In the days since the announcement of its impending end of live service updates, I’ve been returning to Destiny 2. And I’m not the only one: In the last week, Destiny 2 has drawn its highest daily peak player counts since early February as disaffected Guardians revisit their old stomping grounds in the wake of the unhappy news.
As a lapsed Destiny sicko myself, it’s been an affecting return—a bit like spending obligated time with an estranged friend who’s received a terminal diagnosis. But despite the sickly pang it’s put in my gut, it hasn’t been all bad: Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it turns out the shooting in this Destiny 2 game is really, really good. Even now, near the end of its long decline, Destiny packs a peerless amount of joy into its gunplay.
This isn’t a revelation. Many of Destiny’s harshest critics will still grudgingly allow that its guns and magic space grenades have always been extremely satisfying—and its enemies have made for equally satisfying targets. The sights, sounds, and sensations of Destiny combat have been an obsessive fixation for the studio’s artisans, carrying for over a decade the legacy of shooter craftsmanship that was honed by Halo and Marathon.
A favorite anecdote of PC Gamer bossman and Destiny devotee Tim Clark is a bit of design philosophy once shared with him by former Destiny 2 game director Luke Smith, who said the reason Destiny’s headshots feel so good is because the studio treated them like jump shots in basketball: Each spray of Fallen ether, crack of Hive chitin, and detonated Vex milkbox had to feel as good the thousandth time as it did the first.
I passed my thousandth a long time ago, and I can confirm it still feels good.
There’s a smooth sense of quality while wielding Destiny’s weapons that, if I didn’t know better, would almost seem effortless. Lighter SMGs and sidearms draw, aim, and fire with a nimble efficiency, while the more sluggish handling of heavier hand cannons and slow-firing automatics rewards your patience with enticing audiovisual impact befitting their high-caliber kick.
That’s already plenty to admire, but paired with the wider sandbox of randomly-rolled weapon perks and class abilities, Destiny’s guns serve the tone and flavor of its fantasy. For a warlock, a shotgun becomes an implement of cosmic ritual; to a spacefaring knight-errant, a god roll assault rifle from the foundries of humanity’s Last City can stand in for Excalibur. That, as I’ve recently written elsewhere, is gameplay, too.
Again, these aren’t new discoveries—but this week, it’s been a welcome (if tragic) reminder that firing up Destiny 2 for a casual gunfight still hits. Jumping into solo missions, my arc titan is like a stormcloud sweeping over the battlefield: a towering presence, unremitting in its steady advance and crackling with destructive potential that’s unleashed in thundering shotgun blasts, echoing machinegun fire, and the blistering clap of a lightning-charged fist.
My strand warlock, meanwhile, is a roiling mass of paracausal chaos. When I step into a room with enemies, all it takes is a few bursts of submachine gun fire before I’ve started a compounding, accelerating cascade of stuff. It’s like my bullets are fraying reality where they make contact, causing enemies to detonate in showers of ripping darts or discharge roaming, hungry gobs of volatile energy.
A Destiny 2 gunfight is fluid; it’s expressive; it’s fun to hear and see and click. It’s a sheer delight that some part of me will always be yearning for—which is why it feels so frustrating that neither myopic Bungie executives nor Sony strategists could conceive of a way to keep Destiny’s timeline ticking forward, despite how many players remain desperate to continue enjoying it.
That fundamental incapability clubs you over the head as soon as you stop shooting. Navigating Destiny 2’s menus is like entering a labyrinth of twisted wreckage left by almost a decade of conflicting monetization, progression, and UI/UX pressures, which culminated at last in the oft-reviled Portal.
In some ways, Destiny’s looming retirement is the best thing that can happen to its gunplay. I’ll finally be free to enjoy how playing Destiny feels without worrying about whether my guns will be left obsolete by the next major update—for as long as its life support lasts, at least.
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