In 2023, my old outlet published one of my favorite things I’ve ever written: How to get into Destiny 2. But I was a little busy when it was published, at the hospital, welcoming my daughter into the world. After some sleep, I shared it around on social media and I don’t think I’ll ever forget sitting between my sleeping wife and our new kid, hearing from people who were reading my advice on how to get into my favorite game. It’s heartbreaking that I won’t be able to update it for The Edge of Fate this July.
Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate is the herald of a lot of change for Destiny 2. Not only is it a very fresh new expansion with a lot of new ideas, but it’s also bringing a complete overhaul to how we all engage with the game on a daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly basis. If you want to read my thoughts on the expansion — which I was able to preview at an event at Bungie HQ last month — you can read my very, very long article on PC Gamer. But here, for the first of my weekly columns on BF.G, I want to interrogate something a little different about the expansion: Bungie’s ability to make something that appeals to new players.
Right now — and, by right now I mean, for years — Destiny hasn’t really had much of a hook. It’s a game designed to bring you in with its exceptional gameplay, keep you there for the actually very good story, and, in some ways, trap you with seasonal chores. I’m very well aware that Destiny has trapped me in the Guardian Rank 11 chase, the seasonal Conqueror chase, the “all PvE Seals” chase, etc.
But the real truth is that, ironically (given this is very much a meme in the Destiny community), the real Destiny 2 hook has been my friends. Sure the game’s gunplay is astounding, but it’s also an excuse to pal around with my best internet friends as a space-zombie-wizard-with-fists for a few hours every week. And it ensures that, every day 1 raid race that comes around, I have a crew of prepared, dedicated, and willing heroes who want to spend 24-48 hours yelling with and at me while we try and best the hardest challenge the game has to offer. It’s my favorite day of the year.
Without those friends and without the gunplay, all of us would’ve moved on a long time ago. I love Destiny, but it has had dark moments. I’ve regularly seen one member of a Fireteam quit and the departure take the entire friend group down. I’m lucky to have a group of six who still love the game. Four of us have been playing together nearly three years now. Three of us for a few years longer than that. And one of my buddies has been my Destiny partner for 8 years. In the time we’ve been playing the game together, I:
- Met my wife
- Got part-time at Polygon
- Got engaged
- Got married
- Got full-time at Polygon
- Bought a house
- Survived a global pandemic
- Had a kid
- Got laid off from my dream job
- Started my own business
A lot of other stuff happened in that window, but even writing all that out puts Destiny 2 into a certain perspective for me. We’re all old Destiny veterans. We’ve been in the trenches for years now, and it would take something pretty damn catastrophic to take us away from the game — and each other. But we’re not who the game needs. I mean, we are, but we’re pretty safe bets. As Destiny grows beyond the “Light and Dark” saga and into something new, the game needs something fresh. Not just to keep my interest after such a long time spent doing the same thing, but, far more importantly, to inject some new blood into the game.
I believe that, with The Edge of Fate and its many, many changes, Bungie is aiming to do just that. But there’s something absolutely crucial to understand here, which I don’t think Bungie has done a great job of explaining: The Edge of Fate is not making Destiny 2 less complex. If that was the goal, Bungie has not succeeded — at least based on what I’ve played.
Instead, they are making the game far more accessible. And that is much more important.
In the past, Bungie has said things like “you need a PHD in Destiny to understand how to play the game,” and as someone who spent almost a decade writing guides for Destiny … yeah, that’s basically true. But that’s mostly because the game operates so strangely. Content is always flying in and out, it’s scattered all over the galaxy so you can’t find what you actually want to do, and it’s telling one gigantic story that started in 2014. It was so bad at the time that it spawned multiple memes and caused almost all Destiny players to tune dialogue out for years. How do you invite someone you care about into that environment? The short answer is, unless you’re willing to hold their hand the entire way, you don’t — unless you secretly hate them, but that secret will be very, very out of the bag by the time they reach Guardian Rank 5 or so.
To a new player, Destiny 2 is a “what do I do” simulator. There are simultaneously so goddamn many things to do and also not enough. Diablo 4 may have a billion different systems now, but if a new player jumps into a new season of that, they have one goal: get stronger. OK, now we’re talking. As you go, you get stronger by getting better loot. Are you doing it optimally? Of course not — you have no idea what you’re doing. Pit of the Artificer? What even is that? But when you killed that demon, the loot was better. It was orange, and instead of just have a few mild stat boosts, it had some big ones. When you log off for the night, maybe you learned a new mechanic or maybe you didn’t, but you definitely increased your strength.
I have not increased my strength in Destiny 2 in a very long time.
In Destiny, strength comes from better gear. But not literally, the way it does in Diablo. Having a higher power level than an enemy in Destiny does very little. Instead, you’re fighting against power deficits to just get on even footing with your foes. You’re not climbing a mountain like in Diablo, you’re trying to stop yourself from drowning. The best you can hope for is that you stop drowning long enough that you can grind out an Adept Stasis glaive and throw it in your Vault for a while.
But, coming in The Edge of Fate, not only will my power go up just a little bit from playing any activity, I’ll also get scored on how I did most of the time. And my reward might be even better when I do well. Increasing my power won’t cause me to deal double damage or one-shot a boss, sure, but it will allow me to unlock even harder difficulties — like in Diablo — which will allow me to get even better and shinier loot. Suddenly, I not only have a reason to engage in the game’s many activities outside of the homework I’ve assigned myself, but I’m also making progress in every single gameplay session.
More important than a sense of progression, The Edge of Fate also makes finding the stuff you want to do much easier. This won’t impact me much, because … if I didn’t know where everything on the in-game map was after 8 years, I’d be pretty disappointed in myself. But for the new player, it’s brilliant. Sure, it’s less sexy to select a strike off of a big rectangular menu than navigating onto a planet and picking it there. But it’s so much easier and faster. In The Edge of Fate, a new player will be able to see how playing the game will help their character grow within 10 seconds of logging in.
Right now, new players complete the tutorial and are spit back into a world that needs them desperately, but doesn’t feel very welcoming. But on July 15, new players will enter the game, stare down the Portal, and find a lot of easy-to-understand options. Those options can get more complex, sure, but from that one screen, they can navigate through sub-menus to reach every relevant activity in the game. And when they get overwhelmed, they can simply hover over an item on that menu and it’ll tell them that completing the activity will give them a guaranteed version of a reward, and that it’ll have a higher power than whatever you have in your inventory now. That’s an easy sell.
In July, any player can run a Solo Op or a Strike and log off with a sense of accomplishment — their number went up. All of the buildcrafting, activities, raids, and the complex gameplay stuff is still in Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate — it’s not a new game. But it is easier to just do something and get something good out of it. And I cannot remember the last time that was true about Destiny.
When I wrote my “how to get into Destiny 2” guide, I wanted to help people fall in love with my favorite game. And while I’m sure I helped some folks, I can’t take the confusion out of Destiny. I could tell people what an Exotic was, how their subclasses worked, and how they could infuse their gear, but I couldn’t tell them what they should be doing every day. “Do the campaigns” will only get you so far.
If I were to write that guide in preparation of The Edge of Fate, I don’t think it would be shorter than the 6,000 words it is today — much of the advice and the system’s explainers still apply. But I do think it would help more people once they actually log into the game. Before, writing Destiny guides was like teaching someone to captain a boat and then dropping them off in the middle of Kansas. The Edge of Fate will still need lots of guides (support us on Patreon!) to help players get started, but Bungie is finally giving newbies the courtesy of at least dropping them off by the shore.