As the much-anticipated midseason update was due to go live today in Destiny 2, Bungie unexpectedly extended maintenance on the game. Originally meant to end at the normal reset time of 10 AM Pacific, a Tweet from the Bungie Help account informed players that maintenance was being extended by several hours, with downtime continuing throughout the day. This has seemingly become a more and more frequent occurrence, and it’s leading us to wonder: is Destiny 2 in its death throes?
The issue of Destiny 2‘s technical frameworks has been an ongoing one for years at this point. While nobody but Bungie really knows the true state of the game’s code, the game does appear to be suffering from intense technical debt. Remember, Destiny 2 was originally released in 2017, over five years ago. It’s scaled up significantly since then with the expansion to Steam and the Epic Games Store, and for much of that time Bungie was operating as an independent developer, having split from Activision after the release of Forsaken.
Many of the issues with Destiny 2 over the years have been jokingly excused by players with the “small indie developer” line. But when Sony acquired Bungie last year, there was a reasonable expectation that Bungie’s output and quality assurance might return to that of the Activision days. That does not appear to have been the case. While Lightfall saw huge player counts, it disappointed critics and many players, and downtime has continued to plague Destiny 2 since its release — and even seems to have gotten worse.
So here we are, eight weeks into the season, and Destiny 2 is down again for who knows how long. It’s reasonable to wonder, then, where all of that Sony money is going. At this point, our best guess is that it’s being poured into new projects. It certainly doesn’t appear to have affected Destiny 2, which in addition to server problems has experienced technical issues with optimization and frame rates since Lightfall‘s release.
Is the game crumbling under its own weight? We’ve certainly wondered that at several times in the past, and we’ve been happy to be wrong about that. But it seems like things are getting worse and worse for Destiny 2, with frequent unexpected downtime, recurring bugs, and other problems impacting player experience.
Meanwhile, Bungie is posting strangely personal-sounding tweets about nailing content creators who broke NDAs and leaked information from their summits, yet continues to be more or less silent on Destiny 2‘s recurring downtime. Things seem worse than they have been in a long time for the game, and we hope the developer posts some kind of explanation for what’s been going on soon.
