Destiny 2’s ‘The Witcher’ Crossover Armor Met With Player Skepticism

It seems the recent events at Bungie are going to be coloring Destiny 2 for the indefinite future. In what would normally be a somewhat standard event, Bungie debuted new Eververse armor for next week’s Season of the Wish, this time a crossover with CDPR’s The Witcher.

I’m not entirely sure why a Witcher crossover is happening now, given that there’s no show or game thing happening I can see. Cyberpunk 2077 probably would have made more sense given Phantom Liberty, but whatever. The armor looks cool. The Titan school of the Wolf chainmail set is the best. Warlock’s got Ursine armor. Hunter got…I’m not entirely sure. There’s a ghost and a ship too.

However, the Destiny 2 community has not been terribly receptive to the debut here. While some comment that it does indeed look good, the vast, vast majority of quote Tweets, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook comments are all variations of the same few sentiments:

• “Cool set, how will we be able to earn this in-game?” (the joke, you can’t)
• “Gotta make up that 45% revenue miss” (referencing the recent revelation that Destiny revenues are way off target after Lightfall)
• “Maybe you should try collaborating with your fired employees” (Bungie just abruptly laid off over a hundred workers)
• “Read the room, how tone deaf can you be?” (Given everything that just happened, probably not time to show off a new microtransaction).

One of the issues here is that when Bungie does collaboration armor with other properties, almost always it is A) a higher price, $20 per armor set rather than $15 for non-collaborations, and B) it is unable to be earned with Bright Dust over time like normal Eververse sets. No doubt this is probably so the collaborators can actually get paid, but it is not terribly amusing for a playerbase that has seen this shift over time, given how many collaborations there have been.

This collaboration with CDPR was planned well before all of the recent drama, as we know it takes at least 9-12 months to get an armor set from concept to completion, as evidenced by the fan-voted Festival of the Lost sets. And given that last season did take its armor set out of Eververse and make it earned, it stood to reason that there would be another expensive set back in the store now. Out of everything Eververse sells, I imagine that its armor sets are indeed one of its biggest revenue drives. One set on one character would be twice what a given season costs.

What’s going on with the fanbase now is complicated. Some don’t want to buy things because Eververse has gotten real bad well before this. Others are just not in the mood to spend due to how bad things have been with Bungie and the state of the game. But we also very much know why Bungie has to keep rolling stuff like this out, as it genuinely is to try to pump up their revenue to get out of what appears to be a spiral between post-Lightfall revenue and playercount declines and soft Final Shape pre-orders.

I’ve written about this before, that I used to be Mr. Destiny Eververse Armor Whale where I owned more or less every set. This year, that’s stopped. I don’t think I’ve bought anything in Eververse since Lightfall. Something just…clicked off, and I stopped caring about a complete collection. Maybe I’ll get this one? I don’t know, honestly probably not at this rate. But I feel like I’m probably not alone. The vibes are bad. Real bad.

It continues to be a rough situation. The new season should spark a bit of enthusiasm again, but even with some cool armor sets, I’m not shocked to see this reaction from players given recent events and that they all cost $60 with no way to earn them in game.

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