I have played Destiny since the first beta on playstation in 2013(?), since then I have played on xbox, pc on battlenet and steam, playing regularly throughout its entire lifetime. I have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5000-6000 hours total and have seen and done pretty much everything the game has to offer. This is not a review, just an honest overview of the facts of what Destiny has become.

I used to play this game daily, for multiple hours. Slowly it became a couple times a week, then once a week, then once a week to grab stuff from the shop but only playing once every 2 weeks. You can see the trend. Now, I don’t log on to grab anything from the shop, and I show up every month or two to plow through the seasonal content. I can’t say I actually enjoy the process, but at this point I feel obligated to see the train to it’s final destination (a train wreck). The fact that I don’t even call it a game, but a “process” pretty much sums it up. It is a task that I check off, turning my brain off and autopiloting through because it’s not like I’m not going to play through the final expansion just to see where they take the story. But, to be frank, I don’t even give a ♥♥♥♥ anymore. I feel more like a graveyard shift worker at a factory that is soon to be shut down than a gamer playing a game they have enjoyed for a decade.

This is what an activity is like in Destiny: Go to spot where person should be, but isn’t, and get a pop up showing them poorly animated say some nonsense about some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, then go to a holo projector to see those same people telling you some other nonsense, then go shoot some things and maybe throw some balls around, then go back to where you just were and listen to a radio message while standing around awkwardly wondering why the ♥♥♥♥ they couldn’t have just called you, like intergalactic communication isn’t a thing in this universe. Then maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to go watch two characters actually spawn in an awkwardly bumble through some nonsense with their poorly animated angst before disappearing and then you get a pop up with some garbage that you instantly delete. That is the core gameplay loop of destiny. That is what you have to look forward to at best, at worst, it’s just go shoot some things and then get garbage you delete instantly.

Destiny no longer has anything to offer anyone, aside from the following points:
-Gear fatigue and re-skinned weapons that sucked when they first came out and still suck.
-Lazy writing, lazy cutscenes and bad voice acting.
-Lazy, boring quest design that does not engage you in any way, shape or form.
-Rewards for doing activities that might as well not have even existed
-Abandoned activities that have not had active development in them for YEARS, while still forcing you to play them if you need to level (and for certain seasonal activities).
-Balancing issues that never seem to end and have only been “solved” by the addition of seasonal modifiers which do nothing more than mask the fact that everything sucks to use if it’s not seasonally buffed and worked into a build.

The list goes on an on. Want to know what Destiny has that other games don’t? Me too. Take your pick from one of their “innovations” and there are plenty of other games out there (some in the exact same genre) that did it years before and, generally, did it better.

-Loadouts. Cool, Division had that almost 8 years ago. Destiny added it this year. JFC. Hell, with their API there has been third party loadout management for the game for most of it’s lifespan, yet it took them almost a decade to put it in their own game. Unbelievable how passionate these devs are about loot management in their looter shooter.
-Gear. Sweet, every looter game has that. In those games the gear often matters, unlike in Destiny where you literally trash almost everything you pick up because if it’s not a god roll it’s actually just garbage. If you’ve been playing longer than a month, almost everything you get is pretty much trash. The best thing you can do is slap everything that is “questionable” into your vault and use a god roll analyzer on it all because it will save you a lot of time. Yes, but the amor! Cool, get two sets of high stat armor and you’re good to use any exotic you want, after that every single piece of armor that isn’t 65+ is immediate trash and only good for transmog (which you only need to pick it up once to do that).
-Builds. Yep, buildcrafting is the only thing keeping the game alive, so let’s prop that up. But let’s also remember that buildcrafting is now just boiled down to “look at seasonal artifact, use exotic armor that works well with the 5th column perk that’s strongest”. METAH. What a joke. Adding cool modifiers and making them disappear after the season ends, only to be replaced with inarguably worse perks is just idiotic.
-I will give credit to the music. Destiny has some great music that is well orchestrated and fitting to the theme and mood of the content it’s made for….unless that content is regular activities like strikes or lost sectors or pvp or whatever. Basically if it’s not raid or main story it’s gonna be repetitive, boring and ill-fitting to what you’re playing.
-Voice acting! Wow, how great it used to be. It gets worse every season, where now, combined with how terrible quest design and writing is, you basically get to watch these voice actors phone in their phoned in lines while watching a phoned in animation from a holoprojector that half the time doesn’t even have animated mouth movements (and when they do, they don’t sync up). Wow, amazing.
-Raids! Yep, they can be amazing. They are also something you have to use Discord for to find a group because they haven’t added that (but it’s coming this year! 10 years later! Wow, amazing!).
-Lore! Yeah, it used to be great. Now it’s just text messages between two people you don’t know or don’t care about who are talking about someone else you don’t know or don’t care about and doesn’t really tell you anything other than some tidbit for Byf to jerk off over because what the ♥♥♥♥ else is he gonna do. You used to get taken king lore which took an hour to read and was a careful, well-thought out piece of beautiful literature describing how the hive came to be. Wow, amazing.

-Shooting guns still feels good when you are not fighting at level content where it’s just bullet-sponge-city. Bosses in high level content are mostly just bullet sponges. But if you’re fighting red bars, that’s what destiny used to feel like everywhere. Try the game out if you want to see how good something used to be by playing low level content. This isn’t me complaining about difficulty, just how the guns feel.
-Movement still feels good, as long as bungie doesn’t use up your double/triple jump for no reason (a bug that has existed for like 5 years?)
-It’s still pretty and it still runs exceptionally well

If I was you, and I hadn’t played Destiny, I wouldn’t. But I’m not, so I’m stuck riding out this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ train wreck until The Final Shape comes. Currently it’s looking like the final shape is going to be “crippling depression”. YMMV.