Everyone agrees, ‘Destiny 2’ needs Sunset Sunsetting

Yesterday, we had our first Bungie Destiny 2 TWAB for the new year, and one of his main focuses was the return of a series of weapons from non-vaulted destinations in the game, Dreaming City and the Moon.

But they are not all weapons. There are only four from each location, receiving new advantages and, apparently, being given as dungeon rewards as motivation to repeat that old content again. And no, you can’t just infuse the god tests that you may have already saved from those eight weapons. You will have to win everything again.

Although there have been many complaints about the sunset for a while, now it seemed like a turning point. Virtually everyone, from regular players to community leaders, came together to express their annoyance at the continued disappearance and reissue of weapons in Destiny 2.

Here’s Gladd:

And Gothalion:

And Mtashed, who was already on the fence with the neglect of PvP, but the reissue is causing him to give up completely:

And then there is me, where I turned strongly against the sunset after thinking it could work initially, which I must admit, before someone links me to my old article “Luke Smith is right”. I argue that the end of the game could have been beneficial for the game if done correctly, old loot cycles and new cycles to replace them in equal measure. But that is not what happened, and the implementation of that is across the map.

What Destiny 2 is doing with the reissue in particular just doesn’t work from the perspective of a loot-based game like this. It’s one thing if you’re bringing back old Destiny 1 weapons that never appeared or were used in Destiny 2 or in your altered sandbox. And even that is debatable. But it’s an entirely different level when you manually remove weapons from people during sunset, then reissue them anywhere from six months to two years later and tell them to reassign them for identical or slightly different benefits (which they are not even guaranteed better than the original).

But it’s not just about relaunching old weapons, it’s that if you saved those exact old guns in your safe, waiting for your return, it doesn’t matter. You cannot insert your old weapons into the current energy limit, even if they have been relaunched. And even if you could, this creates a separate problem, as players would be effectively forced to save every weapon from the sunset they liked in a clogged full safe “in case” it ended up being reissued.

It doesn’t really matter if the relaunched weapons can be strong or good at the current goal. Something broke on a psychological level with the reward cycle here through sunset and reissue. I don’t think it will feel right to re-run old dungeons or Blind Well or Altars of Sorrow to get slightly different relaunched weapons that were perfectly usable until November last year, when it was all getting dark. And after that, it’s just not good to receive any piece of loot in Destiny 2 now, knowing that it has an expiration date the moment you get it. Gone are the days when 10-100 hours of cultivation by a single roll of god seemed to be worthwhile.

Sunsetting feels like burning the house to kill some cockroaches in the kitchen. It’s easy to see how weapons like Revoker, Recluse and Mountaintop may have been individually destroyed to avoid an obsolete PvP and PvE goal, and yet they took dozens, hundreds of other weapons with them. Looking at the next list of weapons to go to, all in Season of Dawn, I just have to ask why? Why is this happening? Why are any of these weapons a problem? The answer is that they are not, and Bungie simply wants us to look for new things and then, maybe, maybe they will reissue them later so we can redo it.

So, yes, it’s time for sunset. This is not working for anyone, not even for Bungie, because the enthusiasm for new weapons is overshadowed by what players are constantly losing and the fact that every drop now expires. I would be surprised if we hit the Witch Queen and the sunset was still in place at this rate, but that is a long way off, and it will be some difficult seasons as more equipment is turned off and more old equipment is obtained again. This has to end.

Update: Some additional video reflections on why I think the sunset is going so badly and why I changed my mind:

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