Current State of Destiny 2 S18 Plunder (Fall 2022)

There’s been a lot of talk about the current state of Destiny 2, since the concurrent player numbers are at an all time low. It’s the end of a season, and it hasn’t been the best, so could this explain the numbers? PvP mains aren’t happy at all with the state of the current sandbox. I don’t like it either, the Airbone Effectiveness and slide nerfs have greatly reduce the fun factor of PvP. What about PvE?

This season was pretty bad, I’m not going to sugar coat it. After the first couple of weeks, it was difficult to find reasons to log on. It didn’t help that the story wasn’t that compelling. The story missions were also pretty bad. I remember fondly Season of the Lost and the missions in the taken realms. It took me hours to find all of the chests and secrets, and it seemed that every week, there was something more to discover.

Plunder. Well. Not that much. I haven’t been playing much, and Festival of the Lost was so grindy that I completely lost interest for weeks. I gilded Ghost Writer, but it wasn’t a fun experience. Strikes are in a paltry state. I feel like there are less strikes than when Forsaken was released. I end up running always the same couple of strikes. It’s monotonous.

Gambit? 🤮 There are 4 maps. You end up on the same maps over and over again. I can barely stomach playing a couple of matches. It doesn’t help that they implemented this stupid health gating of the primeval, so the matches take much longer than they should. Maps. Lol. I think at one point, there were 8 maps (?).

PvP. AE and the slide nerfs have completely destroyed most of my interest in PvP. For my PvP needs, I play Overwatch 2. It’s a lot more fun. It doesn’t have the PvE depth of Destiny 2, but it’s very good at what it presents. Destiny 2 is buggy. This peer to peer BS is 10 year old technology. Bungie needs dedicated servers, but we’re never going to get them. So we’re stuck in this BS meta of people teleporting all over the place, and it has only gotten worse with SBMM. I generally like SBMM, but in Destiny lmao. It’s not really feasible.

Higher end PvE, like raids, dungeons, and GMs. There was a snafu with the drops of Mindbender’s, so they decided to mess up the rotation. This actually means that I didn’t have time to farm for an adept Horror’s Least, the only gun I wanted. This means that I’ve barely played any GMs. Apparently, HOIL and the aspect of Thunder have made a mockery of the difficulty. I honestly haven’t tried it because of the drop problems. I generally run Omni hunter and have had no issues. They just need to implement another way of leveling, like they did for the legendary WQ campaign and day 1 raids.

Kingsfall was great. But as time went on, more and more of my clanmates decided to stop playing or to only play with their cliques. I was in a mega clan of three clans, so I had trouble completely simple triumphs like clan night fml. Also everyone who saw this coming, switched to the sweaty overbearing clan, which wasn’t very exciting for me so I just packed up and left for some other clan. I haven’t played enough to make clanmates relevant again.

The story has been getting worse. It’s not just that, it’s also because some devs were hyping it up. It’s probably one of the least interesting story arcs in D2. It doesn’t help that they just released an ink blot cut scene as an epilogue, weeks after the actual end of the seasonal storyline.

The live events. Wow. They didn’t really try, did they. The Telesto “mini event”, I don’t know what to say. It’s more like a non-event. Changing how a gun works for a couple of days isn’t really anything that interesting. The community event was a joke. The Eliksni quarter didn’t even change. It was ridiculous. The loot boxes you could farm are so expensive that they make no sense. It’s not even a good legendary shard farm. I popped in to donate some mats and that was the end of it.

I think they should cut down on the seasons, maybe 2 or 3 seasons per year instead of 4. The quality has definitely been going down. It’s not that they don’t have the money. They’ve got plenty of money. They’ve got plenty of people. In fact, they keep hiring more and more people. However, they don’t have that many people working on the game itself. They’ve got their crews working on new games. There’s no excuse for not releasing PvP maps every season. It’s ridiculous. They should be releasing 2-3 each season. Instead we get one giant new map on the throne world, and some reprised maps after years (3?) of neglect.

The last good “secret mission” was the Dead Man’s Tale mission, Presage. My favorite remains Whisper of the Worm. It was crazy, especially the platforming. I didn’t get enough time with Zero Hour to perfect runs in it. They’ve come out and implied that they weren’t going to do anymore secret missions because of data mining. There are plenty of ways to obfuscate secret missions in the API, to make it impossible for data miners to figure out what is coming out next. First and foremost would be to simply fill up the API with false leads. With enough entries, it would be almost impossible to figure out.

I don’t think that Bungie has realized how bad they’ve messed up, and instead of trying to make it better, they’ve actually made it worse. They’ve made the titles too grindy. No one is enjoying killing 50 ruffians that spawn on a timer in the expedition playlist. 35 haunted lost sectors? They are able to make good content, but some of the tech in Destiny 2 itself is holding it back. They might need to redo the whole game into a Destiny 3 to make it better, however we know that we’ve got D2 going until 2026 and probably beyond.