Destiny 2 is getting better, but its latest event only reinforces that the best way to play is to wait

Destiny 2 has had almost a rough a year as I have (and reader, that is ROUGH). Most of the game’s problems stem from Edge of Fate, the game’s summer expansion that launched a new saga (after the previous 10-year journey), and the addition of the “Portal” – a faceless, lifeless menu where you simply select the activities you want to do next from a large, categorized list.

The Portal is, on its face, a good idea. It’s a way to streamline the game to make it more accessible for new players who get overwhelmed by a giant world map and 10 years* worth of content. In practice, the Portal is Destiny 2 now, and it’s taken away much of the game’s exploration and discovery in favor of a streamlined experience. Worse, the Portal launched alongside a massive rework to the Power grind, which started in a pretty bad spot and turned a lot of people off.

(*Quite a bit of that content is no longer in the game, but there’s still a lot of Destiny in there.)

Months later, the Portal and power grind are in much better spots. But we’re not talking about that journey here today. No, today we’re talking about a major problem that that journey has reminded players about, and the real bane of Destiny 2’s existence, historically: bugs and instability.

Destiny 2 — hell, Destiny the franchise, if we’re being honest — has always suffered from a lot of bugs. Now, bugs are normal in all types of software, and Destiny has had its fair share of “annoying but acceptable” bugs in the past. There has been a notable uptick in bugs since the post-Final Shape layoffs last year, as you might imagine, but recently, the bugs have gotten worse. Much worse. 

Ignoring how borked the raid was over the summer, let’s just look at this year’s Festival of the Lost Halloween event, which launched earlier this week. The event is cool, the weapons are worth farming, the real-money skins look fabulous, and the first new 6-player activity in a long-ass time is a super fun remix of Onslaught, one of the game’s most beloved activities. A huge win for the game when it needs it most, right? Well, it would be if it wasn’t still catastrophically bugged multiple days after launch. 

How bugged, you ask? Well, I personally loaded into the activity five times on day one and was only able to finish once. I got soft-locked every other time after my first. The activity is now so well-known for breaking that two players left my sixth run because they thought it was bugging out when it actually wasn’t, leaving us to complete the activity with only four players on the hardest difficulty. Run seven? Softlocked entirely on the final wave before the boss.

That’s just … unacceptable, man. There’s no other way to say it.