I’ve spent somewhere between three and four thousand hours playing Bungie’s live-service landmark, Destiny. That is by far the most time I’ve put into a video game. For eleven years, since the very first public alpha I’d been a fan of the world, stories, characters and gameplay of this sci-fi epic. I made good friends through tackling some of Destiny’s most challenging cooperative content and playing Destiny 2 helped keep me sane during the covid pandemic. However, for the first time ever, I have absolutely no interest in the next chapter Destiny. The Star Wars-themed expansion Renegades seems like something I would be all kinds of hyped for, but the overhaul Destiny saw with its latest major release, The Edge of Fate has done too much damage to the game for me to be excited. In fact, I haven’t played Destiny – a game I was normally playing at least once every two to three days  – in months. I loved Destiny and I still want the franchise to succeed, but I also realize that the game I played for nearly a third of my life, through its many ups and downs, is… well, gone. I don’t want to be one of those guys who just rags on a game he doesn’t like, but with the time I’ve given Destiny I think it’s more than fair for me to share my thoughts here.

 So, here’s why I stopped playing Destiny.

The Story

The concluding chapter to Destiny’s decade-long “Light and Darkness Saga,” The Final Shape wasn’t quite perfect, but it was arguably the series at its peak. We joined forces with many factions we once fought against, unlocked powers that blended the opposing forces of Light and Darkness into one, we toppled the franchise’s big bad, The Witness, and the vast majority of our heroes got poignant closing chapters to their stories. It was the Avengers Endgame of Destiny, and just like the MCU, Destiny 2 is struggling to set up an engaging overarching story to be built upon in the future. We had some seasonal tales that tied up a few loose ends and were fine, but it can’t be understated how big of a miss The Edge of Fate was. All I really felt from Edge of Fate’s campaign was complete disillusionment with the future of Destiny story-wise. My biggest – but far from only – gripe was that the story essentially boiled down to “no, really, these vague, faceless entities were always the big bads of the series, not the Witness or the Darkness.” To me, that narrative twist undercuts the last decade-plus of storytelling.

The Stat and Gear Changes

Until Edge of Fate, Destiny always felt amazing to play. It didn’t matter what class, weapons or powers you were using, it just rocked. However, Edge of Fate revamped how your abilities and gear work. I’m not going to go into all of the details here, instead I’ll boil it down to two points: 

First, you have to prioritize certain abilities in order for them to be even in the neighborhood of effective. Instead of finding different builds or methods that allow you to chain all of your abilities together, you now have to heavily focus on one or two at the expense of the others. Want a fast charging super attack and powered punch? Well that’ll make your health and ammo regeneration abysmal. Oh, you need health? Have fun with your basic dodge taking almost twice as long to recharge. Some folks said this change made stat distribution more meaningful (and I guess it did) but more importantly it made players feel far less powerful in a game that was once an excellent power fantasy.

Second, each new weapon and piece of armor comes in tiers. A tier one piece of gear is straight-up awful and a tier five piece of that same gear is exceptional. On paper that sounds only mildly annoying (because why should I have to find the same gun I already have in a higher tier four times?) but the time it takes you to earn higher tiers is atrocious. I played through the entire Edge of Fate campaign on the hardest difficulty available and was rewarded with… A few pieces of tier two gear. In order to get higher tiers you need to run things in the portal. Speaking of which.

The Portal (the new grind)

Instead of leveling up by earning higher level finding gear in weekly, rotating grandmaster strikes, dungeons or raids you need to run activities in the Portal. The Portal is a small selection of recycled Destiny content with modifiers. If you want to get even tier three gear you need to spend dozens of hours (not an exaggeration) grinding the same missions over and over again while also cranking up the difficulty to the max via modifiers that make the game a chore to play. And as you level up you need to increase the power delta (the difference in level between you and your enemies) which means the game gets significantly harder as you get “stronger.” It’s like the typical power progression you’d experience in an RPG, but backwards. As someone who rarely minded the grind in Destiny I’ll say now that it’s the absolute worst it’s ever been – and by a huge margin.

The Monetization

I’ll summarize this one quickly with one example: In the midseason update, a single new, plain-looking armor set became available to earn in-game. The other five armor sets obviously took time and care in crafting but are only available for buying with real-world money, $20 each. I could go deeper into the controversies surrounding the “bug” that temporarily raised those prices to $25 until fans complained or how one of the much better, money-only sets was originally going to be an in-game reward, but the shameless greed already speaks volumes.

The Content Sunsetting

Imagine you play a game for three years, the developers sunset (invalidate) all the gear you’ve earned, promise they’d never do it again, and then break that promise five years later. The latter is what happened with Edge of Fate. None of the weapons and armor players earned from 2020 to 2025 were updated for the tiering system, and all content outside of the Portal (roughly 80% of what’s in the game) does not offer tiered gear. This means there’s no longer any reason to run the majority of the game’s best content. It’s truly baffling, and while I’m sure some of the sunset gear will return with tiered loot down the road, I can’t muster any excitement to replay slightly remixed versions of content I’ve already played plenty of times.

Bungie “Listens” but Never Learns

Bunge has listened to fan feedback and changed things when they didn’t work out many times over the years, so why am I drawing the line now? To me, Edge of Fate demonstrated that the Bungie of today (or studio’s leadership at the very least) has no idea what makes the game fun or what fans actually enjoy about it. The sunsetting, tiering system, stat changes, the Portal and new progression system weren’t bugs, those were intentional design choices. A stunningly bloated, empty grind that gets more difficult the more time you put into it and doesn’t offer meaningful rewards until you’ve given it at least 40 hours of your life isn’t something Destiny players want. It isn’t something anyone wants. That, the disgusting monetization practices and terrible campaign have destroyed all the goodwill I had for a franchise I once loved. I’m not saying some of these problems can’t be fixed (maybe some of them have been since I started this write-up in October) but I just can’t put my faith in such a misguided company anymore. Yeah, they hear our complaints, but I don’t think the ones at the top care in the slightest. I genuinely feel bad for the developers toiling at a game that just isn’t fun to play anymore and I don’t see a future for. I wish them the best, but I’m done.