Posted by The other day I was playing some games with one of my best friends and we eventually got onto the topic of Destiny 2 and why he doesn’t play it as much anymore. That conversation sparked my inspiration to sit down and write this little essay about live-service games, especially focusing my attention on Destiny and Destiny 2 since I have so much experience with these games and passion for them.
Destiny and Destiny 2 are some of my favorite games of all time. I’ve invested thousands of hours over the ten years both games have been out. However, my drive to play the game right now might be the lowest it has ever been despite how good of an expansion The Final Shape was, and I think a lot of this lack of enthusiasm boils down to the live-service model of gaming that’s become the current major market trend.
For those unfamiliar, the live-service model refers to when developers focus on a single game, routinely adding and removing content in regular intervals to keep the game fresh and maintain player engagement. The system really exploded with Fortnite and has since been included in countless other games, though not always to great success. Destiny 2 is no exception. Destiny and the live-service model have a complex relationship. I remember back when I would play Destiny, after I finished up all of the content in a DLC, which usually would take a few months of casual playing, there was just nothing to do. For example, if a DLC released in September, I would likely have finished it and all its added content by maybe January at the latest. The game then wouldn’t receive an update until April, and sometimes the update added content that I could literally knock out in a night. Then I was left waiting until September when the next DLC would release. So why was this a problem? Because Destiny marketed itself as a big multiplayer game and the game is at its best when you’re playing with other people. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t always anything to do.
Destiny 2 launched and attempted to solve this problem by using a live-service model. Even from the release of the second DLC, the game began to use the live-service template that Fortnite, which released the year prior, was beginning to implement. Unfortunately, I stopped playing Destiny 2 around this time due to various reasons, though I did return in the summer of 2020 during “Season of Arrivals” and I’ve been playing ever since, so I’m not the most familiar with the game during this time in its life. So what’s the new problem? The issue with Destiny is that after you beat the DLC, there wasn’t a whole lot left to do and content drops were few and far between. Wouldn’t frequent updates every few months solve that problem?
The short answer is no. The long answer is still no, but it’s a bit more complicated. With the advent of seasonal content, the quality of ALL content began to suffer. Seasonal content that’s a part of the live- service model is inherently lower in quality because it’s meant to be temporary and disposable. This isn’t a big deal in games like Fortnite where a lot of the seasonal content tended to just be skins, the introduction of new items, and some new maps and mechanics that didn’t matter if they got removed six months down the line (Note: I don’t play Fortnite. All of this information comes from my general knowledge of the game around 2018, so since it has grown and developed over time, it may not be wholly accurate now). In Destiny 2, having content that’s meant to be a temporary hamster wheel is, well, meaningless. To add insult to injury, Destiny 2 tells its story through these seasonal content drops, so if you miss it you miss out. It also doesn’t help that the storytelling just isn’t that good most of the time. Destiny is a franchise with some incredible lore and worldbuilding that never quite sticks the landing when put into the game. Heck, I’m still salty that one of the Hive worm gods is defeated in a basic campaign mission. It’s also why the most important story beats often happen in the first cutscene of the season, and then the rest of it just meanders as you sit around and do nothing of substance. The game is constantly having an identity crisis torn between “this content is temporary and expendable so we can’t dedicate all of our resources to it” and “this is how we tell our story.” These two directions are inherently incompatible. Furthermore, the rise of seasonal content detracts from the actual DLC and its content. If I look back at all of the DLCs, I would say that the most expansive were The Taken King, Rise of Iron, and Forsaken. What do all three of these have in common? They all came out before the advent of the seasonal model, thoughForsaken did use a prototype seasonal model more akin to the original mini-DLC of the first year of each respective game. The content felt expansive and replayable because that’s what it was meant to be. The seasonal models are just meant to be replayable placeholders. The content gets boring and repetitive because it IS boring and repetitive.
“Revenant,” the current “Episode,” is all of these failures coming to a head, and the reason I’m writing this article. The story content could be completed in a night. While not inherently a bad thing, it fell into the issue of nothing really happening other than an old antagonist coming back with new powers. The content added in feels meaningless. While I do enjoy the core gameplay loop of Onslaught, the new seasonal Onslaught just doesn’t feel meaningful, and I know exactly why. Seasonal gear is always hit or miss. Sometimes a season releases with something really cool, sometimes it doesn’t. The advent of crafting created an incentive to grind out enough copies of these weapons, whether good or bad, so that you could make your perfect roll whenever you wanted. This was healthy for the game in my opinion because it allowed you to future-proof. For example, maybe when a weapon released it wasn’t very exciting, but a few seasons down the line a perk it could roll with or its weapon archetype received a buff and made it a sought after weapon. If you could craft the weapon, you could make that perfect roll at any point. The seasonal weapons in “Revenant” aren’t like that because you can’t craft them. But unlike during “Into the Light” where all of the Onslaught weapons had highly sought after perk combinations, were returning popular weapons, and had unique “shiny” versions that could drop, the “Revenant” weapons are just regular seasonal weapons. The result is content that feels meaningless to run and exists solely to drive up player engagement but ends up having the opposite effect because the content isn’t deemed worth doing.
So what’s the solution? Before I answer that, I need to first explain exactly what the problem is. The problem isn’t just meaningless content or poor storytelling or weak DLCs, the problem is that Destiny 2 and other live-service games have steadily morphed into a full-time job. I miss the days where I would get out of school, finish my homework, then hop on Destiny and casually run all of the weekly reset content with my friends within the first two or three days of the week. Then for the rest of the week, we’d play other games. Destiny 2 has become this all-consuming monolith that seeks to overwhelm the playerbase with FOMO. Oh you didn’t play the seasonal content? Congratulations, now you don’t know what’s going on in the story. Even if the content released is meaningless, mediocre slop, dedicated players will still play it because they don’t want to fall behind. I would know because this is the exact camp I fall into. The alternative camp is that the overwhelming FOMO drives players away, and this is the camp my friend falls into. Now, I think that the solution isn’t unique to Destiny 2. From my understanding, games like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League suffer because they release recycled, boring content that feels tedious and meaningless to play. The solution is to step back and accept that it’s ok for gamers to play more than one game. Adding in meaningless content that’s meant to be temporary will only damage the game’s health in the long run. I’ve currently been playing Monster Hunter Rise and Remnant 2 and I’ve been having a great time because I can move through each game at my own pace. There’s no fear that content will ever be removed, and because I enjoy the game’s meaningful content, I’m incentivized to buy DLCs and support the game while doing everything it has to offer.
In conclusion, the live service model for video games is simultaneously great and terrible. On the one hand, it allows games to stay fresh and provide variation for a loyal playerbase. On the other hand, it can quickly become stale due to the production of subpar content that’s meant to be expendable. But above all else, it has turned singular games into full-time jobs. I think that Destiny 2 is a perfect example of this system at both its best and its worst. I’m always most excited to play the game right when a new season releases because of all the new content, and yet within a few weeks I can’t help but turn to other games because I’m just so bored with running the same stale activities ad nauseam. I firmly believe that the the solution to the tedium of live service games is to eventually move on and let the game die. I’m not saying games like Destiny 2 and Fortnite need to die and shutdown, but once the game has run its course, which unfortunately I think Destiny 2 is steadily approaching that moment, it’s ok to stop updating it. It’s ok to leave all of the content as it is in the game for the playerbase to enjoy rather than allowing the skin of the game to drag on like a zombie that get its innards changed every few months. Games are meant to be fun. When a game starts becoming a chore to play, that means that something needs to change. Sometimes it’s an indication that the game just isn’t for you, but sometimes it’s indicative of a rotten system that needs to change.
Broad Scope Entertainment 