As someone who was all-in on Destiny, I'm gutted to see where we are now

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Pour one out for our long-suffering Guardians, because Destiny 2 is officially dead. Or at least, that's how it feels; with "active development" ending in June for the nine year-old shooter, we won't be jetting off on any new adventures. And honestly, I'm gutted that it's going out like this. As someone who's been there since day one and has watched the game slowly yet steadily fall apart, it's heartbreaking to watch.

My Guardian – a dapper-looking Exo Warlock that I've used from day one – took their first steps back in 2014 with OG Destiny. I was there for the pre-release beta. I was there for the infamous 'Loot Cave.' I was there for the short-lived Dinklebot, before Nolan North took over from Peter Dinklage as our Ghost companion. With Marathon becoming the only active game developer Bungie has on the docket, and no Destiny 3 on the horizon, I have a horrible feeling I'll soon be saying goodbye to a character I've used for well over a decade.

Final Shapes

A worthy successor?

Although Bungie's focus is fully shifting over to Marathon, it's not the end of Destiny quite yet. The post which broke the news promises a host of returning content to see it out with a bang... or at the very least, a return to the greatest hits.

On the one hand, I get it. As our own Austin Wood noted when the news broke, "the vibe was that Bungie didn't know what to do with the game anymore, and perhaps it truly didn't." I agree, and think it's clear that Bungie is done with Destiny for the time being. On the other, though, part of the reason this stings so much is because of mismanagement. I don't doubt that the team has tried to do right by this series (no-one sets out to make a bad product), but the promise of Destiny feels squandered. Austin says it best by pointing out that "unpopular systemic changes, wobbling epilogue narratives, and a severe content drought brought Destiny 2 to a crawl in the past year and change."

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Looking back at how tantalizing those early days were doesn't help. I didn't just fall in love with Destiny because of its gunplay; that's obviously fabulous, but for me, it pales in comparison to the impossibly rich world Bungie created in 2014. I appreciate that Destiny's dense worldbuilding has become a subject of (sometimes justified) mockery thanks to how near-obnoxiously unintelligible it could be unless you were knee-deep in backstory, but such complexity made it feel real if you were within its nebula. I don't think scoured another game's lore so heavily, piecing together the narrative or coming up with theories on the wider world. There was something deeply chilling about franchise baddie the Darkness when we knew nothing about it, and tracing its path through our enemy's history only added to that menace.

Similarly, the setting was a fascinating blend we hadn't really seen before. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure with overtones of D&D and Saturday morning cartoons is a hell of a mix, one we should have been exploring for years to come. It was a rare beast that repositioned tropes into something familiar yet entirely alien. Destiny 2 built on that foundation: it did the unthinkable by destroying our home, the Last City, and forcing us to start over. It opened up new avenues and questions regarding our patron, the Traveller, and how benevolent it really was. It broadened those horizons.

Sure, I have quibbles about where the story went. I think some questions are best left unanswered to maintain an air of mystery, and much like Stranger Things' final season, Destiny may have tried to fill too many gaps. Not everything needs to be explained – your audience coming to their own conclusions keeps it alive. Yet even that doesn't dampen how thrilling those early years were, or how much potential the series still has.

For me, that's what I miss most - those open horizons, and the intoxicating sense of possibility. I don't know if we'll ever see something like that again… and if we do, it looks as though I'll be leaving my beloved Guardian behind.

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Benjamin AbbottTabletop & Merch Editor

I've been writing about games in one form or another since 2012, but these days you'll find me managing GamesRadar+'s tabletop gaming and toy coverage (I spend my time here handling everything from board game reviews to the latest Lego news). I've also been obsessed with Warhammer since the 1990s, and love nothing more than running tabletop RPGs like D&D as a Dungeon Master.

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