This week’s TWAB post just went up for Destiny 2, and it’s a pretty thin one. The Arbalest ornament that won the player vote last year is finally appearing in season 21, and three new weapons are up for an ornament of their own, which won’t be in the game until The Final Shape. We were expecting some mention of Destiny 2‘s recent issues in this post, but Bungie seems intent on leaving these problems unaddressed for the time being. (Amusingly, the TWAB repeats the error that the Destiny Twitter account made, referring to Harsh Language as a shotgun rather than a grenade launcher.)
Why won’t Bungie explain what’s been going on with Destiny 2 lately? The argument could be made that the technical specifics involved would go over most players’ heads. But Bungie has been great in the past at explaining the workings of technical topics like matchmaking algorithms, so we don’t really buy that. Is it that openly discussing the flawed state of Destiny 2‘s servers would involve exposing how unstable the game’s code is? Or that Sony simply doesn’t want them doing so?
It’s hard to say. But it’s frustrating, from a player perspective, to encounter downtime, error codes, and so on in Destiny 2, with little acknowledgement of these issues. It’s even more galling when Destiny 2 bugs which help players are immediately fixed while those which impede progress linger on. For example, numerous “bugs” fixed by the midseason patch effectively nerfed Hunter Strand builds which relied on Grapple by reducing the utility of various mods. Or there’s the Terminal Overload bug, which allowed players to get extra gear by leaving and returning to the area to reopen the reward chest, which has also been fixed.
We hate feeling like broken records on this stuff, and it isn’t our intent to be so negative about Destiny 2 all the time. While the narrative has fallen short lately, the gameplay of Lightfall and Season of Defiance has continued to maintain the game’s high standards. But we can’t help but feel that a great deal of player faith in Bungie and Destiny 2 could be restored if the developer was a little more open about the title’s ongoing issues.
