Goodbye, Destiny

It is no secret that Destiny is important to me. I have written 2 blog posts about it. I wrote a PhD dissertation about it. I wrote a book chapter about it. I played it for 9 years. It has adorned the backgrounds of every single slide presentation I have done since 2020. It has been a constant part of ~1/3rd of my life. I have made friends and memories that I still carry with me, communities I still play with. It is no understatement that it has shaped my career and social life and daily life. I literally would be careful scheduling things on a Tuesday because Destiny Reset always happens on Tuesday at 9AM PST*. I have over 1700 hours in this world, and many more watching videos, talking about it, writing about it, thinking about it.

It is a difficult thing to describe. It looks like many other AAA video games. As I have often said (jokingly and not), it is a game about shooting aliens. It is a game about getting colorful guns so you can kill more aliens and get (slightly) better guns. In some ways it was the things I dislike about games. Yet it was also a game about mythological gods discussing the fate of the universe, about trauma therapy, about making friends with your enemies, about second chances, about life and hope and change, and making your own, well, destiny. It was a rare game that lived up to its galactic promise of letting players “become legend”.

But more so than any of that, it was a place. I am not the first to say Destiny was a third place. I am not the first to talk about video games as third places. But Destiny was it, for me, for 8 years. I will share a bit from my dissertation, discussing interviews with players, which shows it well:

It is a place accepted and beloved, not just because of its strengths but because of its flaws, because of its idiosyncrasies and specificities that have remained over the years (let me tell you about the weird jump you can do to get to Hawthorne from Ikora, it is not the most obvious way to navigate, yet it is faster and more fun). Many of the participants echoed this feeling of "coming home" to Destiny, accepting its idiosyncrasies and behaviors as a part of what it was, and enjoying that familiar space. This is the ordinary play of Destiny, what you experience when you log in to the game every week for ten years.

It was a place full of flaws and cracks and ideas and idiosyncrasies, but we knew them all. It was a shared social space I could go to when I wanted a reprieve, when I wanted to explore and dream. It was a place I knew so well, that was always there. It was a second home. It was all the people and the memories. It was all the strangers I saw in the Tower. All the Guardians I ever matchmade with, all the dungeons I completed with friends or by myself, and of course, of course, all the raids. The Day 1 experiences will forever be with me, each and every one, but also all the reclears, all the random Tuesdays and Saturday raids, the silly times and the serious times. And it was everything else. Clown car raids. Prometheus Lens. The Craftening. Gjallarhorn. The Loot Cave. The Last Wish. The Pyramid in the Moon. Deep Stone Lullaby. Lance Reddick. Telesto. Vault Cleaning. Whisper. Pantheon. Warmind Cells. Dul Incaru 999. The Crash of the Almighty. Stonks. Dancing in the Tower. Escalation Protocol. Niobe Labs. Standing in just the right spot when you kill Gahlran to let the Crown fall on you just so. Moon’s Haunted. The Books of Sorrow. Corridors of Time. Marasenna. Recovery is a spiral. Izzy-swaps. The sound Calus’ cup made when you shot it. The first time we saw Prismatic, and the rules of the game broke in front of our eyes. Shaxx. Hunter cape physics. The Last Wish. Complaining about missing your mantle. Strand grapples. Cayde’s final messages. Motes. Fucking everything.

It was, above all, Every day. Life. It was always there and forever present.

And to be fair, it still will be there. The servers aren’t shutting down, and I will be able to log into Destiny for the foreseeable future. Yet there will be no more new updates. No more new stories. No more new activities, weapons, planets, characters, lore books, cutscenes.

No more new raids. That makes me deeply sad. I will never more be surprised by Destiny again. Will never go through that cycle of preparation, hype, exploration, repetition, elation, routine ever again. I will never read another lore book. 

There is nothing else like Destiny. Nothing else.

In my dissertation I asked whether perennial games (like Destiny) should end. I ended inconclusively, because they exist in a paradox between the impulse of narrative to conclude and the need of a community for a shared space. It cannot do both. Destiny staying open in a permanent state at least guarantees the community to have the space until they find a new one.
But man. The narrative was spinning up into a whole new saga, and while it was not yet hitting as hard as previous moments, it had potential. It was going somewhere. If it were to end, narratively Destiny 2 should have winded down after The Final Shape, no question about that. But it didn’t and here we are, stuck in a promise unfulfilled. And I understand all the reasons that happened. But to have the last update in Destiny be a Star Wars homage and then just nothing… Feels awful. Destiny deserved better. The developers deserved to get a shot to tell their story. It deserved to end when it wanted to.

“The end comes unexpectedly and is always unwelcome” I wrote in my dissertation. I wrote how perennial games function on hope. They function on the belief that “the game will continue to exist”. This is a myth, and it is a fallible one because things like this can always happen. Before I knew I would be describing Destiny, I wrote:

When this myth breaks, it is thus disappointing because it is a reminder that this was just a myth: We realize we are building our foundational relationships upon something we are not in control of, upon something governed by a need to perpetuate new content for profit. It breaks the masquerade entirely, as the fiction we build it around becomes dysfunctional, the author we relied upon no longer trustworthy.

I read this back now, and am sad I got to experience it. It is not surprising to me that players of Destiny are frustrated, feel betrayed, or worse. Yet, I don’t feel betrayed. I just feel sad.

Destiny was a miracle. That a single game of this caliber could have such a long stretch of dedicated, high quality expansions, seasons, missions, weapons, abilities, locations, art direction, storylines, etc. for such a long time is nothing short of a miracle. Yes there were ups and downs, and there were months I barely played and then there were weeks where I played every day. 

Destiny was always teetering on an edge, threading such a fine needle it was on the brink of something like this several times. That it managed to pull through for this long, is a miracle. In many ways it ending is the expected outcome, a thing that should perhaps have happened a while ago. This kind of game just doesn’t make sense. It is too many things, for too many people, in too many ways. It was constantly breaking and tearing at its own weight, constantly too much for itself to manage. Yet that was exactly why it was wonderful. 

During my defense, a friend of mine compared perennial games to keeping flowers, a metaphor I also heavily used in my dissertation. A game like Destiny is something that exists and persists with you, and yet also subtly changes and grows with you. Moves through life with you. That is why this is sad. This is a flower that we now know will wilt. It will stagnate and die. It will fail to uphold its myth. This was a communal garden I could go to with my friends, that now will rot. Perpetually, a perennial game needs to change and stay the same. Now it will never change again. Destiny will do what I hoped it never would; it will now achieve its Final Shape.

No more will Guardians Make Their Own Fate.

*or 10AM PST in Summer Daylight Savings.