It’s Time To Dismantle Destiny 2’s Paid, Capped Transmog System

This week at reset, a long-running request of mine was fulfilled. After literally five years, Bungie has brought back Iron Banner ornaments for players to earn, ones that only were available for a brief time back in year 1, back when I wasn’t playing much Iron Banner, if any, which has changed over time.

But their arrival has once again reminded me that I am so, so tired of the way Destiny 2 handles transmog. Even though these are “ornaments,” you must first earn each piece with three Iron Engrams, then spend transmog currency to unlock each individual piece.

This is, technically, the way it has always worked, given that when transmog was brought over, you had to unlock ornaments with currency separately from the original piece. But here and now, you’re being told you can earn these ornaments, but you are instead earning the ability to unlock the ornaments with extra steps that requires a further grind for currency or spending money outright.

The problem is not the Iron Banner situation, the problem has always been transmog as a whole, and this is just a fresh reminder of what a poor system this is compared to other games. And it’s time to just dismantle the entire thing, which is both an interminable grind and a symbol of Destiny 2’s over-monetization of quite literally every aspect of the game.

Players can earn transmog currency by completing bounties every season. 10 bounties, specifically, which will transmog two full sets of armor. However, depending on the bounty, the grind is…exhausting. 10 bounties per character can be 70 Gambit matches or 40 strikes. You can do it faster with raid or dungeon checkpoints, but the fact that it needs to be a grind at all feels like yet another artificial extension of playtime in a game that already does this at every turn. And the fact that there’s this 10 cap per season means there will always be dozens and dozens of sets you cannot transmog no matter how much you do grind.

Unless you pay, of course.

This is the other half, a paid transmog system which is one of the most ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard of, yet it was launched as soon as transmog was brought into the game. The only way to get past the cap or skip the grind is to pay for the currency outright, where it costs $10 to transmog a set of armor you already have earned. So for instance, if I was out of transmog currency right now, it would cost $30 to transmog the three Iron Banner ornament sets I just earned with 45 Iron Banner engrams and a ton of grinding. There are actually two ornament sets back, so that’s $60. Or again, hours and hours of grinding if I hadn’t hit my seasonal cap yet.

Just…stop! Stop all of it! I feel like making one of those “this is how you share used games” videos PlayStation used to roast Microsoft’s convoluted system back in the Xbox One era. Here, it would be “get armor, transmog unlocked,” as opposed to: “Earn and spend 3 Iron Banner engrams and 10,000 glimmer on an ornament, grind and complete a bounty, convert one transmog currency to another transmog currency at Ada, spend transmog currency to unlock one piece of armor. Or pay $2 per piece of armor instead.”

You see the point here. Destiny 2 sells an infinite number of cosmetics already and has a million mechanisms to increase playtime. It does not need to thread transmog into this. It reminds me of when shaders were consumable, another trick to drive more Eververse purchases and increase playtime to “farm shaders.” That was a terrible idea that was eventually killed off, and I put this current transmog system in the same category. Though I am not exactly holding my breath at this point for a change.

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