Destiny 2

Bungie

At this point, it’s well known that Destiny 2 is in dire straits, given a falling player count after a long delay for its midseason update, which is not even going to be some huge new content addition itself. But now? They are shooting themselves in both feet, and this is frankly just becoming embarrassing.

Destiny 2’s souped-up PvP mode, Iron Banner, has been put on ice for six months now for reasons that have never really been clear, other than there aren’t enough people working on this game anymore. But now it’s back and has fumbled out of the gate, revealing not just problems, but problems that are not going to be fixed for another two months. Unbelievable. Among them:

• The main reason players showed up to Iron Banner at all for this new round was to get the new Auto Rifle. But drop rates of that rifle, especially compared to lots of armor, are poor. This was acknowledged by Bungie just two days after the event launched, but they say they are not going to fix this until June.
• Similarly, you cannot equip Iron Banner ornaments to your current armor to get the reputation bonuses like you always can. This means you need an entire set of actual, baseline Iron Banner armor to play with, which has not been the case for years. This will be fixed “in a future event.”
• Past that, not bugs necessarily, but more delays include the return of Finite Impactor, and the fact that after six months, there is no new armor set, and once again, one will not arrive until June, along with tiered weapons, which should have already been here.

I really have no words at this point. Destiny may be known for moving slowly when it comes to fixes and updates, much of the time, and there’s the whole “seemingly easy fixes can take longer than you think” aspect of game development. But if you cannot flip a switch and immediately increase drop rates of a single weapon when there are still a full five days left in an event, what are we even doing? Why does this decrepit game engine even still exist? This has gotten to a point where changing or fixing literally anything feels like turning an aircraft carrier around, and it’s unacceptable for a live game, particularly a live game where there are yawning, months-long gaps between content releases now. Iron Banner returning was supposed to be a layup. Instead, all the balls are deflated and one of the hoops has fallen over.

There’s no defending this. Destiny is at a point where the mobile version of the game is lapping it, and Marathon is clearly the top priority at Bungie, despite not performing all that great itself. If this is how Destiny is going to be going forward, even for the most basic of issues, maybe it’s time to just ice the whole thing.

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