As if Destiny 2 needed any more disasters right now, a new one has surfaced that has players furious. And I’m going to say it’s for good reason.
In a now deleted ArtStation post, an artist at Bungie shared images of a Gladiator-based armor set they’d done, one that was offered in last season’s Eververse store. I remember seeing it at the time and going “wow, that’s cool, I wish we could earn it.” Well, about that.
Part of the ArtStation post showed two images where the Iron Banner tree was stamped on the front, one of which was in “blazing” form, which usually happens the week it’s live. What seems to have happened here is that this was either pulled from being an Iron Banner set and thrown into the Eververse store last season, or at the very least, was designed to be a theoretical Iron Banner set before abandoning that idea well before release.
Insult to injury here is that the actual “new” Iron Banner set this season is a reskin from six years ago, a set that’s been reissued more than a few times but this time with…just a new default shader. If there are any other differences, I don’t see them. Needless to say, fans are steaming.
All of this comes at a time when Bungie’s microtransaction-filled Eververse store has frankly, lost its mind. In these three month periods now, between the paid season pass, a holiday event and the actual store, we are seeing as many as five full paid armor sets. This season, that’s happening among multiple reskins in the “earned” portion of the game. Again, almost no changes but their default color. There are three of tose this season alone, by my count. The paid sets now include a Taken set, and a shader sold separately, something fans have been begging to earn for years. It’s here! But it’s $20+.
It’s gotten ridiculous. There are also five paid sets, I believe, in the preceding three months including that gladiator set. We have lived through a lot of Eververse nonsense eras but this isn’t Bungie squeezing blood from a stone, it’s smashing the stone into powder and inhaling it.
There are some people defending this, saying that well, Destiny is a live game and it needs to sell things to make money. It does sell things, of course, like an entire year of content. But before this, Eververse controversies were not usually 1) a set of armor very clearly being taken from a free activity and made paid and 2) the game being in one of its worst states of all time with player sentiment bottomed out.
What is the “answer” here? The most common one is that Bungie should go back to making that set Iron Banner and put that flaming tree back on, and give it out during the event. This would of course involve refunding everyone who bought it, and changing it from ornaments to an actual armor set (that would no doubt take six months of work in the current engine). This would, of course, feel like a “sorry we got caught, here’s your thing we tried to sneak by you” concession. The other option here is to take a future Eververse set and make it a free Iron Banner one, thematically appropriate or not. That’s happened before, a long while back in the Prophecy dungeon, and in a better era of the game.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
