Trying to review this game or even muse on it is an exercise in frustration, which is really poignant considering playing it hits the same notes of confusion and dissatisfaction.

I could point to any one era of Destiny and go "it was better/worse back then!" but to even do that as a lighthearted joke would require enough context, setup and exposition that it'd make a Yakuza game blush. But I'll try because it's 1:26am as of writing and none of my sleeping aids have aided in sleeping.

Once upon a time this franchise was little more than "High Sci-fi Borderlands x Halo shooting with dailies and weeklies", and while that might make some of you sweat and wish that videogames never progressed past the level of Tetris, for me it was enough to sustain my interest. Tacking on Bungie's best-in-class sense of scale and environment design was just delicious icing on a juicy spongecake.

When I opened this google doc I had a lot of jokes at Destiny's expense swirling around my head but I'm already four paragraphs in and struggling, because those jokes are predicated on the assumption that Destiny is art, and my particular brand of autism means I hate jokes that aren't grounded in reality.

Destiny 2 is a product to be sold more than it is 'art' and the only real difference between the game in 2017 and the game in 2023 is that Bungie's upper management have simply stripped away the pretense. I know this might ring hollow to any of you who play AAA games or know what 'Fortnite' means, and even as I type it I find myself furrowing my brow and saying "hmmmm" out loud like I'm in a Persona game, but I think 'product' applies to Destiny 2 more than most other games.

Because Destiny 2 has a shelf life, and unlike many other live service games it is actually upfront about this shelf life. Not as upfront as it should be, but nonethless any Seasons a person purchases will be thrown in the garbage once an expansion's cycle ends. These seasons often have a worse shelf life than some of the crisps I buy. Did you like that one activity from Season of Plunder? You didn't because nobody liked Ketchrash, but if you hypothetically did then tough luck buddy. It's gone forever. It's temporary. Almost everything is temporary. It's a lot like life except rather than capping off the highlights of your life with comfort, you get Lightfall instead.

I bring all this up first because the actual gameplay, story and anything without profit incentives behind them are superfluous. Bungie's concept of balance is still as bad as it was in 2004, the story is written ad-hoc by an endlessly spinning carousel of underpaid and overworked writers, and while the environments are pretty they are ultimately backdrops for dailies, weeklies and grinds.

My cynicism might seem overbearing, but really I'm just truncating Bungie's appalling GDC conference to you. Trigger warning: They say the word "overdelivery" with all sincerity.

Everything in Destiny 2, for good or ill, is secondary to player retention and cash. This goes for most games, and all 'live' games, but D2 sticks out because it is unique in its antipathy for the player. Bungie do not care if you're having fun, they do not care if you like specific content, they do not care about the player. Again, this is not me kvetching about 'mistreatment' or somesuch nonsense (for I made my peace with this game's state after Shadowkeep and the free trial debacle), it is simply Bungie's stated policy.

What really makes Bungie stick out compared to even Epic or the thousands of gacha games aimed at lonely people in their 20s who want idol culture but hate human beings is that Bungie have a very open and recorded distaste for Destiny as a piece of art. While even Epic are willing to bring back an entire season/map for nostalgia bait, Bungie burn their content bridges with glee and only really drag things out for brief 1 minute setpieces to appease the 5-6 people who're still earnestly engaged with the story in much the same way I reference Fesh Pince of Blair to see if anyone in VC is still awake. At times, discussing the history of D2 and the amount of burnt bridges is not unlike talking about a Discord server staffed entirely by people whose conflict resolution skills stopped developing once they learned their times tables.

I have unfortunately been on this ride since the start, because much like anyone who has spent 20+ years playing videogames I went through a cringe phase and mine was Bungie worship. Admittedly, I lucked out by not being a Team Fortress 2 defender or one of those guys who thinks Metal Gear Solid V's rocky development is an artful critique on player expectation. What I can tell you, having played this series since D1, is that it honestly does just kind of suck?

I'm going to dispense with the jokes for a minute and also switch back to my usual manner of speaking: The whole thing is just kind of immature. It's Bungie having a moment of imposter syndrome after two Seroquel and a cluster migraine. The core of their games for the last two decades is there and it's great, but it's wrapped in a thick layer of insincerity and insecurity. High profile VAs, dramatic mid-mission speeches, an addiction to melodrama so crippling that it makes Kojima seem chaste, and 'lore' that's somehow less captivating than a lot of randomly generated Dwarf Fortress stuff.

It is wank. Were Destiny posited as a parody of high sci-fi I would be much kinder to it, but it is not so I have to endure cutscenes where almost every single major factor in the plot is "The [Thing]". The Traveler, The Witness, The Darkness, The Fallen, The Veil, The Gardener, The Winnower, The The The The The The. Dispensing with the pretense and calling The Witness "The Bad Guy" would be more dignified at this point. There's also an alarming addiction to vagueness. This is not Hideo Kojima "I leave it vague because speculation amuses me" vagueness or Hidetaka Miyazaki "I leave it vague to recreate the feeling I had reading English picturebooks as a kid" vagueness, it's... Hmm.

I'll go ahead and call it crutch-vagueness. Dart vagueness. Throwing shit at the wall vagueness. Whatever metaphor for inaccuracy and creative insecurity you want vagueness. It is Bungie couching their 'lore' in a thick layer of vague metaphor so that they can pull back the curtain and pretend the pig in lipstick was always planned. I know this because I and most other creatives I know who've made a failed attempt to write an epic as one of their first literary outings did the same thing. It worked for Halo because Halo ended, but much like queer infighting Destiny is doomed to continue forever.

You've heard of technical debt, now get ready for narrative debt! [Disclaimer: Any FFXIV fans from 15-20 years in the future who're making a "The Downfall of FFXIV" video are free to use this one.]

And no, text entries of poorly named characters speaking entirely in abstracts or concepts isn't 'lore'. It's not even fluff. It's the shit I did when I was 12, when I thought having every character's name be a bible/torah reference was clever and every work I wrote was named after a song I liked. You can replace most words in Unveiling with anything and it'll still make just as much sense and have just as much narrative weight.

This penchant for gormless melodrama is carried over into the actual text, mind you. A great number of the cutscenes and dialogues in this game are two models doing canned emotes at one another while the voice actors audibly sound like they regret not listening to dad and becoming a lawyer. It's honestly impressive that they got a man like Lance Reddick [RIP] into the studio to record lines with all the gravity of someone ordering McDonalds at 4am on a work day. It's doubly impressive that Bungie backslid from the Halo series in terms of cutscene direction and are now producing dialogue exchanges with all the tenseness and artistic flair as Fable 2. If I ever decay that hard please just take me to a rabbit cafe, slip some cyanide in my poison, and tell me to go for a nap.

If you're wondering what prompted this diatribe, someone asked me to hop on the latest season "because the writing is really good". So I looked up the cutscenes and realized that I should stop taking game recommendations from people with shonen anime avatars.

There are things about Destiny to praise, of course, but with the above in mind the question becomes "why bother"? I could sit here and regale you with stories of how beautiful The Reef (ugh.) was, how great the Black Armory weapons were, how much fun I had doing the Leviathan raids, how Forsaken's story content is a cut above the rest, but none of that content currently exists. Parts will inevitably be brought out of the content vault when player numbers dip and Bungie crave a surge, but is there any point in reviewing something that 'might' happen? You may as well review your lottery ticket, your future child, or your inevitable death.

I don't really have a succinct finisher for this ramble, but that's okay because Destiny 2 will end just as poorly.