For years, Destiny 2 players have turned to hefty "State of the Game" blog posts during hard times; the current creatives at the game's helm would step up to lay out what's working, what isn't, and what's in the works. On this front, Bungie was uncharacteristically quiet after the difficult launch of The Edge of Fate, an expansion that actively soured many players on the game with a bland Portal activity hub and tedious Power grind, and which failed to give many more a reason stick around after The Final Shape.
Bungie did own up to taking the "wrong path for Destiny" in an apologetic blog post this month, but it is still nice to hear game director Tyson Green walk through the game's latest hardships and the next turn-around plan.
Speaking with IGN, Green acknowledges the dour state Destiny 2 finds itself in as Bungie prepares to launch the Star Wars-flavored expansion Renegades on December 2. The Edge of Fate, The Final Shape, and Renegades are the hottest topics, but Green also cuts through to an older, more foundational issue saddling Destiny 2.
"For years now, Destiny has been on this steady hardening of the core [audience]," he says. "More and more core players are staying and playing the game, but relatively few [new] people come into the game. There's a tightening and contraction, and this presents problems for a game that you're trying to maintain as a live service, especially when you want to keep serving those core players with great, compelling expansions."
This contraction owes a lot to Destiny 2 struggling to enact a clean onboarding process, and failing to not delete huge chunks of the game, and it only worsened after The Final Shape. Green says "the big [downwards] spike in population [came after]" the end of the Light and Darkness Saga, which created a natural exit point for folks who'd perhaps had enough Destiny after 10 years, or were at least considering a break.
"That wasn't the plan from the business perspective," Green adds. Seemingly having realized the corner it painted itself into by putting Final in a climactic expansion title, Bungie has been quite loud about the continued future of Destiny 2. Post-Final Shape, it worked to set up new plotlines that could carry future years, and The Edge of Fate does have a compelling story despite its systemic missteps. But "unfortunately," Green says of The Final Shape transition, "it was not gracefully managed, but we had to try something."
All of this certainly hasn't helped, but The Edge of Fate's unpopular changes are largely to blame for the state of the game, with Bungie now working to walk back decisions it just made to appease players who've jumped ship. Renegades won't make sweeping changes here because Bungie hasn't had enough time for that kind of refactoring, but Green suggests the expansion does address some standout problems, and says the studio's new release model of two medium expansions a year enables greater reactivity in its planning.
"It sounds great on paper, but it didn't work," Green says of The Edge of Fate's Portal and Power pivot. Instead, "what our players are telling us is that they don't want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards." It's me, I'm players.
In what's probably the loadbearing line of IGN's interview, Green says, "I think we've been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games: those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don't. And we don't want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny."
