On the Trolley Problem of Playing Destiny 2

This post is a repost from No Escape. 

The final season of Destiny 2, “Season of the Wish,” released today. As is usually the case with seasonal updates, Season of the Wish comes with new gameplay modes, new gear and weapons, a new seasonal artifact to level up, new challenges to cross off your list, and new narrative content to sink your teeth into while we all wait to open the Witness’s gate and face him and his Final Shape in the Pale Heart of the Traveler… next June.

Season 23 was always going to face the issue of being the “last” of its kind: next year, when Final Shape lands, Bungie is moving to what it’s calling an “episodic” format with its inter-expansion content, and with that comes new possibilities for gameplay and narrative delivery. But will we be able to make it there? And what are the costs for those that try?

Last month Bungie fired roughly a hundred people seemingly at random, including legendary composer Michael Salvatori and veteran Bungie artist Lorraine McLees, as a result of the company’s revenue falling short of expectations by a reported 45 percent. In addition to this decimation (a literal reduction in workforce of 10 percent), it was rumored that Bungie would have to push The Final Shape back and Marathon would be delayed until 2025. This rumor was finally confirmed after weeks of silence by the Destiny 2 development team on Monday ahead of Season of the Wish’s launch. The Final Shape now launches on June 4, 2024, extending the gap between Season of the Wish and the expansion by four months.

Game director Joe Blackburn also made a video summarizing the situation, taking the time to detail interim content that would possibly get players through at least the last two months of waiting.

There is no doubt that the remaining staff at Bungie are working as hard as they possibly can to make a good day-to-day video game while also crafting a satisfying conclusion to a nearly decade-old story arc. The pressure they’re under to deliver something that is both an explosive end and an enticing beginning to whatever comes after Final Shape while also living in fear of possibly losing their jobs the next time the executives and attendant bean counters don’t like how much money their work made must be more than immense. If Bungie employees weren’t already thinking about unionizing they should be working on that as soon as humanly possible.

But also… I’m thinking about my own personal relationship to this video game. I’m thinking of the brief-yet-very-high highs and very long, extremely low lows. I’m thinking about how I made, and then lost, friends who wanted to play this game with me over the course of the last half-decade. I’m thinking about the burnout I’ve experienced, the way that burnout twisted my perception of the game into something it wasn’t. I’m thinking about how other games that have lasted at least as long actively tell their players not to worry about logging in every week if they don’t want to, in order to preserve their enjoyment of the game. I’m thinking about what I personally want from a game like Destiny 2, and how that has always been in tension with what the game promises.

First and foremost, I fell in love with the story Destiny has been telling for a decade. The way it has evolved and complicated itself as time has passed. The ways in which it has attempted to integrate its context-rich lore into the action-centered ongoing narrative. When Bungie first announced it was switching gears toward a world that evolved every week and from season to season, I was more than a little excited; I really did want to see how the story would benefit from that kind of slow-roll of new events.

When I say I fell in love with Destiny‘s story, though, I mean it—and only it. I don’t do competitive multiplayer. I rarely join casual Crucible matches in order to complete some weekly task or other. I don’t hunt for the best gear or weapons. I don’t raid or dungeon-crawl, barely do the strike playlist anymore, and I am among the apparent vast majority who just does not touch Gambit at all. When the unrepeatable story missions are done, when I’ve fulfilled my quota for the week’s activities in order to get the little chunklets of narrative that Bungie lets sift out week-over-week, that’s it. I turn the game off. I spend the next six days doing other things. Even before the layoffs, I had no idea how the developers of this video game could ever make me do more than what I’ve committed to here.

Unfortunately, it now feels as though the stakes of my decision to play or not play the game are higher, while my actual desire to do so has decreased.

Looking out over the next seven months, according to Blackburn and the dev team, we have the opportunity(!) to play through the entire narrative arc for Season of the Wish, immediately followed by a new gameplay mode called “Wishes,” from November 28 to late February. Wishes are described as “progression-based quests.” Without speculating too hard, I can only imagine these quests will reward players with special gear. Moments of Triumph is once again returning for people who want to grind out a whole new triumph seal, and Guardian Games has been moved to March. Blackburn teased some kind of interim content drop happening in April called Destiny 2: Into the Light, which he promised would help players at every rank and experience level get ready for The Final Shape, and this would last until June 4. He also promised that as we get closer to the next expansion, they’ll show us some gameplay tidbits. Nothing here’s especially objectionable, but I gotta be honest with you, I’m not seeing any appointment playtime here. Like I’ll do each week’s story content, for sure, and I’ll check out Into the Light, but nothing else is really calling to me, you know?

I have always believed that games should not take up all of our time. No one single game should ever be able to monopolize all of your waking hours. I know I’m not the only one to grow tired of Destiny 2 at this moment in time. And I know now that there are financial consequences for burning out — ones I should by no means be responsible for, but which still have me hanging out to dry nevertheless. If I don’t play Destiny 2, if I don’t preorder the expansion, if I don’t buy the Witcher gearset from Eververse, who’s next on the chopping block? How many people will lose their jobs in the next layoff? Bungie and Sony – and the rest of the people with money at the top of the games industry – have made it clear that they believe the talented, dedicated people who make every video game we love are expendable. And they believe it is our fault if they don’t make as many millions of dollars a year as they guessed they would—as they expected, demanded, were entitled to. And so, via the transitive property, if another 50, 100, 200 people get the axe next time around, it is our fault. We were bad consumers, so the innocent devs had to go.

I have to reject this framing. We all have to. There’s no version of capitalism I particularly like, but even if we’re stuck thinking in capitalist modes like a bunch of neoliberal eggheads insist we are, this absolutely cannot be the version of capitalism we land on. It is going to ruin both producer and consumer, and not “eventually”—in short order.