If Destiny 2 Is To Survive, It Needs A Real New Player Experience

Bungie CEO Pete Parsons’s statement explaining the reasoning behind laying off 220 employees, some 17% of Bungie’s staff, is illuminating. In it, Parsons describes a company that overextended, expanding into too many projects as it tried to incubate multiple games while making Destiny 2, the studio’s successful live-service game, and Marathon, a revival of a storied Bungie franchise. “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red,” Parsons wrote. The result of this mismanagement is that 220 Destiny 2 developers from all teams lost their jobs, which is in addition to a previous massive round of layoffs in late 2023.

But critically, this second group of Destiny 2 developers lost their jobs at Bungie right after shipping arguably the best expansion the game has ever seen. Developers reportedly knew The Final Shape was make-or-break for the studio, and Bungie’s staff responded to that call by turning out a phenomenal addition to the game. Less than two months later, they learned that their herculean efforts to make money for the company were not enough to save their jobs.

The Final Shape should have saved Bungie. It was a phenomenal expansion that received acclaim from critics and players, and despite the major stumble that was the Lightfall expansion in the year before it, The Final Shape still had the momentum of 10 years of Destiny 2 investment behind it. And yet, according to Stephen Totilo’s reporting at Game File, The Final Shape has sold less well than Lightfall. That makes some degree of sense–Lightfall saw huge sales thanks to the hype that resulted from The Witch Queen, the expansion immediately before it, which was also excellent. Lightfall was a major disappointment, and players burned by it were less likely to turn out for The Final Shape.

Bungie leadership messed up with “our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall,” as Parsons puts it, shipping an expansion with a weak story and burning a ton of player goodwill and momentum in the process. But that’s only part of the issue with Destiny 2 that led Bungie to this place. It wasn’t just that Bungie over-invested in other projects while failing to anticipate things like how the end of the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic would affect sales. Bungie leadership also failed to invest in a key element of Destiny 2–for years.

Back in 2020 with the Beyond Light expansion, Bungie started to “vault” certain old Destiny 2 content, removing it from the game. Among those elements it cut was the Destiny 2 vanilla story campaign. This one decision, I think, has been quietly disastrous, with its wide-reaching effects only just now coming into focus.

Lots of complaints have been made about the Destiny Content Vault taking away content players have paid for. There’s a debate to be had about how much removing content from the game damaged Bungie’s credibility, and how the technical limitations of Destiny 2 made it impossible to keep adding to the game indefinitely, but there was a more insidious effect to the DCV: It removed Destiny 2’s on-ramp for new players.

The Destiny 2 vanilla campaign, like the original Destiny’s story campaign, worked as a guided tour through the game. It took players to each planet, introduced them to the major characters, and bounced them through content like Strikes and Lost Sectors. It certainly wasn’t a perfect introduction to the game, especially since Destiny 2 has added many other major components, such as Gambit, since then, but it did at least give a decent sense of how you were supposed to play Destiny 2. By following the story from the start of the game and through its expansion campaigns, you could slowly acclimate to each piece of the Destiny 2 puzzle.

Ever since the loss of the vanilla campaign, Destiny 2’s new-player onboarding has been a frustrating mess. In 2019, Bungie added the New Light feature to Destiny 2, a new take on the opening moments of Destiny 1 that was meant to bring players up to speed on how to play the game, which it expanded into something of a campaign with Beyond Light. But at least anecdotally, New Light still doesn’t really do the job. It takes players through the basics, but does so in a speedy, artificial way that’s not particularly immersive–and when it’s done, the game drops them into whatever’s currently happening with almost no guidance.

The studio tried another approach to guiding players through Destiny 2 with Guardian Ranks, a new system it introduced with Lightfall. Guardian Ranks are meant to give players an ascending ladder of stuff to do in order to “rank up,” which serves to walk them through Destiny 2’s content, from its easier repeatable activities to its more advanced gameplay mechanics and endgame dungeons or raids.

But Guardian Ranks also don’t do an especially good job of actually leading players. The system is easily ignored and its importance often isn’t well conveyed; it’s not particularly clear that it’s showing you how to play the game; and it lacks a lot of information and context about what the activities it wants you to do actually are, how they work, or where to find them. It’s nice that Destiny 2 has something that says, “Okay, now you’re ready for a dungeon,” but you still need to know what a dungeon is in order to act on that information.

The issue is compounded by the live-game nature of Destiny 2. Boot up the game in a new season (or in the current case, during a new Episode), and you’re usually met with a cutscene about whatever is happening in the game’s current storyline. If you’ve been away from the game for a while or you’re new to Destiny 2, you’re immediately blasted with a firehose of stuff you don’t understand. Even worse, the cutscene often leads you into a new limited-time activity as the game kicks you into the current story automatically, so you’re not only confused about what’s going on, but now you’re playing something you didn’t ask for and have no context about. It’s an approach that only works for regular players and is totally off-putting for everyone else.

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that even with New Light, the Destiny 2 vanilla campaign, or Guardian Ranks working as intended, Destiny 2 is just a dense and confusing game, even though Bungie has been working to lessen that issue and make it clearer literally throughout the franchise’s 10-year life.

A great example is your character’s Power level, the measure of how strong you are and, therefore, what content you’re capable of playing. Power is determined not by any intrinsic measurement of your character “level” like in other RPGs, but by the numbers attached to all your gear. So in order to increase your strength, you need to find better guns and armor. You can get that just by playing the game for a while, as when you’re low enough on the Power scale, every new item you find will be a little higher than what you have.

That’s fine until you hit a certain number known as the “soft Power cap.” From here, only certain activities drop gear that can increase your Power level, and only under certain circumstances. These activities are denoted as dropping “Powerful” gear, and while other gear is stalled at the soft cap, Powerful gear will drop higher than your current level. There are a lot of these activities, so ascending is still pretty easy–until you hit the “Powerful cap.” At that point, Powerful gear stops being effective, and the only way to keep moving up is with “Pinnacle” gear. Pinnacle drops also come from specific activities, but there are fewer of them and they’re higher-end, like raids. They also advance your character much, much more slowly.

And then you hit the “hard Power cap,” the peak of what you can attain from gear. At the hard cap, the only way to keep advancing your character is by gaining leveling up the Artifact, an object related to Destiny 2’s current content Episode. You level it by gaining experience points just by playing, so it’s not something you have to think about, but if you want to hit that really tough endgame content, like Master-level raids, you need to boost up quite a few levels on top of the hard cap, which means more grinding.

I’ve just explained how Destiny 2 leveling works in a pretty truncated way. It took me 319 words. I didn’t mention that Powerful gear has multiple tiers, or that you can “infuse” higher-level gear into lower-level gear, or what drops are offered by repeatable activities, or the old bounty system that was part of the game for years up until two months ago. I didn’t mention anything about gear stats, the loadout system, or Exotics.

Imagine trying to follow that system in the game and you have a pretty good idea what new players are up against. I’ve been playing Destiny for 10 years and sometimes have to look up the Power system caps and differences after taking breaks from the game.

What I’ve heard from people who’ve tried to get into Destiny 2 is that it’s extremely difficult, and a lot of them bounce off. After a certain point, they’re not sure what they should be doing or what they should be chasing, or what their effort leads to. They often need friends to explain the game to them, and if they don’t have any, they tend to filter out. They certainly never get to the best content in Destiny 2, the stuff that really makes the game worth playing and investing in, like the raids and dungeons, or great missions like the two-player-only Dual Destiny.

Destiny has had this onboarding problem, where players get lost in a quagmire of systems that have been building on each other and mutating over time, for years. Even as the game has gotten better, with better long-term storylines and more affecting narratives, more interesting gameplay systems and better weapons, improved subclasses and more endgame content, it still has dropped new players into the deep end and left them to sink or swim.

Imagine how many people wanted to get into Destiny 2 and couldn’t–especially after The Witch Queen, a well-reviewed expansion that had the community buzzing. Again, anecdotally, I knew many people whose interest in Destiny was suddenly piqued after hearing about that expansion. Most or all of them played the game. None of them have stuck around.

That brings us to Lightfall. The expansion was a flop among critics and veteran players, largely because of a story campaign that felt like it made no sense and did little to set the stage for the ultimate throwdown that would be The Final Shape. Good additions, like the Strand subclass, were overshadowed by weak new activities and a new destination that didn’t do much to inspire players. What excitement for the future The Witch Queen built up, Lightfall leveled at the absolute worst possible moment.

But it’s important to recognize that the damage that Lightfall did was amplified by the fact that Destiny 2 is so hostile to bringing in new players. The success of The Witch Queen attracted people to the game, but the rough onboarding meant many of them didn’t stick around, so Lightfall pushed people out of the existing player community with little way for the game to replace them. With no real way for the Destiny community to get bigger, a stumble like Lightfall meant it could only get smaller.

For years, Bungie put its efforts into making the game for the existing community while largely ignoring the new player experience, and for a while, that was enough for the game to see success. But clearly, that situation was tenuous, and Bungie leadership’s failure to prioritize making sure Destiny 2 could attract and keep new players was a major mistake.

To be clear, this isn’t an effort to place blame on Bungie developers, who have vastly and consistently improved the game. Instead, the clear focus is on Bungie’s leadership, who decided where to put investment and what elements to prioritize, and pumped money into other projects rather than dealing with the shortcomings of Destiny 2.

Now, Bungie’s leadership needs to deal with those mistakes, and quickly. Both rounds of layoffs have had a massive impact on the Destiny 2 community, undercutting excitement for and confidence in the game. Reports say Bungie plans to move away from big expansions like The Final Shape to smaller content drops like Into the Light, which doesn’t sound great, either. Maybe that approach will keep Destiny 2 at a quality level high enough to keep the community invested, but cutting the people who’ve helped make the best of Destiny 2 certainly isn’t raising Bungie’s chances.

Regardless of the path forward, Bungie needs to make the game more inviting to new players if it’s ever going to thrive as it once did–and that means investing in plugging holes, rather than cutting the people keeping the ship afloat. If there’s any way to recover from the disaster of two devastating rounds of layoffs, it means creating a Destiny 2 that can grow beyond what it currently is. Otherwise, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before another cataclysmic event–whether it’s restructuring from Sony or just a few bouts of poorly received content–puts Destiny 2 down for good.