"I hate that I miss Activision": Destiny fanbase lashes out at Bungie after 'useless' season launch

The newly released Season of the Worthy has been met with some seriously harsh criticism amongst the Destiny 2 community due to its lack of content and variety.

Normally there is a ‘honeymoon phase’ with new content releases that lasts from a few days to a few weeks. During this time, players are content with the state of the game but as they slowly run out of activities to complete and worthwhile weapons to chase it slowly turns into very vocal criticism.

The honeymoon phase for Season of the Worthy lasted all of three or so hours before the Destiny subreddit was flooded with angry Guardians expressing their displeasure towards Bungie’s new lackluster direction of game development.

One particular thread on the subreddit that gained a massive amount of traction was titled “I hate that I miss Activision” by user ‘MathTheUsername’ that gained over 14,000 upvotes.

“It honestly feels like Destiny has been in a slow(or not so slow decline) since they parted ways with Activision,” says MathTheUsername, with many of the comments backing up this claim.

For those of you out of the loop, Bungie was in partnership with game publisher Activision from the release of the Destiny franchise in 2014 until early January 2019 when the pair decided to part ways with Bungie retaining the rights Destiny and becoming an independent studio. 

Much of the community rejoiced as in their eyes, the slow monetization of the game was at the direction of Activision with Bungie simply following orders. It has, unfortunately, become apparent that this was not the case.

In fact, the monetization of Destiny 2 has become much worse since the split early last year.

Activision is one of the biggest publishers in gaming with a net worth of almost $47 billion and many smaller studios working under it. During the partnership with Bungie, Activision was able to funnel funds into the development of the Destiny franchise as well as lend the help of some of their smaller studios such as Vicarious Visions.

With the split early in 2019 this all went up in smoke and Bungie was left to fend for themselves. 

This has all come to a head with Season of the Worthy as Bungie has had to beef up the Eververse store will cool looking items, items that should be obtainable as end-game rewards, to entice players to spend real-world cash. On top of this, Bungie has seemingly cut out several pieces of content that used to be almost guaranteed for a Season as a form of cost reduction. 

Here is a list of all the blunders that Bungie has managed within the first day of the release of Season of the Worthy:

Emblem Stat Tracker Rework

Before the release of Season of the Worthy, many emblems came with a tracker that displayed a certain statistic of the player that was relevant to the emblem. This included statistics like a player’s KDA for Crucible emblems and the amount of Shattered Throne completions for a Dreaming City emblem. Many players worked at these stats for years in order to be proud to display their commitment to a certain area within the game. 

Emblem stat trackers saw a significant rework with the release of Season of the Worthy. Now, players are able to choose from a large selection of stats to display on any emblem they currently have instead of being forced into displaying a predetermined stat with each emblem.

Unfortunately, the selection of stats that can be displayed is significantly smaller than what the previous emblem system had and many of the stats that can be displayed have been reset to 0. 

“Deleting almost 3 years of trackers. "You had to be there." Okay now no one knows I was.” says the same ‘MathTheUsername’ from their ‘I hate that I miss Activision’ post mentioned above.

Another post by the user ‘GR34T_D4N3’ goes on to say:

“My resets. My gold medals. My dungeon clears. The 300k fractaline that I spent the last 5 weeks donating! Are you serious? All those achievements meant something to me, and to a lot of others. This feels like a punch in the gut from the devs straight to the players. I’m literally.. in shock. I’m angry and depressed and speechless all at the same time.”

Wanted to show off the 1 million Polarised Fractaline you donated last Season? You’re out of luck. Wanted to show off all the Gold Medals you obtained in the Crucible? You’re out of luck.

It's extremely frustrating that at its core this stat rework is really done well. The UI is sharp and easy to navigate but it's overshadowed by its disrespect to players' time by resetting the numbers and not tracking all the previous stats.

No New Seasonal Ritual Weapons for Vanguard, Crucible or Gambit

Ritual weapons, for many people, are one of the main draws of a new season as it's an objective to spend a couple of hours a day plugging away at in order to obtain what is most of the time, a fairly powerful weapon.

Players logged on to Destiny 2 once the Season released and made a bee-line straight to one of the vendors in order to grab the relevant Ritual quest but they were met with an empty quest screen. Surely this was a bug? Many reached out to Bungie Community Manager Dylan ‘dmg04’ Gafner for clarification who gave the following statement:

“Season of the Worthy contains a single ritual weapon, reserved for the Iron Banner. You’ll learn more about  this reward before the first Iron Banner of the Season.”

So the typical Ritual weapons have been cut from the game and it's unclear whether this is for good or just for the current Season. This is most likely one of the cost-cutting measures mentioned before, it seems Bungie lacks the manpower and the funds to develop 3 simple weapons.

Lowering of Number of Eververse Items Purchasable with Bright Dust

At the start of the new Season, Bungie lowered the amount of weekly Eververse items that could be purchased with Bright Dust and filling these slots with useless consumables that nobody in the right frame of mind would buy.

It doesn't take a whole lot of brainpower to see this for what it is: a simple and effective way to force more people into spending Silver, Destiny’s currency bought with real money, to obtain the cool cosmetics they want.

Lack of Variety with New Season

At the start of the new season, the player is tasked with clearing a path to Rasputin’s Mindlab on Mars and once there they are redirected to the EDZ where they must clear out one of the Warmind’s communication Bunkers. This is fairly straightforward and should only take about 30 minutes.

Once this is completed the player is met with what is essentially a more convoluted version of Season of Dawn’s Obelisks where the player must complete bounties, a worse version of Escalation Protocol and higher difficulty Lost Sectors to acquire Seasonal currency to upgrade the Warmind Bunker.

This is essentially the main focus of the Season and it is simply stuff that we are already done before.

Lackluster New Gear

With any kind of Looter Shooter game, there needs to be worthwhile weapons to chase or the game grinds to a halt. Destiny 2 has been mostly fine in this regard, Season of the Dawn wasn't the best when it came to powerful weapons but there were a few hidden gems.

Bungie has taken this to the next level and has introduced almost no Legendary weapons worth chasing in Season of the Worthy due to their lack of powerful perks combinations. Almost none of the weapons contain the reload speed + damage perk combinations like Feeding Frenzy and Rampage that have become a staple for a weapon to be considered powerful.

A case can be made for the reintroduced Hand Cannon ‘Dire Promise’ with its Opening Shot + Rangefinder combination or the soon to be released Trials of Osiris Shotgun ‘Astral Horizon’ as it being Aggressive Frame that can roll with Quickdraw + Opening Shot will make it rival Mindbender’s Ambition.

After this explosion of criticism within the first few hours of the Season’s release, Bungie went into damage control mode with community manager Dylan ‘dmg04’ Gafner tweeting the following to attempt to calm the masses:

“Good Morning. Lots of feedback to process and pass on to the team. A quick list of what we’re tracking:

• Ritual Weapons
• Stat Trackers
• Eververse (Bright Dust Slots)
• Armor (Acquisition, Mods)
• Weapons (Perk Pools)

There’s much more than those topics. We see you.”

So it seems the faults have been noted but if Bungie’s rate of turn around on making changes is anything to go by then don't expect any kind of update or patch any time soon.

It seems that the Destiny franchise is heading towards a point of no return where lack of purpose within the game is beginning to drive players away.

Fingers crossed that Bungie can course-correct in time.