It’s no secret that Bungie and Destiny 2 are in a bad spot right now. Poor reception to this year’s Lightfall expansion had a huge impact on the game, leading, at least in part, to mass layoffs at the company at the start of November. The next expansion, The Final Shape, was just officially delayed from February to June 2024, while the new season that launched this week, Season of the Wish, had of any season since the la𓂃unch of Shadowkeep in 2018. Interest in Destiny 2 and trust in the company is seemingly at an all-time low, so what does Bungie do? It releases an absurdly overpriced DLC pack that pisses everyone off.
The new Starter Pack, a $15 add-on ostensibly designed to help new players get a headstart in the game, is undeniably sparse. It includes a trio of off-meta exotics, a cosmeꦿtic ghost shell, ship, and sparrow, and a handful of currency and upgrade materials: 125k Glimmer, 50 enhancement cores, five enhancement prisms, and a single ascendant shard. This isn’t much more than what you can get from a typical Twitch drop, and Bungie wanted $15 for it. Compare that to the Forsaken Pack, a loot bundle that was introduced when Bungie nuked Forsaken out of the game. You get 20 exotic weapons there for the same price. I don’t think selling guns you can’t earn the original way they were designed to be earned is good either, but it’s especially hard to justify this new Starter Pack when the Forsaken Pack is the same price.
Anyone that has much experience with Destiny 2 can immediately recognize the poor value here, and the online Destiny community immediately went feral. It broke Datto, who is well respected in the community for his reasonable criticism and level-headed attitude towards developments surrounding the game. The YouTuber spen💙t the last two minutes of his railing against the DLC pack, screaming “How much more tone deaf can you possibly get?” and ending the video with this gem:
Normally I’d find this kind of gamer rage diatribe inappropriate, but Datto is completely right here. Speaking as someone with a lot of passion and love for this game, it’s heartbreaking to see Bungie shoot itself in the foot like this over, and over, and over again. I’ll echo Datto’s frustra💦tion here, because I agree that the opওtics on this kind of thing are so much worse than a crappy, overpriced DLC pack would seem at first glance.
Destiny 2’s monetization has been spiraling out of control for years. It’s been death by a thousand cuts, with seasons sold separately from expansions, then dungeons sold separately from seasons. Then the 30th Anniversary Pack, then junk lik🍒e the Forsaken Pack. The Steam store page has 14 different expansions and DLCs, with a total price of $409.76 if you click “add all DLC to Cart”. Many of them overlap, since you can buy the expansion with or without their annual passes, but how is a new player supposed to figure any of this out? Now there’s a new Starter Pack to further confuse things and trick new players into buying something they definitely don’t need. If my friend was just checking out Destiny 2 for the first time and they told me they bought the Starter Pack, I’d tell them they just got ripped off. How is that a good first impression for the game?
How Is A New Player Supposed To Know What To Buy?
The Starter Pack is gone now, deleted from the Steam store thanks to the wave of anger that came with it. On X, that the Starter Pack was pulled because it was “not something bringing joy”. I suppose that’s worth celebrating, but it says more about the strength of the community’s voice than about Bungie’s willingness to do the right thing only after it's been caught trying to pull one over on us. The fact that it was ever sold reeks of desperation, and more importantly poor leadership that would ever think this was a good idea in the first
place.
It’s not my intention to pile on here - clearly Bungie has got the message already. But if you’re trying this hard to invite criticism, it’s only right that you get it. I love Destiny 2 and I’m rooting for Bungie. I want to see it deliver the expansion I know it’s capable of making, blow everyone away with The Last Shape, and cement Destin🌠y 2’s legacy as one of the most ambitious and incredible games ever made. This kind of stuff should never happen, but especially not right now when Bungie is trying to dust itself off and rebuild trust with its players - or build trust with the new players it’s hoping to find. Maybe it can start by giving new players the Starter Pack items for free.
