The Destiny 2 community being upset with the state of the game is seemingly a yearly occurrence, up until the reveal and release of the new yearly expansion where sentiment seems to taper off, at least for a bit. But this year, player outcry does seem a lot louder than usual.
A new “State of the Game” blog post by Bungie outlining the game’s status and highlighting some upcoming changes and features has done nothing to quell the anger. In fact, it seems to have made things a whole lot worse.
In yesterday’s lengthy blog post that many players are calling “tone deaf,” Bungie revealed some lackluster changes for Crucible after months of promising that the upcoming season 22 would revitalize the PvP mode. And in the same post, the dev basically announced the death of the PvEvP mode Gambit as a ritual activity.
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Players have been asking for new Crucible maps for several years, and the focus of the developer seems to have shifted entirely to the PvE content in the game. The blog post confirmed as much, with Bungie saying it’s an issue of resources and development time.
“To set expectations, our studio structure is built to support more overarching updates to PvP like the ones above, rather than focusing exclusively on maps,” Bungie said. “When we do focus our resources on building new Crucible maps, it comes with the tradeoff of multiple teams’ bandwidth on work that contributes to a variety of experiences that players also hold dear, such as new story or Exotic mission content, core activities that make up the foundation of each Season, or new destinations. Similarly, bringing back reprised maps also involves extensive porting to the latest version of Destiny 2, which requires additional resources to ensure the maps work correctly for multiple game modes and play styles for years to come.”
Gambit, meanwhile, has been dormant since the launch of The Witch Queen expansion in February 2022. The writing has been on the wall for a while, and it appears as though Gambit won’t be receiving substantial updates again.
“Unfortunately, these updates didn’t move the needle for player engagement,” Bungie said of the Gambit revamp that came with The Witch Queen. “Although we know our Gambit fans mostly care about new or returning maps, this is an area of the game with lower engagement that would take resources away from more popular parts of the game to shore up.”
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Bungie announced that Gambit would now be “entirely optional,” meaning it won’t even be a weekly Pinnacle reward for playing matches anymore, effectively killing the playlist in the eyes of players.
“While I don’t particularly care about Gambit myself, it seems very tone-deaf for Bungie to basically say they aren’t giving it attention because the player population in it is too low,” one player said on Twitter. “It’s low BECAUSE its being ignored.”
The growing sentiment of community-vs-developer has been brewing for most of this year after a disappointing Lightfall expansion in February. And now, it seems like the temperature is as hot as it’s ever been.
“This really might be one of the most tone-deaf State of the Games ever,” another player said. “I try to give Bungie the benefit of the doubt often but there’s just no other way to look at this. Crazy how much Bungie has burned the trust of its playerbase in half a year.”
Elsewhere in the post, Bungie said that “delivering ritual armor sets at the rates we have in the past has become increasingly challenging,” which is why there have been no new armor sets for modes like Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit. But many were quick to point out that the paid armor sets in the in-game store continue to arrive each season.
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While this has been said many times before, it truly does feel like the game’s next showcase reveal stream on Aug. 22 and The Final Shape expansion in February is make-or-break for many of the game’s most dedicated players.
