Destiny 2 and the sunsetting news every fan has been waiting for!

Many players of the lootshooter Destiny have often and loudly shared their frustration not only with us, but also on other websites, in social media and on Reddit. It’s about the process of sunsetting, which Bungie developers are a little too big on if you ask Destiny veterans. Sunsetting means the following: Certain Lootshooter content will be removed from the live game and placed in the Content Vault. Later they can be taken out from there and modified to be made available to the players again.

This is what happened with the Destiny 1 Raids Vault of Glass and (recently) King’s Fall, or with the Destiny 1 play area Cosmodrome. Let’s stay with the last example, the cosmodrome. To make sense in Destiny 2 (buy now €18.86) To be integrated, the Destiny 1 game start experience has been taken and adjusted. Now the Cosmodrome is the starting point for every new Guardian. That is not the problem.

The real problem is that Destiny 2 needed a new game entry, because with the release of the Beyond Light expansion in 2020, the actual intro of Destiny 2, the campaign for the Red Battle, was banned from the game to the content vault. Just sunsetting. With The Witch Queen, the Forsaken campaign has also been thrown out of the game.

Take away what you paid for?

Most Destiny veterans resent the developers for this process. They’ve paid for content like Red Warfare and Forsaken, and they want to be able to play it. I can understand the anger, even if one always has to emphasize: We don’t explicitly pay for content, we pay for a game license. We don’t own Destiny, and we always have to be prepared for developers to make choices that we don’t like. Consider the Cataclysm revamp of Azeroth.

Dominus Ghaul and the Speaker; both a meme in their own right. Since 2020, both are no longer in the game because the Red Battle was removed.

Source: Bungie




Anyway: However, sunsets are always to be viewed critically, because they take something away from the player, and taking something away should never be the first choice. But what bothered me a lot more about Bungie’s approach is that the story about Dominus Ghaul and also about Uldren and Mara Sov were chopped up. Whoever starts Destiny 2 now will never know who this rumored Cayde is who sometimes strikes the player (and sounds like Nathan Fillion, just sayin).

Cayde-6: Gunslinger, Knowitall, Kickass, deceased. Unfortunately.

Source: Activision




Or this narrator who always gets so many laughs when he mentions it. If you start the game now, you only notice that Dominus Ghaul captured the traveler and the guardians temporarily lost their light. And they may not really understand that Uldren is the murky past of Crow, who still struggles with his self.

Story is the key to victory

I recently wrote about that the storytelling of season 17 of destiny 2 was terrific, also game mechanics (unfortunately that’s not the case in season 18, but that’s another topic). It’s all the sadder when important story developments simply disappear from the game, especially in the form of expansion campaigns. One explanation the folks at Bungie are fond of making when it comes to sunsetting is Destiny’s engineering. The game may not be able to offer that much content, and besides, it’s confusing when players stumble across old, barely played content. To me, in plain English, it always sounded like this: The developers think I’m a bit too stupid to find the activities that are important for my character at the moment.

Crow, tragic character of the Destiny universe. Why? Will be explained to you in Forsaken…

Source: Bungie




But that has less to do with my intelligence or the cleverness of the Destiny community and more to do with game design and player control. And the Bungista seems to have noticed that too. Because to Announcing Destiny 2: Lightfall (to be released on February 28, 2023) the devs emphasize: There will be no more extension sunsetting. Finally! After the item sunsetting was already discontinued with season 14, the extensions are no longer taken away from us. Only the seasonal content remains…

Extensions no longer expire

Official wording from Bungie developers: “It’s always been hard to say goodbye to campaigns when they’ve been moved to the Destiny content vault. Even if you didn’t play them often, it made it harder to tell your friends about it to keep you posted on what’s been happening in Destiny 2 in the meantime. Seasonal content will remain available in the current expansion year and will then be moved to the Destiny Content Vault when a new expansion is released.”

hmm…

There are definitely things happening within the seasonal stories that are important to the narrative of an expansion, both the one that is current and the one that is yet to come. Destiny now spans almost ten years of stories from the saga of light and darkness; That doesn’t fit on a beer coaster. Even if the Bungista don’t move on to keeping the seasonal stories in-game as well, they should bring the events to all Guardians, in-game. With a video, for example, that goes into a few details.