Destiny 2's Achilles Heel: Its Convoluted Story
The older I get and the longer I play video games, the higher my bar for engaging stories gets. Nearly a decade ago, I fondly recall watching every second of dialogue the Witcher 3 had to offer. The incredible voice acting and gravity of my in-game decisions kept me on the edge of my seat as I chose the incel life and curbed Yennefer’s romantic advances. Watching her gut-wrenching response was enough to make me think twice, reload my save, and select the opposite dialogue option just to see how the cut scene would play out. Unbeknownst to me, downstream from this decision I would be curbed later in the game because I had previously already romanced the red headed vixen, Triss. While my regrettable actions cost me a threesome, witnessing the visceral human emotion and consequences of my choices on screen was no less captivating.
Today, I often find myself searching for the skip button during cut scenes. The standard for compelling story telling has climbed ever higher while my attention span seemingly has inversely plummeted. I can speculate on many reasons for this, chief among them my own divided attention as I’ve gotten older, but I think there are some broader industry trends that have caused developers to pivot from narrative to gameplay. With limited exception, it is often the case that one comes at the cost of the other. For example, I loved the harrowing world of Alan Wake 2, and the We Sing mission is one of the most unique things I’ve ever seen in a video game. I will also add that the actual gameplay itself is mid at best. It seems that developers who try to have the best of both worlds will invariably fall flat in both, and time is better spent playing to one’s strengths. This leads me to the current predicament of one of my favorite obsessions, Destiny 2.
The Destiny franchise has been weathering storms and riding waves since 2014. The boom / bust cycle of player sentiment has defined the saga, and although the most recent expansion, The Final Shape, launched with critical acclaim, community attitudes towards the game are now at an all-time low. The Reddit hivemind has no shortage of critiques, and nearly every prominent content creator has weighed in on the alarming decline in the player base. Many of the takes are valid, some not as much, but everyone has rightly identified that the game is in dire need of help. Curiously, the common opinions coalesce around over-monetization, cadence of new content, and lack of rewarding gameplay loops, but I have yet to see anyone call out one of the most glaring problems. The story of Destiny 2 is downright awful.
Depending on when one entered the Destiny universe and the potency of their member berries, this take may be painfully obvious or downright heresy. For those that have been playing since the D1 beta many years ago (a badge of honor in online forums), I understand that they have invested countless hours and can trace the origin story of the game’s 87 protagonists and 73 villains. For literally anyone else who may have joined midway through this journey, the story is hopelessly convoluted. The creators themselves at Bungie don’t even attempt to bring newcomers along, as they’ve relegated most of the game’s content to their affectionately named “content vault”. Making matters worse, they haven’t even bothered to ever catalogue the timeline of events in a digestible manner to unscramble the terribly complicated web of relationships of the pantheon of main characters. Instead, they have outsourced this task to their community, leaving prominent content creators to connect the dots for them.
I have a tremendous respect for someone like Youtuber “My name is Byf” for painstakingly compiling a ten-hour long video to explain the in-game events of the last decade. However, I think fans erroneously watch his highly creative content and misattribute the genius of the story to Bungie. To me, it is blindingly obvious that Bungie has been cobbling together one nonsensical subplot after another for ten years as the game vastly outlived its life expectancy. From one season to the next, players have been drip fed inconsequential story beats that have little impact on the main thrust of the story. On that note, what is the overall plot of Destiny 2?
This is actually a very interesting question, because the answer varies considerably depending on when you ask it. Within the last two years, the answer is very obviously anchored in foiling the Witness’ plan to Thanos snap the universe. Within the first two years of the game’s life though, perhaps the answer would lie in defending the Last City and the enigmatic Traveler from various hostile races that have flooded the solar system. Both answers are incredibly simplistic and miss many key details, but my point is that the arch villain and supposed puppet master of evil for ten years is a relatively recent, obviously contrived addition to the story. Despite what many lore enthusiasts may say to the contrary, the Witness is a made-up character dropped in the end-of-credits cut scene of the Witch Queen expansion in 2022. Since then, fans of the series have deluded themselves by incepting this character into the rest of the story to make the finale of 2024 seem more impactful. I firmly believe that Bungie has been making this stuff up as they go over the years, as evidenced by the never-ending number of antagonists introduced each year. Since the many diverging story lines and plots have many elusive threads and loose ends, it becomes incredibly easy to paper over them with the many-handed evil mastermind. It reminds me of the harebrained theory of the Bible Code whereby biblical scholars superimpose present day events into millennia old texts.
None of this is necessarily catastrophic as a standalone problem, but Destiny has been struggling to stay buoyant in a sea of problems for years. Thinking back on my initial dichotomy of balancing engaging gameplay with compelling narrative, I think many of Destiny’s problems stem from over indexing on creating an engaging story within the ever-prevalent live service construct. The last year for Bungie has been nothing short of a bloodbath with a continual string of misfortune followed by greater misfortune. The peak of their misery arrived this summer with a merciless round of layoffs, the likes of which the company had never seen. Coming off the heels of The Final Shape, many fans and pundits were left bewildered by the incongruence of the positive expansion ratings and the sudden firing of so many staff. This was quickly followed by a post from the company, lamenting the move as a necessary step and further informing fans that no more large story expansions were on the horizon. Although many were flabbergasted, this was completely unsurprising to me.
Bungie has stated that much of their development time gets sucked into making these annual expansions, to include most of the story content and dialogue that drives it. It makes little sense to invest so heavily into content that most people play only once (three times for more dedicated players who complete it on all characters). The draw of the game lies in the loop of repeatable activities; it is in fact a looter shooter. There is little reason to replay the story, and the allure is even worse for people who barely understand the complex machinations of the Destiny universe. The overinvestment in storytelling has come at the cost of many of the traditional grinds that make live service games enjoyable. The core playlist activities are woefully underserved, and rewards are nowhere near commensurate with the time commitment they require. Destiny is now in a terrible middle ground where players don’t want to play the core content of the game because Bungie instead spends most of their time building story content that has fallen flat for years.
If you don’t believe me, examine the recently released roadmap for the future of the game. Gone are the massive story expansions of the past, and whether players admit it or not, Bungie has taken note of the engagement metrics and knows that the story simply does not drive long term engagement. If it did, the roadmap would have a very different tone than it does. Many may be quick to point out that fans were on the edge of their seats waiting to see the conclusion of the Final Shape, but Destiny is a live service game, and the grind has always been at the heart of what keeps players involved. I think it’s important now to point out that Bungie themselves seem to misunderstand this fundamental principle.
While writing this article, I went back and watched many of the old trailers for Destiny expansions past. The marketing for this game is nothing short of incredible, but I did realize that the major point of emphasis has always been the narrative, rather than gameplay. This is unfortunate because Destiny has some of the best cooperative content and dynamic gunplay in gaming, bar none. I thought about this viewing experience through the lens of a newcomer and realized that, absent years of understanding a massive compendium of lore, absolutely nothing in the story will make any sense. Should a new player decide they’d like to take the plunge and join the Guardian ranks, they’ll quickly find that Bungie has just erased years’ worth of previous expansions due to file size bloat. If the major selling point of the franchise is the story and its hopelessly inaccessible to new joiners, who exactly is Bungie selling to?
The answer of course, is the loyal fans who’ve stayed with the game for many years, strung along by the gaslighting that there was always a grand ten-year narrative master plan for the series. As these fans have grown older and more disillusioned by bad storytelling, they’ve simply dropped off the bandwagon. Destiny is experiencing a Japanese-like population crisis with few new players to backfill the retiring ones. Although the player counts ebb and flow, the trendline has been veering downwards for a very long time and this is the principal cause. Bungie wants new players to believe that they’re entering a narratively rich universe fueled by the exciting stories of treasured characters, but instead all that awaits them is a disjointed story that is impossible to follow. Making matters worse, the live service hamster wheel of activities contain little or no meaningful connection to the story at all. The foundation of Destiny lies in these activities, and it is where players will spend over 95% of their time. Why has Bungie neglected to keep them engaging, all the while allocating most of their time to a handful of campaign missions that many players don’t understand to begin with?
I believe the reckoning has already come. For years, Bungie treated fans to an annual hype fest of live streamed teasers, trailers, and interviews all showcasing the massive story beats to come. In 2024, they have gone incognito, and the future of the series is largely unknown, with the only color lying in a sparse, lackluster roadmap. Diehard players will stick around no matter what, and free agents on the gaming market will simply pass on Destiny as they’ve been doing for years. Too little too late, I think the leadership at Bungie has realized that they had a bafflingly limited understanding of their own community. What we’re left with is a “concluded” story that made little sense to begin with, and a mass exodus of players who have finally come to realize that it was never the glue that held the game together to begin with. Bungie clearly has incredible talent, and they certainly have the potential to create engaging gameplay that will keep players returning for years to come. I can only hope that Sony’s DEFCON 5 level takeover will course correct the ship before it is too late.
