What If ‘Destiny 2’ Cut Out 70% Of Its Grind And Timegating?

At a certain point, developers are going to start to realize that live service exhaustion has set in for a while now. Too many live games, too many battle passes, too many opportunities to “fall behind” in an ongoing game and never catch up. For some that may have been years ago, for others, that may be now.

The other day I remarked about how I appreciated Diablo 4’s current, short season, where you could experience its major components very quickly, including its entire storyline, and then continue to level and gear your character as much as you wanted, but knowing you could still do so after the season ended as well.

In at least in the post-Final Shape era, as the next two seasons are probably already set, I would love to see this logic applied to Destiny 2 to some degree. The idea that to survive in the live service world, or against a flood of increasingly high-quality, attention-grabbing games that may run 100 hours themselves, you may need to let go of an “engagement at all costs” model and allow your game to be played alongside other games in an easier fashion. Less grind, less timegating. And hell, that may even apply to Bungie’s own slate of upcoming games. If Destiny takes up less time, that’s more time for fans to play Marathon.

I would say Destiny is already making some moves in this direction. They’ve reduced materials grinding, simplifying currencies. They’ve reduced the RNG grind, by introducing crafting. They’ve started to reduce the crafting grind with Deepsight Activation. They’ve reduced the seasonal grind with less obnoxious vendor upgrades. There was no power increase this season, erasing that grind.

There’s room to go further. Too much of Destiny is structured to feel like it’s forcing players into showing up each and every week, with rewards that feel too stingy, with activities that feel too repetitive. Ironically, the most potentially engaging, dynamic activities in the game, ever-changing matches of Crucible and Gambit, are paid the least amount of attention.

I’m not sure the broken-up seasonal storytelling model is working anymore. The pattern of showing up every week for eight weeks to run a seasonal activity and maybe a single mission to get five minutes of dialogue or a ninety second cutscene is getting old. I think grouping entire stories together without regard for timegating would allow for a better form of storytelling overall, like no longer needing to film shows with commercial breaks every seven minutes in the streaming era. Yes, you’d have to balance this with the old “there’s nothing to do” criticism, delivering too much too fast, but I don’t think that’s been Destiny’s issue for a long while now, and in fact, the opposite is probably true.

The loot grind feels flatlined. It’s a wild swing between zero reason to farm armor and way, way too much guns to farm with too much variance, even with crafting. And even then, most of it is all timegated in different ways. You must wait for rotations of the proper raids and dungeons and Nightfalls to farm. You must wait to grind ritual playlists for rotations of bonus rep. You must wait to grind Iron Banner or Trials. You even have to wait for weekly “exotic fish rotation” this season. It’s this constant schedule where a thing you may want to do in a given moment is either unoptimal or unavailable to do.

Simply put, I think Bungie needs to start to be okay with less time invested in a Destiny 2 season, and focus on making an experience that is first and foremost satisfying and rewarding for players. You buy a season, you can complete that season without constantly paying attention to rotating timers or weekly reset story developments. You can just…play it, and do whatever you want in terms of what it has to offer. And who cares if you can complete a battle pass in 15 hours or 50? It’s purchased either way, and it might be purchased more if it was easier to get through.

If you want to go above and beyond that, offer ways to keep making progress and fine-tune the grind, that’s great, but I’d argue that’s not something the game has either, with overstuffed vaults making almost all new gear irrelevant and nothing like a paragon system to keep making character progress. The ultimate, longest-term grind is 5/5 rolls on uncrafted guns (that probably don’t even need 5/5 rolls), and little else.

Destiny 2 would benefit by slimming down its grind further and releasing many of its timegates. I suppose they have stuck with this model for a while because it suits them. But in an increasingly competitive landscape, I’m not sure you can demand this much time and investment from players, particularly if $10 is $10 for a season whether you play ten hours in week one or two hundred hours in three months. And given the ongoing absurdity of Eververse, no, I don’t buy the idea that this model is squeezing out microtransactions in a worthwhile fashion through “more engagement” either. Make good cosmetics, price them appropriately, people will buy them.

Probably nothing will change, but looking at other games that are steering away from this model, I kind of hope it does.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.