Destiny 2 has always faced fluctuating opinions from its most passionate fans. Now, under seven months after the launch of its critically acclaimed and popular DLC, The Final Shape, it’s contending with some seriously concerning player counts and overwhelming content drops, leading to an all-time low for the community’s morale.
I know what you’re thinking. Aren’t you the girl who said Destiny 2 isn’t the problem, its players are? Well, you’re not mistaken, but I don’t regret the points I made in that article. When I wrote it in July 2023, the Light and Dark saga was hurtling towards an exciting conclusion, and Bungie was rolling out more fresh and exciting content for its FPS game than I knew what to do with. The arguments against its monetization system were justified, but that was never something players were forced to engage with.
Despite a challenging 2023, the narrative seemed set to change with the launch of The Final Shape in June 2024, which catapulted player counts back up to north of 300k concurrents. However, it’s been in sharp, painful decline ever since, dropping to a peak of 34k concurrents in December 2024. The discourse around the game’s future is fairly pessimistic online, yet no one can pin down why interest is at an all-time low, or how Bungie can reclaim its past glories. One thing you hear a lot is that Destiny 2 needs more “meaningful” content – but what does that look like?
For me, the amount of new content isn’t the issue. Since the introduction of the seasonal reworks and episodes, Bungie has added new three-player activities, timed activities, reworked Battlegrounds, added two new Exotic missions, a dungeon, unique story missions, and more dialogue and cutscenes to flesh out the narrative. It even brought back the Prison of Elders from the original Destiny, which many had wanted for a long time.
As someone who openly and unashamedly admits Destiny 2 is my favorite game, I think The Final Shape felt too much like a definitive ending in retrospect. I don’t know what’s happening in the new story; I’m disinterested and disengaged from the narrative for the first time in years. I had followed the tale of the Red War, the Witness, and the Guardian’s perilous adventures, but when we toppled the big bad, it felt like the ultimate culmination of my hard work.
I haven’t had breathing space to collect my thoughts and get the itch to start a fresh chapter. In a year plagued with devastating layoffs and challenging player opinion, taking a hiatus after The Final Shape might have been the best thing Bungie could have done for the franchise. Financially viable for the studio? Probably not, but the endless glut of new Destiny 2 content hasn’t given us any time to miss it. It’s just straight back into the grind for better loot, only now with a story we’re not as invested in.
For me, a huge rework and reset is needed. Subclass reworks, armor, and exotic weapon reworks, as well as looking at the loot tables from each of the game’s activities. It isn’t enough to put a pretty reskin on a gun, give it a different name, and declare it a new weapon. The rewards need to justify the grind.
The game’s PvP mode has had constant tuning and adjustments, including long-awaited new maps, but the endgame PvP has been largely neglected. Gambit as a mode is just… there. As players, we’re expected to treat it like one of the three main ritual activities, but if Bungie doesn’t care about it, why should we?
One of the highlights of the past twelve months was the Pantheon, a boss rush mode that tasked fireteams with taking on multiple raid bosses for rare loot and achievements. But, sadly, it no longer exists, having been a temporary mode to fill time in the lead-up to The Final Shape’s release. I’d love to see it make a comeback.
While this will be a wildly unpopular opinion, I also want the power grind to return. I felt far more incentivized to log in to Destiny 2 when I knew I needed to seek out pinnacle rewards to level up my gear and increase my Light level before taking on endgame content. If I wasn’t strong enough on day one of a new raid, my fireteam would go on without me. As someone with cripplingly unmedicated ADHD, that kind of time pressure is the only way to get me glued to my keyboard, headset on, grinding for the items I need. The removal of the power level grind means I can log in at any time and be as strong as almost everyone else – boring.
Do I think Bungie needs to take Destiny 2 offline, go into quiet development mode, and eventually release Destiny 3? No. After all, the studio is working hard on Codename Frontiers and its two expansions. Frontiers will release in mid-2025 and is the umbrella term for Apollo and Behemoth. Frontiers promises new stories, locations, missions, weapons, gear, raids, and dungeons. The episodic delivery in each expansion will bring new and reprised activities, gear and mods, challenges, modifiers, events, and a fresh meta.
Most interesting to me, though, is that Apollo will follow a story over “dozens of threads” that can be explored in a non-linear fashion. In theory, this means I can choose my own adventure at my own pace, but in practice I’m not sure if it’s enough to win over the disinterested ex-Destiny players seeking a reason to return.
In short: I don’t think there’s an easy way to solve the dwindling player counts and get people excited about Destiny again. I can only speak for myself. What I do know is that the conclusion of The Final Shape was the best time I’ve had in Destiny 2 in years. The 12-player activity, the excitement of finally confronting the space game‘s most terrifying enemy, and the adrenaline of the storyline coming together almost perfectly. If Bungie can get me that hyped again, I’m all in.