More Surprise Timegating Exhausts ‘Destiny 2’ Players Yet Again

Well, it’s been a while since a good old fashioned Destiny 2 timegating controversy, but logging in this week, players found that they were once again being thrust into the same dungeon twice as a part of the game’s “Rite of the Nine” event, meant to bridge the lengthy gap until July’s Edge of Eternity expansion.

The idea of the event is that Bungie is releasing three new versions of old dungeons with reprised, upgraded weapons. The new difficulties range from an ultra-guided easy mode to a much harder mode for veterans. It’s fun! The problem is that the assumed rotation was one new dungeon a week, rather than one dungeon for three weeks three times over, plus a bonus three weeks where they’re finally all activated.

The only difference this time is a quest for a new shiny copy of a gun and perhaps more importantly, the ability to choose between two dungeon exotics you may have missed (this is its own controversy, but no time to get into that). But it’s still the same dungeon and it’s live for another full two weeks.

It’s yet another example of timegating from Bungie, the idea seemingly being to stretch out playtime by making people return every three weeks and farm in the middle of those before dropping out completely. I don’t even think this makes sense, as now you have a bunch of annoyed players throwing up their hands for the next two weeks and I would argue they are less likely to return than if the dungeon rotated weekly or they simply activated all dungeons at once for the indefinite future.

It seems like a somewhat desperate release plan, seemingly to combat what are near record-low playercount levels right now, above January 2025’s 36,000 low, but at 43,000 currently, still underperforming every past era of Destiny. And with months to go until July, you can see the problem.

The pressure is on for Bungie as they both have to keep Destiny players engaged and the game profitable while also launching Marathon in a few more months, its controversial extraction shooter that did not make the best first impression in its first Closed Alpha. This will be increasingly difficult with Destiny 2 now making less overall content in its new “Frontiers” era, and it seems likely it will settle at a baseline lower than it’s ever been.

As for the timegating, one issue is that Bungie seems to have miscommunicated how this was going to work, communication which it has now promised to improve, but at this point, I would just throw open the floodgates and put all these dungeons live. This dragged out release schedule seems pointless and aggravating, and I do not imagine it’s going to do much, if anything, for player retention over this time period which is likely not going to be great either way.

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