I’m Ready For Blasphemous Post-Final Shape Sunsetting In ‘Destiny 2’

At this point, we definitely know that Destiny 2 is not leading straight into Destiny 3 with the conclusion of the Light and Darkness saga, The Final Shape. Bungie has already outlined a switch to “episodes” in the following year, disconnected 18 week seasons that will span the whole year instead of the 3 month ones we get now.

It’s meant to A) make sure those episodes are beefier than current seasons and B) make sure players can jump into them without missing some extremely important story component from the season before.

But what apparently isn’t happening is any sort of gear wipe, the type you no doubt would see with a Destiny 3, like we saw between Destiny 1 and 2. Unfortunately in that case, it came with an instantly worse weapon system, no random rolls and double primaries. But the longer time goes on, the more I wonder how the current mountain of gear can sustain itself.

I am starting to believe that once again, it is time for some sort of mass sunsetting to keep the gear chase alive and even remotely fresh. I know, I know, this is blasphemy, given that the original sunsetting was so poorly received it had to be killed not long after it was introduced. However, I do think a few things have changed since then:

• Seasons don’t delete themselves immediately. This was a big problem with sunsetting, as it was happening in a rolling fashion. A new season would delete 30 weapons while a new season would add 30 weapons. It was incredibly stressful to have this rolling system in place, trying to constantly keep track of what was phasing out and what wasn’t. Now, seasons do not delete themselves right after, allowing for a longer tail on acquired loot. And I don’t think you would need to do it a rolling fashion, just one big sweep, and then keep everything after that point from there.
• We have seen the very real effects of power creep. The whole point of sunsetting in the first place was to try to stave of power creep by making better and better weapons that came before. But now that’s…exactly what happened. Subclass integrated legendaries, for instance, have become almost essential at this point for those slots. New heavy DPS options have to outclass old heavy DPS options to stay relevant. On the PvP side, sunsetting didn’t really even do all that much, as that mode is mostly about meta balancing no matter what guns are in the pool.
• Vault space is an eternal issue. There are between 30-40 new weapons added to a season most of the time now, given that we have seasonal weapons, new Trials and Iron Banner weapons, new ritual weapons and either new dungeon or raid weapons, plus exotic weapons and armor. We’ll just assume we’re sharding all new armor for transmog. The current vault situation is unsustainable and we essentially have to manually sunset things anyway, sharding old gear to make room for new gear, although we are saving some space by crafting. But that leads me to…

• Crafting. Can I put out an unpopular opinion within an unpopular opinion? I think sunsetting would be a place to either eliminate or dramatically reduce crafting in the game, as I firmly believe it has hurt the loot chase. While I recognize that endless lottery farming for god rolls isn’t good, there are many other ways that kind of RNG could be reduced without the ability to craft god rolls of 70% of the weapons in the game at any given time. A sunsetting reset could be the time to heavily adjust that.

Yes, I know sunsetting was extremely unpopular at the time, but it was implemented badly and I do think many aspects of the game have changed since them. If something like this does not happen, and we are not on track to get a Destiny 3 slate wipe until the next console generation, at least 3-4 more years, I’m not sure the game can sustain that.

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