Post Script

Bungie wanted Destiny 2 to be more approachable. A year on, it’s just made its toughest raid

You might remember Datto from E317, when one of YouTube’s most prominent Destiny creators told us he was starting to consider a career change. The changes Bungie made in the transition to Destiny 2, in a bid to have the game appeal to a wider audience, had put him in quite a tough spot. The game simply didn’t require the guide videos on which he’d made his name, and which paid his bills. There were far fewer people to watch them anyway, as players turned their backs on Destiny 2 in droves.

It’s early days for Forsaken, but the tide already appears to have turned. Over the course of his first run at the new raid, Last Wish, Datto’s Twitch subscriber numbers doubled. When the end boss finally went down, his chat feed was a rapidly scrolling feed of new subscribers. A few minutes later a single viewer sent a $10,000 tip.

These were not exactly typical circumstances, admittedly. The launch of a new Destiny raid is always a popular time for the game; the race to be crowned World’s First is always hotly contested, as the game’s most committed party up and dive in. When Last Wish released, Destiny 2 was briefly the most viewed game on Twitch, surpassing even the likes of Fortnite and League Of Legends. But even in that context, Last Wish was something special. The week before the raid launched, Bungie announced that any team that cleared it in the first 24 hours would receive a special in-game emblem. World’s First was the real prize, of course (literally this time, with Bungie offering real-world rewards to the first team over the line). But for those who couldn’t quite make the grade, the emblem was still there, an in-game reflection of their achievements.

Datto is one of the best Destiny players around. His team was the first to clear The Vault Of Glass, the first Destiny raid. Yet he missed out on the Last Wish emblem by two minutes, after his team had been at it for 24 solid hours. Still, they were only the third team over the line. When King’s Fall raid – until now considered one of the hardest Destiny raids – launched in 2015, almost 38,000 people cleared it within 24 hours. Only 12 people beat Last Wish. When Luke Smith took the stage at Destiny 2’ s lavish unveiling event in May 2017, he pointed out that only half of the people who reached the level cap in Destiny had finished one of its raids. Smith and Bungie felt that was a blot on the game’s copybook, and so Destiny 2 was streamlined, reset, made hopefully more accessible to enable more people to see the game when it is at its best: when you and five friends, after days or weeks of trying and failing and learning and falling out, finally see a final boss explode, and the loot stream into your inventory. We all know how that turned out. Last Wish suggests Bungie has come to terms with the fact that endgames aren’t for everyone, and it’s okay for raids to be hard.

Raids may have been the pinnacle of Destiny for as long as it has been around, but that has often been a measure of their necessity as much as their quality. If you don’t know the game, you’ll know its reputation: Destiny is a game built on the idea of playing and then replaying a small amount of content in the hope of a reward. The biggest returns are earned by completing the toughest challenges. Whenever a new instalment or expansion launches, a ravenous fanbase tears through it, racing along the levelling curve in order to be ready when the raid launches. Since a character can only complete a raid – or only receive rewards from it, anyway – once per week, the most efficient way of reaching a Destiny level cap is to sprint through the game, then sprint through the raid, then wait for the next weekly reset so you can sprint through the game and the raid again.

Forsaken introduces two major changes to the Destiny formula. The first is a dramatic extension of the levelling curve, something the game has long needed but has rarely had enough content to support. Given how much there is to do in Forsaken’s midgame, it makes perfect sense; one of Destiny’s core pleasures is watching the numbers go up.

The second – making the raid dramatically harder – is in part a consequence of the first. In the past, Destiny has released on a Tuesday, and its new raids typically the following Friday. For Forsaken, Bungie held the raid back an extra week, recognising that players would need time to not only adjust to the new midgame structure, but to push their character’s stats high enough for Last Wish to even be possible. If the gap between the player’s level and that of their enemies is large enough, they will not even be able to damage them. That extra week was vital to even bring Last Wish’s foes within reach.

Even then, they only made it by a whisker. So few people made it over the finish line on day one not solely because this is the toughest mechanical challenge Bungie has devised to date. Rather, the level deficit was such that players were being one-shot by low-level adds, and doing only small amounts of damage to bosses. Raids demand that teams coordinate, communicate and execute a strategy. This required them to also be perfect.

That’s why only 12 players cleared it, why Datto and crew missed out by two minutes, and why after somehow cramming the best part of 100 hours of play into three weeks, we are only just at the recommended Power level for Last Wish’s first encounter. And this is precisely how it should be. After all, the reason they’re called endgames is because they take a while to reach.

Last Wish suggests Bungie has come to terms with the fact that endgames aren’t for everyone