It sure has been a couple of weeks for Destiny 2. Lightfall launched with several major bugs, including one that seemed to prevent completion of the game’s campaign. Others have, variously, rendered certain mods useless, made all characters and weapons invisible, and overpowered some Exotic weapons. Yesterday, Bungie briefly brought the game offline to address a number of issues. Service has since been restored, but as of this writing the game’s API is still offline and many bugs haven’t been fixed at all. With less than 24 hours until the World’s First Race for the new Root of Nightmares Raid, what’s going on?
Of course, it’s a meme at this point that Destiny 2‘s code is made of spaghetti. The game has been building on a base that’s years old at this point, such that things can go disastrously wrong for seemingly no reason. For a time, players tended to excuse this with the tongue-in-cheek comment “small indie company,” referencing Bungie’s status after leaving Activision in 2019. However, now that Bungie is owned by Sony, it’s a little harder to brush off the game’s many technical issues — to say nothing of the quality concerns with releases like Lightfall.
Here we are, heading into the weekend Raid race for the Root of Nightmares, and players variously can’t log in, can’t see their characters, or can’t use their gear. There’s a bug with Grand Overture that can make nearly any weapon blind enemies on demand, and Bungie hasn’t mentioned that they’re aware of it. We expect that they’re in emergency mode over there, desperately trying to triage the biggest issues heading into the World’s First race.
But the damage, in a sense, has already been done. Players haven’t been able to grind their Power in advance of the weekend, the new buildcrafting system hasn’t been working as intended, and there are serious doubts whether the game will be able to handle the onslaught of active players that comes with a new Raid. And it isn’t like this is the first time this has happened — last year’s Vow of the Disciple was plagued by disconnection issues, too.
Short of Bungie providing more information about what’s going on, we’re not sure what the solution is here. All the Sony money in the world can’t magically fix a game’s architecture, and with Bungie working on a new IP, maybe we’re simply seeing Destiny 2 begin to snap as it’s stretched to its limits. Happy Raid weekend, everybody!
EDIT (3/10/23): Bungie has disabled the Grand Overture Exotic and Thread of Ascent fragment for the World’s First raid race today. The game’s API has also been restored.
