Overview

The speaker shares their current disinterest and frustration with Destiny 2’s “Edge of Fate” update, highlighting a lack of engaging seasonal content, confusing progression systems, and poor communication from Bungie. They compare Destiny 2 unfavorably to Destiny Rising and other MMOs, noting missed opportunities for social and community features. Personal burnout, leadership changes at Bungie, and a negative community atmosphere contribute to a general sense of apathy and fatigue.

Current State of Edge of Fate and the Game

• Edge of Fate’s seasonal content is sparse and less engaging than previous seasonal models, leading to a noticeable drop in enthusiasm among both the speaker and the community.

• New activities like “the sieve” and “Reclaim” are described as unremarkable and easily ignored, offering little incentive to participate.

• The lack of clear in-game timers or prompts for new content reduces excitement and makes it harder for players to know when to engage.

• The main progression loop now centers on the portal, which recycles existing activities and feels stale for longtime players who have already experienced this content.

• Streamlining has removed much of the universe exploration and the sense of significance in visiting different locations, making the game feel less dynamic.

• The director menu has lost much of its previous utility, and onboarding for new players is confusing, making navigation and engagement more difficult for both new and returning players.

• The speaker notes that while they didn’t expect as much new content due to ongoing reworks, the reality of the update has been more disappointing than anticipated.

Progression, Leveling, and Gameplay Issues

• Recent updates have introduced confusing and punishing leveling mechanics, with unclear level caps and grind requirements that feel disproportionate to the rewards.

• Players at the previous cap found themselves needing to complete activities far above their level just to earn minimal progression, making the grind feel unrewarding.

• Bungie’s communication about the intent and status of leveling changes is slow and unclear, leading to confusion about whether issues are bugs or intended features.

• The speaker and their friends feel little motivation to engage with the leveling grind, as their current gear is already sufficient for most content, and the process feels more like busywork than meaningful progression.

• Raid loot drops have seen minor improvements, such as gear that now progresses power, but the system is still broken—loot is limited to once per week per account, which discourages repeated high-end play.

• The speaker calls for more generous and scalable loot drops, especially for higher difficulty content, to make the time investment feel worthwhile. They suggest that activities should reward more loot as difficulty increases, referencing the positive reception to the Solstice event where plentiful rewards boosted player morale.

• The current system makes leveling feel like the only meaningful progression, overshadowing other gameplay goals and reducing the sense of accomplishment from playing.

Social Features and MMO Comparisons

• Destiny 2 lacks robust social features commonly found in other MMOs and even in Destiny Rising, such as clan housing, side activities, and community-focused mini-games.

• The absence of meaningful clan support is a longstanding frustration, especially given the game’s emphasis on playing with friends and community.

• Destiny Rising is praised for offering features like clan housing, sparrow racing, fishing, and a card game, which help create a more complete MMO experience and foster a sense of community.

• Destiny 2’s social features are limited, with only a few adjacent activities like Heavy Metal or Team Scorched, and there has been no significant attempt to improve clan systems or introduce new social spaces.

• The speaker notes that even small, non-progression features can make a game world feel more alive and engaging, but Destiny 2 has not prioritized these elements, possibly due to ongoing technical or development challenges.

Industry and Leadership Changes

• The speaker briefly addresses Pete Parsons stepping down as studio head, expressing uncertainty about the long-term impact on Bungie and the game.

• While there is a general sense of relief and ongoing discussion in the community, the speaker believes any real effects from leadership changes will take years to materialize, not just one or two expansions.

• The speaker mentions positive impressions of Justin Truman but admits to lacking enough information to predict how leadership changes will affect Destiny 2’s direction.

Personal Engagement and Content Creation Challenges

• The speaker feels uninspired and unmotivated, citing ongoing personal and professional setbacks that have disrupted their ability to create content consistently.

• The past two months have been particularly chaotic, with frequent interruptions from events and travel, leading to a cycle of catching up and falling behind on content creation.

• This instability, combined with a lack of compelling in-game goals, has further diminished their enthusiasm for Destiny 2.

• The speaker notes that community sentiment is low, and even positive changes are often met with suspicion or conspiracy theories, making it difficult to maintain motivation or optimism.

• They express a sense of apathy that feels even worse than frustration, as there are few topics or developments that inspire strong opinions or excitement.

Key Observations and Takeaways

• The lack of fresh, substantive content and poor communication from Bungie have led to widespread player apathy and disengagement.

• Structural improvements, such as more generous loot systems and enhanced social features, could help revitalize engagement, but there is little hope for immediate change.

• The current negative sentiment is pervasive, affecting both the speaker and the broader Destiny 2 community, and there is uncertainty about when or if the situation will improve.

• The speaker encourages others to share their feelings and try to keep discussions civil, acknowledging the challenging state of the game and community.

Destiny 2's Current State and Challenges

So, we're just under 2 months into Edge of Fate and this new era of the game and I don't know, just kinda wanna talk about where we're at right now, things are hitting a bit different post first impressions as they tend to do, so I just wanna talk at you for a little bit. How am I feeling about the game right now? Not great.

I really do not have that much enthusiasm for the game at the moment and judging by my viewership, neither do many of you. I've definitely noticed the lack of the seasonal content and/or seasonal cadences recently. Edge of Fate's seasonal activity is only around every so often, it's the sieve, in case you didn't know, and it's not anything very remarkable in terms of an activity.

It is fine, I've barely touched it, it gives some nice stuff every once in a while, sure, but the activity itself is fine. Why there is not some sort of a timer on the main portal page, I will never know. We had a LOT of activities come to the game, even if they weren't the most revolutionary pieces of content, right? 3 new battlegrounds, a couple unique activities with episode 1, Tomb of Elders, the Nether, etc. So, when new seasons come out, at least we were playing in the new content and we were doing things that felt new or participating in the new stuff in order to progress.

Edge of Fate, on the other hand, was very self-contained, but could also be completely ignored as far as the leveling and grind experience goes because the portal and a bunch of the other parts of the game are free, so they need to let people play the game without owning Edge of Fate. And I knew that going into Edge of Fate that we weren't going to be getting as much pure content because of all the reworks, but I didn't realize how that was going to hit until it actually released. Now that we're this far, I can say that it's not hitting in a good way and I'm hoping that Renegades gives a bit more of a seasonal content drop kind of feeling to incentivize me to participate with the newest content in the game. Because right now, the game is the Portal, for better or worse, which is entirely non-new stuff if you have been playing. It feels like not much has changed.

Ash and Iron got a new activity called Reclaim added, which is essentially overthrow from the Pale Heart, but it's in the Plaguelands. And it's fine, it's not anything super insane content wise, so it'll probably just get mixed in with everything else. Not only that, but when we were in the seasonal model, we had reasons to go around to different locations and physically move around in the universe that was available to us. I'm not going to pretend that most of my time was spent doing that though, most of my time was spent in the director menu, hitting the GM playlist or finding a raid or sitting in the tower.

But, there were still times where I went to actual places to do actual things and now it's mainly the portal. It's almost too streamlined. That's killed a little bit of the vibe for me, but I know it's killed the vibe much more for many of you out there listening. I know Bungie has said that they're working to bring back the utility of the director menu and I realize that it is basically impermeable for a new player to figure out or navigate without onboarding, but it was still a pretty significant part of the day to day Destiny experience and made the universe feel significant. Again, not that torn up about it, but even some kind of middle ground of having the portal Some sort of social hangout space might go a long way where at least you're seeing some other people I'm not saying we need to go back to physically running to the activities We want to run like I'm doing shattered throne back in forsaken, but somewhere in the middle, you know could be nice I'm not I'm not really too sure what the end game is or is supposed to be for Destiny right now, other than I guess, feated raids, like 1,2,3,4,5 feats on a raid.

Ash and Iron raised the cap to 550, but the first day of the update featured a lot of confusion about what is intended and what is not intended. People at the old cap of 450 were reporting that they needed to push activities to like 60 levels, 70 levels above them just to get a +1 drop in a slot, which is insanely not worth it at all for the intent of leveling. Even before this update, I wasn't in a huge hurry to participate in the level grind because my gear at tier 4 is already pretty good for the time and effort that it took and I am basically clearing all content in the game anyway.

And, most, if not all of my friends who are farther along than I am have expressed no desire to hit up any of this. A problem, like what feels like happens with most big patches, is that no one knows the level of intent with these changes, no one knows if what's happening is the intended thing or if it's bugged. Bungie posted 8 hours after the patch that they are looking into what's going on with leveling, I don't know if they've said anything since.

It just keeps happening, I just want a patch where I can feel confident in reporting on what's actually happening, but this stuff happens so often that I wait 2-5 days for Bungie to figure out their mess and then report on it, but then by the time I end up reporting on it and it's all fixed or acknowledged that the fixes are coming, everyone's made up their minds anyway. It's infuriating. I thought that with the update, leveling from 400 to 500 would be pretty similar to leveling from 200 to 400, like they just expand the band out a little bit, right, and then going from 500 to 550 would be slightly easier than going from 400 to 450 because of the improvements that Bungie was going to make to leveling.

And that does not appear to be the case right now and even if it were the case, I would still not be in a massive hurry to level. But that's the intent of the system, right? Just level until you feel comfortable with what you have or your time constraints or whatever.

The problem is that leveling feels like the only thing the game has to entertain you from a progression standpoint. I will give a small amount of props, the raids finally drop in gear that progresses your power, should've been like that from the start. But, it's broken right now, it's once per week per account and I'm gonna say that it's broken right now because no one in their right mind at Bungie should be thinking that once per week per account is an acceptable way to fix the loot problem in the raid. Should the raid be repeatable, in that it gives you power every single time? The portal is repeatable, that's literally the point of it, could the raid not also be like that?

Because for me, 3 and 4 feet raiding is a much more enjoyable experience than anything in the portal when I'm this far along in the leveling process. I think what this whole experience has taught us, taught me, taught someone, what it's taught is that even if you say to people that hitting max level isn't really the main goal and it's just to get as far as you can, people still want to hit max level because it's what we've known as part of the Destiny experience this whole time on top of the fact that leveling is literally the entire game, it's like a psychological thing. Leveling should probably remain a more chill experience, a more time investment focus, while getting these tier 4, tier 5 drops should be more of a skill focus, but even then, 1 drop at the end of some of these higher difficulty modes that take a lot of time and effort Like, that needs to be fixed, like, yeah, a strike is gonna take 10-15 minutes when you're at 238 power and your modifier is grenades do 8000% more damage, but when you scale up to Grandmaster and you need to fight at these higher levels and the content takes 2-3 times maybe sometimes even 4 times the amount of time to complete, it feels terrible to get one drop that gives you 1 or 2 power, but the game still assumes that the activity is 10-15 minutes long, so Fireteam Ops, for example, is scaled to Fireteam Ops itself and everything in that category at their base difficulty and not the difficulties that you can adjust these activities to.

Double it, triple it, quadruple it, dump loot on people, speed up the process, shower people in gear, I know we got vault problems, who cares, make it more worth cranking up the difficulty at higher levels, make it worth running the portal, even raid loot, we got 2 drops on the first clear of the week now, make it 3, make it 2 on every other, just make it 3, whatever. I'm fine with tier being tied to feats though, that's fine. Look at Solstice, man.

You made it rain on everyone with the gear and the bonus tiers and look how stoked everybody was. And then you buff up some fireteam ops activities in terms of drops and make sure the scaling is actually scaling properly, man. That should probably just be the norm at this point in terms of the total drops, like Solstice.

Because right now, unironically, I'd rather be playing Destiny Rising. Like, I know it's a brand new game and like, that's kind of interesting. I would still rather be on Destiny Rising. I've probably spent more time on Destiny Rising since Rising has come out than I have on Destiny 2. On a completely different note... When it comes to the whole Pete Parsons stepping down thing, I don't have much value to offer in that conversation because I don't know the true impact of such a thing happening.

I know Justin Truman, I've done feedback sessions with him before, he's a nice guy, But otherwise, I don't know enough about how much the studio head can impact the game in like a positive direction. I don't know enough is just really what it comes down to, other than the optics of guy who fired a bunch of people and then spent way too much money on cars is leaving Bungie, giving the feeling of relief. Of course, that didn't stop a bunch of the discussion of the overdelivery talks given at GDC however many years ago it's been now, which everyone loves to bring up even though no one really gets the context of that talk correctly and there's zero chance to actually remedy that anymore.

I'm interested to see if and/or how much the game changes with him at the helm, but those are going to be things that happen over the course of years, not like the next expansion or even the expansion after that. I've heard more good than bad from my peers in the industry, but what it'll truly mean for the game, no clue. I don't have much else to say, I'm just not educated or informed enough to give more of a take than that. What else, man?

I don't know. Destiny Rising, let's talk about it. I've actually been playing a fair amount, as I just said, I beat the campaign, I did the raid, I think my feelings on the game are about the same as they were in the alpha, which is for what it is, mobile Destiny. Did a pretty good job, just happens to be a gacha game, which is really not going to resonate with a lot of people at all, especially in the Destiny community, I feel like gacha and Destiny don't mix literally whatsoever in terms of the community sentiment, it's just the nature of these mobile games right now.

I've spent no money on the game and the most I plan on doing is buying the Battle Pass, Season Pass, whatever it's called. After seeing how much it costs for an individual pull of a character, I do not see myself paying for a lot of stuff in that game. I'm considering making some content on it, but seeing as I missed the opening weekend for my clan's 10th anniversary party and event weekend, I feel like I'm already very behind and therefore probably too late to the party for a lot of things, but we'll see. It's kept my attention though because I don't have any goals on Destiny 2 right now and this is a fresh game with a fresh start and I've been enjoying my time on it, despite some not so great revelations that have been discovered.

I think something that it's done well that Destiny can learn from is giving a greater community or MMO feeling in the game by having features that aren't super gameplay or progression focused. Like they got clan housing, they got sparrow racing and fishing and a card game, stuff that makes an MMO space feel a little more complete. I realize Destiny used to have fishing as part of Season of the Deep, but it got removed because it was technically seasonal content and fishing is a pretty divisive activity because you either love it or you hate it, but it's not a mandatory part of the game.

I know all the nuance and blah blah blah, but It's things like that, the silly or non-consequential things that can make a game feel more than its base component. And we have some stuff adjacent to that in Destiny, like Heavy Metal or Team Scorched, but you look at other MMO experiences and they have all these kinds of things in their game just as side projects, side progression, whatever you want to call it and Destiny doesn't have that at all. The game right now is leveling. The gameplay is fine, but the game is leveling and the game has never really reached a level of stability that it has needed or a level of happiness in the playerbase that it's needed where Bungie could be like "hey, let's do this weird thing for fun" or maybe there's some other reasons that I'm just not aware of, like someone's probably gonna hit me with some technical jargon at a future capture event or something.

But like, for a company like Bungie to constantly spout about community and playing together and playing with friends and link up with friends and all that stuff, why does Destiny Rising do clan support way better than anything Destiny has ever done for clans? It's not close, man. It's not like the clan features in Destiny Rising are anything insane, but it's way more than anything Destiny has done. Why is the clan feature so barren in this game? Why does Bungie not want to embrace any sort of MMO social features in this game after 11 years?

And I'm not even saying this is a priority, you can't really introduce clan housing when the game is on fire, I get it, but like, there hasn't even been an attempt to do anything to clans. At all. And like all you talk about is friends and playing with friends and playing together and the game is the best when you play with people. Content wise, I just have had like zero ambition for anything in particular other than like some build crafting content and keeping up with the news and I barely even want to keep up with the news because it usually ends up being bad and everyone's mad and it's just... I don't really have many things to have opinions on right now, I know that's what a lot of people come to me for, but I fear that my apathy is getting the better of me, which you could argue is worse than frustration, right?

I'm sorry that I just haven't had that much to discuss, but I haven't been inspired, I haven't been motivated, I haven't been in a good mental place for the past couple of months, I had some personal setbacks outside of Destiny and work that have affected my ability to make content in the way that I want to. I've also had an incredibly busy 2 months filled with constant starting and stopping of content due to events and travel, like I would catch up on all the videos that I need to make and then something happens and I fall behind and then I catch back up and then something happens and I fall behind and just... so that really exhausted me, that's finally come to a close so I'm looking to get stable again, I'm not trying to excuse it, I'm just telling you what happened. It's like there's been an earthquake under my feet for like 2 months and it just stopped. On top of all that, community sentiment is down and we get into this vicious cycle of Bungie does a thing and then the community doesn't like that thing or the thing didn't work out and then Bungie has to go back and they put their thing down and flip it and reverse it and then the community is mad that they had to resort to this in the first place.

It's just exhausting, such a waste of effort and time and work to do all this stuff and then they just undo all of it. And here's how I know we're in a terrible spot. When Bungie actually does something good, like Solstice giving bonus tiered loot, And like everyone's happy with Solstice and like giving away a bunch of items.

And people go conspiracy theory mode where they claim that Bungie didn't even mean to do all that and they're just trying to save face and pretend that "Oh, this is what they're- this was the plan all along. There's no way that Bungie could actually do that." Even when something does go right and a thing happens that people almost universally like, it's still suspect. Like that's- that's not good, man. That's not good.

They did something good and they can't even get a win. Hopefully we get to a better place at some point soon. I'm not sure it's gonna be in this season or this expansion cycle.

Maybe Renegades is the earliest. I think it's gonna be a tough couple months here. Let me know how you're feeling. Try to keep it civil. Just try.

For me. Okay? Try. Thank you for listening.

Thank you for letting me talk at you. And I'll see you next time.

the past couple of months have been rough. and i'm just gonna talk at you about what's been on my mind recently. i am frustrated. i am apathetic. Watch Datto Live at   / datto   on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

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