Are We Witnessing Destiny 2’s Collapse Under Its Own Weight?
As much-anticipated midseason updates were due to go live today in Destiny 2, Bungie unexpectedly extended maintenance on the game for several hours past its original reset time of 10 AM Pacific. A tweet from Bungie Help informed players of extended downtime extending throughout the day; leading us to speculate as to whether Destiny 2 may indeed be near its end?
Destiny 2’s technical framework has long been an issue, although no matter who knows about its full state. But while no one but Bungie knows for certain where its code stands, Destiny 2 certainly appears to be suffering from technical debt compared to when first released back in 2017 on Xbox, Steam, and Epic Games Store; at which time Bungie operated independently after splitting from Activision after Forsaken released.
Destiny 2 players often try to dismiss its issues as the product of “small indie developer.” With Sony acquiring Bungie last year, there was hope that its output and quality assurance might return to that seen during its Activision days; unfortunately that has not proven true; Lightfall saw high player counts but disappointed critics as well as players alike, while downtime continues to plague Destiny 2.
Here we are eight weeks into a season and Destiny 2 has once more fallen on hard times, prompting many fans to question where all that Sony money has gone; one possibility might be new projects; it certainly does not appear to have had any bearing on Destiny 2, where server issues and technical difficulties with optimization and frame rates have only made matters worse since Lightfall released.
Are we witnessing Destiny 2 disintegrating under its own weight? At times we have wondered that very thing, only to be proven wrong each time – however it appears things may only be getting worse, with frequent downtime, bug reports, and issues impacting player experiences being witnessed on a more regular basis than previously experienced.
Bungie has posted strangely personal tweets regarding content creators who broke NDAs or leaked information from summits, yet remain mostly silent regarding Destiny 2’s frequent downtimes. Things seem worse for Destiny than they ever have been for some time; hopefully their developer provides us with some answers as soon as possible about why this might be occurring.
