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My Destiny 2 clan and I straight-up could not raid last night. The first encounter of the newly updated Garden of Salvation just did not work. The boss would not advance as normal in spite of all our poking and prodding, so we couldn't proceed. We reset, wiped, went to orbit, changed fireteam leaders – everything short of offering the boss a bowl of chocolate truffles. Nothing worked. So we grabbed a checkpoint for the final boss from Discord, skipping the raid bounty that brought us to the Garden in the first place, cleared it, and we all dipped for the night.
This was an extreme but fitting way to finally piledrive this article, which in Discord conversations I have been threatening to write for weeks, so deep into my brain that I had no choice but to write it. Destiny 2 is a mess. It has been a teeny-tiny bit of a mess for a while – in some fashion, for 10 years, you could not-unreasonably argue – but post-Final Shape this MMO has been plunged into technical problems so frequent and disruptive that playing it has gotten materially harder.
I don't trust it
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Last night's raid dud came on the heels of the widely covered Weightgate perk controversy, which saw some hotly desired weapon perk combos unintentionally rendered harder to acquire. How many weapons were made rarer, and for how long, we don't yet know. But this was quite a big, bad problem for a loot-based game to have, seemingly for months.
Something like this in Diablo 4, I imagine, would've been met with far greater outrage. Destiny 2 players, however, adopted a fairly cordial and investigative tone, perhaps because we are accustomed to this. "Man that's wild! Isn't that wild?" everyone, including Bungie, seemed to say – Bungie with a slightly nervous laugh. Yet Weightgate somehow doesn't hold a candle to the backlog of bugs, crashes, and inconsistencies that have slowly but steadily consumed more and more of the Destiny 2 experience.
I am, very obviously, here to moan about this. But it's not just that, I promise. For a few weeks now, I've been keeping a running list of technical issues that me and my clanmates have personally encountered in Destiny 2. "Austin, put it on The List," has been an alarmingly frequent comment in our sessions. In just a few weeks, I've logged dozens of problems across all areas of the game, and that's with the courtesy to omit some minor hangups as well as most of the things already in Bungie's own weekly list of known issues.
Destiny 2's technical degradation has reached a point where I not only can't trust the game, I have to expect bugs around every corner. From activities to abilities, every single element has been injected with doubt. Our raid problem was seemingly caused by an update that Bungie pushed to allow raid chests to drop weapons, because we didn't have this boss issue just last week. And that's just one of many, many topical examples.
The List
I'm not going to rattle off The List or Bungie's known issues, but I do want to put into perspective just how broken Destiny 2 has been lately. Pretty much every piece of new content has seen serious bugs. These aren't "smash them with a tissue" bugs, here. We're dealing with a "get the flamethrower out" caliber of bug.
When the new Episode launched, the updated Onslaught activity was bugged so that only the first player to loot the coveted wave 50 chests – the entire purpose of the pinnacle version of the Episode's premier activity – would get extra loot. And that's if you can get to wave 50 at all; enemies in earlier waves can be totally invincible, soft locking the activity. This is the cornerstone of the Episode! And it was missing 66% of the loot finale at launch, and to this day it will sometimes throw its hands up and say, "Oops, gave that enemy god mode, back to orbit you go."
The wave 50 chests have been fixed, but the first secret chest in the new dungeon, Vesper's Host, still has this problem. At the time of writing, only one person can loot it. Several messages in the protracted questline which unlocks that chest are also bugged, with enemies or objects not spawning several times for my fireteam and requiring resets. We once saw a critical enemy spawn out of bounds and refuse to enter the playable space because it was too busy shooting a panel on the wall which inexplicably registered as a target for the AI.
Bungie had to announce a fix to a bugged and unannounced change
On top of that, Hunter's Shadowshot Super is still disabled in the dungeon since it's prone to crashes or errors. This effectively bans Void since the other Hunter Void Super, Spectral Blades, is irredeemable garbage in PvE. Let's not forget this solid-gold known dungeon issue, either: "Sometimes the final boss doesn't spawn and players are forced to wipe for the encounter to start." Sometimes!
The Pale Heart, the main destination of The Final Shape expansion, is inordinately prone to Guitar errors kicking you to orbit. New Artifact perks like Kinetic Impacts are bugged and do almost nothing. I swear the old Radiant bug that causes anti-barrier properties to flicker is back. Bungie had to announce a fix to a bugged and unannounced change causing Solar Ignitions to deal basically no damage to bosses. New Exotics like the Hunter's Mask of Fealty just do not do the things they say they do. Health regeneration might not trigger in Vanguard Ops, the main PvE playlist. A Trials of Osiris PvP bug is blocking many rank-up rewards entirely.
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The smaller things compound, too. Destiny 2's UI has become a nightmare. Several labels and tooltips don't appear when you mouse over things, and the whole system grinds to a halt if you have the gall to open the character menu in the Tower, the main social space of this MMO. A new weapon in the Festival of the Lost event dropped with perks it isn't supposed to have. This Episode's Tonics regularly bug out during mixing or when you drink them, bombarding you with notifications saying that the 60-minute potion you just chugged has expired. Like a Helldiver in a Tier 10 operation, I am never far from bugs.
I'm not here to make the ridiculous argument that it would be easy, actually, to fix or prevent all of these bugs. The folks at Bungie could surely explain how these issues happened and why, in the bug triage process, they weren't or couldn't be caught or fixed in time. That explanation would probably come across as fair and reasonable, especially at a time when the studio is under pressure and down staff (and, I can only speculate, down morale). I'd wager that these issues will be fixed eventually, but eventually can mean six months in Destiny 2.
It's hard to seriously engage with this game right now. Even when things do function on the surface, uncertainties nag me constantly. Is this build or gun working as intended? Is it bad, or just bugged? Will a future "bug fix" nerf it into the pavement? Will tonight's raid even freakin' work? Fundamental distrust has taken root, and the ratio of new problems to necessary fixes is so skewed that I can only assume it's going to get worse with every new update. It has gotten worse with every new update, if not through buggy content than through collateral damage caused by other patches.
I see the work being done to fight the bugs, but the bugs are quite frankly winning. It goes without saying that I don't have a silver bullet solution. Some players have floated the idea of Operation Fixit, a season that's deliberately light on new content but heavy on repairs. That sounds great but doesn't seem especially feasible when Bungie is already between a rock and a hard place trying to put out content to keep the game active and profitable under Sony's watchful eye. But I do think something needs to change. I have personally hit my tipping point, and it feels like Destiny 2 is approaching its own.
