Just when you couldn’t think Destiny 2 and Bungie could take anymore PR issues but it seems that they found a new low. The Dawning event, which is Bungie’s time to give back to it’s player base has hit a new low. Just like a fake charity or someone stealing packages off your porch, The Dawning event has become somewhat of a very shady move. Within the event, normally player’s would play the game, grind a little and get a lot of cool stuff. However Bungie has locked everything behind the Eververse, their lovely micro-transaction store.
Once a day, players are able to run around the world gathering certain components to forge a gift to give a certain NPC in the tower and rinse and repeat. Although you are unable to complete more than one a day, it still doesn’t guarantee that you will be able to unlock everything because, in Bungie fashion, everything is locked behind loot boxes. Not just any loot boxes, loot boxes you can only earn via the quests above or by spending real money on Silver (their currency). It seems that players have calculated how much you would have to spend if were to spend money and…. it would cost you nearly $600 for everything. Yes, it would cost you a [redacted] lot of money to be able to get everything and even if you did decide to spend that much, you might run into the real possibility that you wouldn’t have enough space to house everything.
So with all that, where did this go sideways? Why can’t Bungie just do anything for the fans? Well, let’s start with the first one. It seems that Bungie has taken a page out of EA’s book and they are beginning to focus on making fans pay to get stuff instead of crafting a game that continues to build on what still could be a great franchise and making player’s want to hunt for everything. The other leads to a bit of the same as the first answer, it seems that being part of the Activision family has caused Bungie to forget what it meant to craft an amazing game such as Halo and has made the leap into just bleeding player’s dry.
What does it mean from here? Well… there isn’t really much Bungie could do to turn this around at this point. From some numbers, it seems that Destiny 2 has lost around 78% of it’s player base since launch and it doesn’t seem to be looking to get better in the coming months. In fact a player took his frustration right to the official Destiny forum and Bungie responded:
Thank you for your feedback. This is being collected and forwarded to the appropriate teams as necessary. Once we return in 2018, we’ll speak to the feedback collected over the holiday season and give some details on future plans. Sta tuned, and keep the feedback coming!
This has sparked a new wave of frustrations in an already fragile player base. In fact, the hashtag of #RemoveEververse has arisen to try and finally get them to see the light (no game reference implied). However, as we have said in our podcast many of times for all different games, the only way these guys will ever learn to change, is to stop buying their games and hit them in the pocketbook. But as I’ve heard from multiple sources, Destiny 2 has become somewhat of a toxic, abusive relationship that players must finally walk away from this game and never come back. Stay tuned for more information.
