What Destiny 2 Meant To Me

Destiny 2 is over. Or at least it’s about to be when the last update happens on June 9th. After almost 9 years of the game and 3 years of the original game the series is now over, at least for now. This means a lot for those in the community, people are losing the game they hoped to play “forever”. They’re going through the stages of grief, trying to organize ways to show Sony and Bungie that D2 is worth keeping around, that the franchise is worth investing in, but that won’t change anything, the game is done. That’s it. No changing it.

I’ve written about D2 a few times in my closing in on 2 years writing on Substack, both directly in my Why I Quit Playing Destiny 2 article that I put out just a couple months into doing this and more recently in my Abandon Casuals and Kill Your Game article. Both are articles that I stand by fully and I think are unusually prescient for the time in the community. However what I have never written about is what Destiny 2 actually means to me. Or, rather, what it meant to me. So today I want to do that. I want to talk about the memories I gained in the game, the drive I felt to continue it, that it was the only thing keeping me going for a couple years there, and that all things must come to an end, even an unexpected one. Let’s dive into the most personal article I’ve written in a while.

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There’s one thing the Destiny community all shares, we have memories of these games that we love and cherish. For me, those mostly were in the first game. Back when Destiny came out I had gained a new group of friends through my job working at a local library as the shelver and bed bug checker (unfortunately I found many but that’s a tale for a different situation). One of them bought Destiny and wanted to play it together. So I grabbed it and we started playing in February of 2015. Then, I got introduced to her brother in law and his friends and I all of a sudden had a group of people to play the game with that I had never met in real life but that I was still able to relate to and form memories with.

This was in the first year of the game, it wasn’t the best time in the history of it. The mode Trials of Osiris came out and we all sucked at PvP but it was the only consistent way to get to max level so we tried and tried to play the mode and always failed. It was brutal and anger inducing. But we still made memories. There was this one time when the three of us were able to do something we were absolutely terrible at and snipe the opposing team over and over again completely stomping them until the last round when we got wiped. But then one of us did a “self res” where you were able to come back from death, revived all of us, and we beat the team. We all partied, we triggered our supers and were ecstatic to have won one of the matches. We all felt the high of doing something that we never expected to be able to do. Of course we lost the next one but hey, it was something.

This is what made Destiny for me, moments of excitement and partying with friends. For instance, when the second expansion came out for the game there was the Raid (a 6 person activity that is built around mechanics and difficulty) Wrath of the Machine and there’s this encounter where you have to pick up certain parts for a machine and put them in the correct spot in a very tight amount of time while dealing with enemies, mines that slow you down, and a debuff that meant that once you reached the max stacks you couldn’t grab the part for a period of time so you had to keep changing who was carrying it. It was this really difficult moment in the Raid that we all had issues with and we kept failing and failing. Often just barely too, it lead to so much anger for us, to rage quitting, to just being done and going to play something else for the rest of the night. The experience went from being something we were enjoying to being a wall we were beating our head against. More so, it took us weeks and weeks to actually beat that encounter, but once we did it wasn’t just a moment of relief, but a moment of ecstatic joy. We felt good for the first time, we even jumped off the edge of the bridge the encounter was on with as much excitement as we had had in years dying in the process because of the joy, we felt like we could conquer the entire Raid after managing to defeat that bitch of an encounter. So we did, we got so good at it that we managed to beat the next 2 encounters, meaning we beat the final boss. It was an awesome moment where we kept dying but I managed to keep reviving our team throughout the rest of the raid.

See, the thing about Raids was that, back then, you had unlimited revives (Destiny 2 changed this so that in each encounter every person only had 1 revive so the experience of saving the run just disappeared) so you had the ability to have an almost complete team wipe and be able to have one person, usually me in my team, go around and revive everyone allowing us to continue the encounter and beat it. These were some of the best moments for the original game. It was a wonderful experience and was when my friends who played the game really felt like a team, a group of people who were capable and good at the game. Then things changed in Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 made a bunch of changes over the course of the life of the game and every single one lead to less and less people playing the game. It was this sad moment where I stopped playing with those people and lost those connections but those memories remained.

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I eventually made more memories with new players, like when there was a glitch to get up to 12 people into a Raid, but nothing quite beat the originals magic memories. Those memories are still with me, they still make me feel all fuzzy inside about having that time with my friends at the time, being able to just chill and have saves that allowed us as players to feel powerful. That’s what Destiny 1 and 2 were, memory machines.

There’s this thing that happens in brains that makes memories with certain games: we fall in love with the gameplay and experience. We go from thinking of it as just one of many games to the one game giving us the memories that we crave. This drove me to continue playing the game even when it was just me. As I said above I ended up losing the friends I had who played the game, they stopped playing, but I sure didn’t. I still felt the drive to keep going. What mattered wasn’t the new memories I was making, but the memories I had made. At least for a time. Eventually things progressed to a different attachment, but that’s the next section.

This, for lack of a better word, addiction I felt was hard to let go of. I tried to pull new people into the game, my other group of friends who only really wanted to play GTA Online, but it never worked. They always fell off or just weren’t even interested in trying. You’d think this would make me less interested in continuing as the game was a multiplayer experience, but nah. What mattered was the attachment. The past with it. Not the possible future I had with the game.

Feeling the drive to play a game can often lead to you only playing that game. For me, that didn’t happen, but I know for many it did. People became so attached that their drive exceeded mine. I eventually dropped off the game after I realized it wasn’t for me anymore, but that didn’t lose my drive to be attached to it. I still checked in on the community, still looked at what was coming next, because that drive never left, it just changed.

As I said above, there was once a time when Destiny 2 began to mean more to me than what I’ve talked about prior to this. In 2020, just before COVID I broke up with my abusive Ex. It was a brutal experience that left me feeling lost. Then COVID lock-downs happened and I lost what could have brought me new adventures. I didn’t know what to do. I started to see a new therapist, dealing with childhood trauma and the ramifications of it, but that only went so far. One day I told my therapist that sometimes the only thing that kept me going was Destiny 2. That it was what mattered most, not because of the memories I had in the past, not because of the connect I currently felt to it, but because I just wanted to see what happened next.

I’m sure many people have dealt with bad break ups. Especially during COVID when a lot of people were breaking up after having to spend so much damn time together. We all needed something. Some found new hobbies (I did this too eventually with gardening that I still do to this day), some found new friends online, some lived because of spite to outlive those in the public sphere. But me? The thing that mattered for a long while was just Destiny 2.

It meant the world to me, it meant that there was always something coming next. They had just announced 3 new expansions so I knew there was a future there, the only future I knew was definitely going to happen. So that’s what I attached to. Eventually, I found other things that began to drive me forward but Destiny 2 was still there for me when I needed it. It was there for me when I had nothing else. When I had lost what I held dear to me and when I didn’t know if I even wanted to continue in this crazy world we call life. Without it, I’m not sure I would still be here, that I’d be writing this. That I’d have over 150 amazing people who like to read my writing, who find what I say well formed thoughts instead of ramblings like I often think they are. Destiny 2 saved me, at least for a time.

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With all that I’ve said you’d think I’d be more upset with the soon to be last content update for the game. Sure I haven’t played it in almost 2 years, I’ve literally written about how much it bothered me that I felt abandoned by the continued direction of the game. Yet, I’m just relieved. Not just because I felt like the game wasn’t for me and now I can feel like I’m not missing out on possibly really good content or progression back towards what feels like a game that is more accepting of casual and non-hardcore oriented fans. I’m relieved because this is it. It’s over. It’s finally done.

The thing about relationships is that they all will end one way or another. Those of us in the Destiny community have had a relationship with the game. It’s had ups and downs, but it’s always been there, it’s always been changing and creating new things. There’s never been an end of the road.

But now there is. There will be one last moment of that relationship and sure we can try to cling on for dear life, sure we can try to bargain and convince ourselves that we as a community can convince a multi-billion dollar corporation to change it’s money oriented mind, but that’s not gonna happen. It’s over.

And that’s beautiful in a way. The game happened, we gained those memories, we felt joy and happiness, we felt sadness when characters died, we felt anger when changes were made that ruined the game in multiple ways. Those emotions were real, those times were real. They didn’t mean nothing, they weren’t a waste, they happened and that’s more than most games get. Destiny 2 was always going to end, it was headed towards this since The Final Shape (where I finally stopped playing the game). The ones who refuse to accept that, who decided to trash on Marathon as a way of making themselves feel better, who talk about trying to bury that game as a way of showing that Destiny as a franchise is the actually right direction for Bungie to head down, they are acting foolish. They are clinging to a game that was running on it’s last legs. There is always an end, there always was going to be an end.

We can argue over how we would have liked that to happen, how it would have been great if the game had ended years ago with Final Shape, or that they should have put out the next expansion as a grand finale, but that’s not reality. The reality is that it’s over. For so many reasons, there’s no future there past June 9th, and it’s time to accept it like those of us that dropped off of the game years ago. It’s time to play new games, even if they’re not quite the same. It’s time to make some new memories in new ways that you’ll cherish just as much as the ones you made in Destiny 1 and/or 2. You can do it. I believe in you.

This got personal for me, but it was always going to. Destiny meant a lot to me as a franchise, I wanted it to thrive, to change back into something I actually desired to play. But I was always aware the path they were going down had this at the end of it. This was likely always going to be how it stopped. The sad part isn’t the game ending, it’s the failure of management to keep the game going, it’s the failure of management to communicate to the team that they shouldn’t be working on the next expansion because it would never come out, it’s the failure of management to divert so many resources away from the game that had such a dedicated player base back when Forsaken came out in 2018 and decided to make 2-3 more games. It’s the failure of management to think that it would be possible to be this kind of studio. And finally, it’s the failure of management that this will lead to layoffs while many higher ups will likely skate by without any repercussions for the absolute train-wreck that their decision making lead to.

All that said, I still am glad with the time I had with Destiny 1 and 2. But what about you? I assume if you’re reading this then you played Destiny 1 or 2 at some point. Did you make memories? What were your favorite ones? Was there anything that made you realize that the game had lost you? And are you sad about the end of the game? And even more, do you expect there to be any more games in the franchise eventually? Let me know in the comments, we can commiserate and reminisce together always remembering that there was a time when things were brighter for the franchise.

Meow,

Cat