The Edge Of Fate’s Portal Cannot Sustain The Game

Logging in to Destiny 2 during its second week, players were greeted with..nothing. We are now in an era, for the first time in years, where there is not a week-to-week story unfolding in Destiny. In the Edge of Fate, you beat the campaign, and that’s it. Instead, you’re herded into the main new draw of the entire game, The Portal.

The Portal is a series of four “Ops” sets of missions, Solo, Fireteam, Pinnacle and Crucible. Each have their own dedicated weapons and armor to farm, both now using the new “tier” system of the game, common Tier 1 drops and exceedingly rare Tier 5 drops at the highest difficulty levels of the game.

It’s only been two weeks, but it’s clear this is not going to be enough to sustain the game in a meaningful capacity, and it would be shocking if the game’s active players did not start dropping left and right as they hit some sort of wall in the activity. Some may last longer than others, and some changes will no doubt be made to fix extremely obvious issues with the system. But The Portal is not going away this is “the thing” that’s meant to keep players engaged now.

The launch of this Portal in The Edge of Fate is bizarre. There are zero new activities in any of the Ops lists. I’m not going to classify through a string of enemies in a Patrol zone “new” for Solo Ops. Fireteam Ops is years-old strikes and forgotten seasonal activities. Pinnacle is only old exotic quests right now, though supposedly chunks of dungeons will be added later.

The way to “mix this up” to some extent is the new modifier system with different challenges and boons you can pick to earn better rewards. But it’s mainly split into lower levels trying to get an A rank, which usually just means locking your loadout and putting on an enemy challenge or two, or higher levels, where you have to slap every negative modifier in the game on in order to get the best loot. And not even the best loot. At the high end, it’s something like a 5% drop at any Tier 5, much less a specific weapon or armor piece with perks or distribution you may want.

Lower levels are blindingly easy. I’m not sure what’s going on there, but some of these difficulties have bosses that cannot possibly have more health than a miniboss, at max. But at higher levels, getting more powerful actually hurts you, given that you will keep being forced into higher deltas. +30, +40, +50, nothing you do can change that unless you scale things back for inescapably less loot.

The split is that lower tier players are going to climb high enough where this just gets exhausting, and leave. Higher tier players, all but a few crazies, are going to burn out with this insane difficulty that is often not necessarily difficulty, but endless sponges and the simple inability to ever feel truly strong.

There are some pretty obvious Portal fixes that should be implemented ASAP:

• The ability to take a favorite weapon through Tiers via a lot of investment, rather than it being impossible for most players to even see a Tier 4 or 5.
• Better drop rates for high Tiers at higher levels.
• At least any kind of chance to get a rare higher Tier drop at lower levels rather than making it wholly impossible.
• Changing these high-end difficulty deltas so every single player isn’t going to be terminally underpowered, with that only getting worse as time goes on.

Being vastly under-generous with loot and overly focused on “challenge” with stupidly punishing tuning is a recipe to turn off players. All of this seems to be in place to extend the grind as long as possible, but what it’s going to do is cause a lot of rage or exhaustion quits. I’m already seeing it happen.

The entire concept of the Portal, replaying very old content, also is just not appealing at baseline for most players, and those that do say they like it, I will be curious if even they’ll still be around a couple weeks from now. This is just not going to be able to carry Destiny 2 for six month gaps between major expansions without severe population crashes.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.