Too Many Big ‘Destiny 2’ Bugs Are Falling Through The Cracks Now

While Destiny 2, as big of a game as it is, has always had some measure of bugs, things seem to be getting worse over time, and certainly now in the wake of mass layoffs at Bungie.

Sure, some are just goofy, like Eva Levante missing her head sometimes when you talk to her at the Tower. But many more are just irritating, and so clearly obvious that you have to wonder if A) anyone is playing the live game or B) if so, if anyone is around to fix these things. While I’m sure both of these are true, something is missing as things are simply not getting corrected.

This is absolutely getting worse. Sure, the game has had long-term bugs before, but now? These are pretty major bugs that are directly interfering with core events of the season. Here, off the top of my head:

• Destiny 2’s entire Dawning event is based around snowball throwing, and yet essentially all of the upgrades you spend currency on this year simply do not work, making snowballs close to functionally useless compared to past years. It’s only a three week event, and with just days left, it is clearly not getting fixed at all, negating the concept for this entire year.
• Destiny 2 has inserted Togetherness as a modifier into The Coil, which shows up every couple of days. It’s annoying at baseline, forcing you to stick with your teammates in situations where that makes little sense, but more importantly, it’s bugged. You will still not recover health and shields quickly when you are by your teammates unless you take some amount of damage first. Damage that will very often kill you outright. Also, the modifier makes solo play, something The Coil was designed for given its ability to scale enemies based on fire team size, close to impossible as the game considers you never by your teammates, which do not exist, meaning you have close to no recovery for an entire run.

• I have tried to make a Wraithweavers build for this quasi-Stasis season on my Warlock, only to discover there’s still a bug where casting your freezing rift, which is now much better after recent buffs, does not actually heal you. You get an overshield, but underneath that you are not regenerating health at all, leading to many unexpected deaths. I finally just said to hell with it and did a new build entirely.
• Bungie just brought back an Ascendant Challenge for this week’s story quest, and players hopped in only to discover that old lighting issues from years earlier still have not been fixed and the mission is the darkest, most poorly lit thing in the entire game.
• This one isn’t a bug, but a clear oversight, as Bungie revealed essentially the finale of the season in an errant line of text during this past week’s mission, something that clearly should have been caught on review. Leaks happen, but this one is on them, and ruined a major point of Destiny 2’s final true season.
• I don’t know if this last one is technically a bug, but the idea that Bungie would dramatically increase playlist engram drops this season to offset new focusing costs just seems flat-out false. You can do an entire reset of a playlist activity and emerge with maybe 20 engrams for exactly six focuses of old weapons. Either the drop rate is a bug that needs to be fixed or the costs should be lowered, which should be an easier fix. But more than a month into the season, neither has happened.

While granted, some bugs may be tough to fix and take time, many of these have been bugged for multiple seasons, or even years, and many are not even acknowledged by Bungie, which is bizarre. And other, short term bugs like the snowballs can still make half of a holiday event pointless, given that it’s literally the main mechanic.

We know Bungie is having some tough times, but they do have to get a handle on the state of the game on multiple fronts, as more than ever, it seems like things are starting to spiral away from them.

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