Even Making Destiny 2 Free Won’t Convince My Friends To Play
Destiny 2‘s next expansion, The Edge of Fate, goes live later this month. It will provide the foundation for the struggling live-service shooter for the foreseeable future, and Bungie is making everything currently in the game free for all players on every platform. It’s a pitch to get lapsed fans back into the fold and the uninitiated to take their first steps, but Destiny 2 has a lot to prove these days.
“Do you have a few friends interested in Destiny, but that hesitate to make the jump?” reads what sounds like a mid-level marketing scheme posted on the Bungie blog last week. “Good news: let them know about the Destiny 2 Open Access weeks!” The promotion makes all existing expansions, episodes, raids, dungeons, and other activities free to play, grind, and loot until July 22 whether you’re on PlayStation, Xbox, or PC.
It’s meant to make it easier for people like me to convince our online gaming crews to give the long-running space-scape shooter a try ahead of The Edge of Fate, which will include a fresh story arc, a new location called Kepler, and drastic changes to how Destiny 2‘s increasingly complicated slate of activities and goals is presented (the new thing is called “The Portal”), as well as much more granular updates to various aspects of the associated loot grinds including armor stats and how power (effectively the player’s level) is increased.
Some of these changes are meant to streamline the experience for new players, get everyone feeling like they’re starting from the ground floor, and make it feel like “Morning in Destiny 2.” Others sound as convoluted as ever, and if I dared mention them in any sort of detail to my friends they would laugh me out of the group chat. Staggered power caps? New infusion core economies? Seasonal resets? Multiple rare armor tiers? Long gone are the days of shooting stuff until a purple orb drops and then gloating to your friends about it. Was that the most fun version of Destiny? Not by a long shot. But it was the one they all actually played with me.
My friends and I recently wrapped Elden Ring Nightreign, at least until the new Everdark Sovereign bosses drop. I keep subtly plugging Destiny 2 at the end of our nightly sessions. “The new expansion’s coming,” I nudge. “It’s a soft reboot,” I lie. Before I can keep going they are already groaning at me. I’ve tricked them into playing it at various times in the past. They have fun, at least until that familiar sense of shame envelops them as they run the same content over and over in exchange for the most marginal improvements to their power and arsenal.
These reward treadmills were once the holy grail of a live-service game, the way to keep people playing as developers rushed to try and ship expensive DLC. They are now the exact type of pseudo-satisfaction loops that burn many people out. How else to explain my friends pouring almost 100 hours each into Nightreign, playing the same map and bosses over and over until they’d earned every achievement, with no loot vault or Star Wars crossover skins to show for it, and them still itching for a reason to come back. Meanwhile, their perception of Destiny 2 is that it’s a slop-filled theme park with long lines and bad prizes.
Not everyone is going to like Destiny 2. Most people are never even going to try it. But it doesn’t help that those who do are greeted by a slog that feels more like navigating a spreadsheet than playing a game where the best stuff—gear, raids, lore—is hidden or kept just out of reach until they’ve paid their dues. I will never stop trying to convince my friends to play Destiny 2. The game itself, on the other hand, feels like it gave up long ago.
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