This week's Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris livestream cancelled so Bungie can address community concerns on the state of the game
Destiny 2 is not in a good place, and it's past time Bungie talked about it. The good news is: it's about to.
Tomorrow's Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris weapons and sandbox livestream has been cancelled, Bungie announced today, so the team can focus on putting together a blog post about the state of the game.
Here's what Destiny 2's comms team said about the change:
"We are investing all our efforts into delivering some higher priority information about Destiny 2," Bungie's David "Deej" Dague wrote in a community update on Bungie.net shared over the game's social channels.
"You’ll hear from studio leadership about their assessment of Destiny all up, they’ll talk about our goals for the game going forward, and you’ll also learn about how we’re reacting to your feedback with some game updates that will arrive in the next few weeks. That will appear on the Bungie Blog on Wednesday."
The livestream was the final of three announced to showcase Destiny 2's Curse of Osiris content, but seems to have been derailed by growing community concerns. These were exacerbated by the recent Destiny 2 XP debacle, which highlighted Bungie's communication lapses more prominently than the unpopular system itsef.
Bungie had said that the livestream would include an update on Destiny 2's sandbox, since a major rebalance is expected with Season 2 in December, but it looks like the developer has opted to make that the focus of its next communication with fans.
Returning D1 players have many complaints about Destiny 2's systems. Without regurgitating the entirety of the discourse over the past few months, players believe that Destiny 2 lacks the stickiness of D1, thanks to the unsatisfying nature of the token-based gear system; that gear in general lacks the unique properties and aesthetics that made collecting it fun; and that the weapon sandbox has been rendered deeply uninteresting in the name of shoring up PvP - and yet PvP itself is rather lacking.
As an example, here's a great, recent video from Slayerage, AKA The Legend Himself, that effectively summarises the weapons complaints. Despite the strong language and feeling involved, I think it demonstrates that the Destiny 2 fanbase has thought long, hard and well about the game rather than had a kneejerk reaction to change and new systems.
Opinions are divided on these topics and certainly plenty of people love Destiny 2, especially if they're more "casual" than the really vocal hardcore fanbase. But there's definitely a problem for at least one segment of the community and Bungie has been slow to address or even respond to their concerns. It's great to see that potentially changing at last.