazing Forge community.

There has never been a better time to pick this game back up.