Destiny 2’s Technical Issues And ‘Priority’ Fixes Have Become Exhausting

There’s an old adage that all games are effectively held together by duct tape, and it’s a miracle anything works at all. But some games feel more rickety than others, and Destiny 2, now in year 6 of content production, has felt much more unstable as of late. A problem compounded by what is being fixed when other problems remain.

The latest controversy is that while a new patch did some fun things like buff a lot of weapons, it broke the game in a number of big and small ways. But as it turns out, at least some of the things that were potentially viewed as bugs were in fact stealth nerfs that didn’t get mentioned in the initial patch notes, nor were really any of them discussed ahead of time.

Twelve different patch notes were added to the list after the fact, including nerfs to orb generation from certain mods and nerfs to a certain kind of grapple playstyle. Things like farming multiple Terminal Overload chests at a time were also patched. But there’s still plenty the patch broke, and loads of long-term remaining issues.

The problem with game development is that you can’t really say “why did you fix this and not this?” given the different complexity and difficulty of issues within the game. It may sound easy to fix a flashing indicator and hard to nerf a chest farm, but it may in fact be the opposite. But the problem is at the very least the appearance of poor priorities, nerfing things that seem fun that were generally not harming anyone, especially with larger, more broken things still intact.

Then there’s the general stability of the game, which has been poor as of late, and pretty unstable over the course of the past year. Almost every day last week there were server issues during peak times at night. We recently had a season where the entire API had to be turned off multiple times in order to fix a number of cascading error codes.

All of this adds up in the psyche of the playerbase:

1) Too many anti-player bugs are not fixed in a timely manner

2) Attempts at fixes often break more things than when they started

3) Priority fixes seem to often target things that benefit the player

4) The mere act of playing the game has often become unstable with server issues and error codes.

It’s a lot, and often, all of it is hitting at once, which is essentially what we’re seeing right now. It’s a perfect storm of all of these, and I’ve seen a number of high profile creators say in the wake of this that they may be putting Destiny on the shelf for a while until it stabilizes or gets its priorities in order. Or the more pointed “thank god Diablo 4 is coming soon.”

I am not about to quit Destiny over any of these points, but I will admit to a certain level of exhaustion with all of it. Maybe a game like this was not meant to run this long, as it’s already sacrificed half its content to the vault to supposedly make everything more manageable, and yet things just continue to get noticeably worse. And I hope this trajectory does not continue, or the game really could start to be in serious trouble.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.

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