It’s crazy to think where we are at now with Destiny 2. At Towards the final quarter of 2017, it was one of the most highly anticipated titles of the year. For the most part, it was met with much success from critics and fans alike as it was a. Then as the months went by, its playerbase started to drop at around 75%. There wasn’t enough engaging content to keep players in the sequel, and it didn’t help with that dreadful first expansion, Curse of Osiris. For many players, this was the last straw. Bungie is hoping to regain some of that momentum from 2017 with a brand new expansion, Warmind.
Destiny 2 has been under quite a lot of scrutiny within the last few months. Not only was the content lacking, but Bungie stirred up a lot of controversy due to some shady business practices. First, there was the Eververse, which was deliberately predatory in its microtransaction system. This all came to fruition when players found out that XP had been doubled to earn Bright Engrams, making it an incentive to spend real money in the Eververse. Then there was the content lock for non-DLC owners. When Curse of Osiris was released, players who didn’t own the expansion were locked out of content from the original game, such as the Prestige Nightfall Strikes and Raids. Bungie later fixed this issue, but the damage had already been done.
Bungie has been working hard to repair all this damage to Destiny 2’s reputation. In a recent tweet, the word “new” is thrown around a lot to describe this next expansion. Bungie promises to bring players to “new places to meet new heroes and battle new enemies.” Now, many players, including myself, are slightly skeptical of Warmind. After all, a lot of these assurances were supposed to be part of the vanilla Destiny 2 game, but what we got instead was all too familiar, most notably, the enemy types. Essentially, these “new” enemies were just reskinned versions of the first game. The gameplay stayed relatively the same, which I didn’t mind since Destiny 2’s shooting mechanics are some of the best in the industry. Still, it would’ve been nice to introduce new gameplay mechanics that add a new layer and make it feel like Destiny 2, not Destiny 1.5.
Needless to say, Warmind is crucial to Destiny 2’s success, or it’s ultimate failure. There were many fans who still stuck around after Curse of Osiris, but if Warmind is of the same quality, then be prepared to see them leave as well.
Bungie will stream a reveal trailer on April 24th. Warmind is set to release on May 8th.
