Saying goodbye to Destiny 2 is one of the hardest things I’ll ever do in gaming

I have a lot of accolades that I’m proud of in Destiny 2, many of which are some of the hardest things I’ve ever achieved in a game. There’s multiple Contest raid emblems, years of Gilded Conqueror titles and Grandmaster Nightfalls completed, nearly 70 in-game titles (and counting), and more. But saying goodbye to a game that I’ve set my annual clock by for nearly a decade will be the hardest thing yet

Last year, Bungie released the excellent Renegades expansion for Destiny. A Star Wars tie-in — the first of its kind — that Bungie managed to thread the needle for very successfully. But the expansion underperformed, largely due to some of the missteps made in last summer’s transformative Edge of Fate expansion. 

With Destiny 2 failing to make Platinum best seller on Steam for the first time since hitting the platform in 2019, Bungie delayed the mid-season update for Renegades away from the Marathon launch date in March. In May, it was announced that that update — which had moved to June 9 — would not be the lead-in to the already announced Shattered Cycle expansion, but would instead be the final update for Destiny 2. The Fate saga would not continue, Shattered Cycle and the game’s other announced expansion, The Alchemist, would never release.

And so now I find myself at the end of a very long journey that I wish, more than anything, was continuing. And I can’t help but look back and weep at all that has changed.

When Destiny 2 first came out, I was freshly out of college, and working “full time” as a freelance writer for Polygon and its satellite League of Legends website, The Rift Herald. I’d loved Destiny 1, and had experienced almost all it had to offer exclusively through various online group finders (LFGs). I wanted D2 to be different, and I absorbed every bit of information I could about it. When the opportunity to write freelance guides for the game arose, I threw myself on what was seen as a bit of a grenade with joy.

Within just a few days of launch, I made a name for myself at Polygon and in Slack. I wasn’t just “Ryan, that annoying contractor who works at the League of Legends site,” I was “Ryan: the Destiny guy.” Suddenly I had people who I had spent years listening to on podcasts, like Russ Frushtick (who would later be my boss), messaging me on a random Thursday evening to ask how to optimally use an Exotic. And I was spending my weekends running co-workers with years of journalistic experience through the Leviathan raid.

When I wasn’t playing Destiny with Polygon people, I was playing it with a new group of friends I made through our work Slack. Friends of co-workers then became my own friends, and one of those people I first ran Leviathan with that opening weekend has become one of my best friends, who I’ve spoken to virtually every day for nine years, even though we've never met in person. 

In the time since Destiny 2 launched, I’ve: 

• Moved out of my childhood home
• Met my wife
• Gotten hired at Polygon as a part-timer
• Gotten engaged
• Gotten married
• Gotten promoted to full time at Polygon
• Bought a house
• Lived through a global pandemic
• Experienced the devastation of pregnancy loss
• Helped bargain a Union contract on behalf of my colleagues
• Been promoted a second time
• Made two other years-long friendships via random Destiny LFGs
• Become a father
• Traveled to Bungie to preview Destiny and Marathon multiple times
• Been laid off
• Founded a website
• Founded another website
• Been accepted to a Masters program at a well-regarded state school
• Founded a popular Marathon-themed podcast
• And had a second child

I’ve grown up with Destiny 2 in the background. It's something I’ve always made time for. Even after having children, I’ve bent over backward to coordinate childcare schedules to ensure I could be there for day 1 raids with my friends.

And I would’ve done that forever. But on Tuesday, it ended.

Ironically, there’s more to do in Destiny 2 right now than there has been in years. I’m overwhelmed and moved by the new update. I have so many raid nights with the boys left to go before I have everything I want.

But for the first time in 12 years, I know there will come a time where I will truly finish Destiny. Soon — sooner than I’d like to admit — I’ll uninstall the game, knowing that there is no new season or expansion waiting just around the corner. Eventually, I'll have to say goodbye. And outside of a yearly raid gauntlet with the boys, that goodbye will be forever.

I recently learned that I’ve spent over 6000 hours in Destiny 2 across all the platforms I’ve played it on. And while some of that is AFK time, or time spent floating in orbit while looking at menus, or taking screenshots for work, it’s also about 250 full days in the last 9 years. 

That's a huge number — one that’s almost a little scary to think about — but it was never a waste of time for me. Almost all of those hours were spent in my office playing with friends online or on my couch watching TV with my wife. Those hours were social hours, like going out to the bar on Tuesday nights, or having an annual “guys weekend.” I spent years trying to make Destiny 1 a social game for me, and not a lonely one. But I succeeded in that with Destiny 2.

I’ve always said that I was lucky to have a partner that understood why that Destiny time was precious to me. And why it mattered so much. Every few years when we’d have a scare about losing Destiny, it was always those relationships I worried about first. When something is as special and unique as Destiny, no game will satisfy the entire group the same. Even Marathon, which I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into with two of my Destiny mates, hasn’t captured my entire squad.

One of the few things we do know about Destiny’s future is that Destiny 3 isn’t in active development yet — or at least it wasn’t when Jason Schreier reported about it last month. And while I still believe it will come, eventually, I can’t help but wonder where we’ll all be 5-6 years from now. 

My 3.5 year old will be at least 9, my buddies who have young kids now will have similarly aged kids then. Even our bachelor friend will likely be married and may have young kids of his own by the time D3 is in our hands.

It’s scary to think about just how much the world has changed since I started playing Destiny 2, and it really makes me wonder how much it’ll change before I’m playing Destiny again. But no matter what happens or where we’re all at, I feel confident that the draw of Destiny will pull us together again to slay another god and protect another endangered civilization. And if somehow it doesn’t, well, my wife and I have made our own fireteam.

Destiny fans often like to throw around this obnoxious phrase: “I hate Destiny, it’s my favorite game.” But I’ve always preferred my own, which is that “even in the worst times, I've never played a Destiny that was bad enough that I wasn’t excited for more.” It doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way, but it’s how I’ve felt for 12 years, and it’s how I know I’ll feel when that stupid and mysterious tricorn logo shows up at a Sony State of Play sometime in the next decade.

But perhaps one of the community’s most oft-memed phrases is the most accurate of them all: the real Destiny was the friends we made along the way.

Thank you Liquid, and Jango, and Arkham, and Gemini, and Vegito, and Div, and Skarrow. 

And, most of all, thank you to all of the devs at Bungie and its former support studios who’ve touched these magnificent games over the last 12 years

Goodbye, Destiny 2.