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Destiny 2 (2025) Review
Image Credit: Bungie
Loading...I’ve been playing Destiny since the first game launched back in 2014, and here we are in 2025 with Destiny 2 still alive, still evolving, and still trying to figure out exactly what kind of game it wants to be. It’s kind of surreal, honestly. After The Final Shape wrapped up the Light and Darkness saga last year, a lot of people thought this might be the perfect moment for Bungie to sunset the game or at least slow down. Instead, they’ve doubled down with what they’re calling the Year of Prophecy, and it’s been… well, interesting.
The biggest change is the release model. For years, the cycle was predictable: one big expansion, then three or four smaller seasons stretched across the year. And for years, that cycle slowly wore people down. You’d blast through the new expansion in a week or two, stick around for a season or two if the activities were decent, and then peace out until the next big drop. Bungie finally admitted the formula wasn’t working and swapped to two medium-sized expansions a year with four free updates sprinkled in. On paper, it makes a lot of sense. In practice, it feels like Bungie trying to keep the game feeling alive without burning out the devs—or us.
The first test of this new structure was The Edge of Fate, which dropped in July. I’ll give Bungie credit: they really swung for the fences on mechanics. Kepler, the new planetoid destination, looks cool, and the abilities they introduced actually felt fresh. One lets you roll into this little ball of lightning and zip across the battlefield, another involves teleporting with a cannon, and there’s even some terrain manipulation in play. For a game that’s been running for nearly a decade, that’s impressive. On top of that, the entire loot and power system was reworked. Armor perks, set bonuses, modifiers—you can tell they’re trying to add depth for build-crafting nerds. And the new Portal UI? Way cleaner than the bloated Director we’ve been stuck with.
But for all those changes, it still has that familiar Destiny 2 problem: the grind. Missions are still repetitive, enemy arenas still feel recycled, and the loot treadmill, even after all the tinkering, still feels like a treadmill. The raid, The Desert Perpetual, was the highlight—Bungie still makes the best raids in gaming—but outside of that, it felt like the same old loop with some shiny new paint. I had fun, but by the second week, I could feel the burnout creeping in.
PvP, meanwhile, is still a mess. Bungie keeps promising balance passes and new maps, and while we’ve gotten some tweaks, Crucible just doesn’t feel like it’s in the spotlight anymore. Trials still has its sweaty weekends, but the mode doesn’t have the pull it once did. For a lot of players, Destiny’s PvP is just something you grind out for pinnacles rather than a reason to log in by itself. That’s a shame, because the gunplay in this game is still top tier—it just doesn’t feel like Bungie knows what to do with it competitively.
And here’s the thing: you can tell I’m not the only one feeling this way. The player base isn’t what it used to be. Sure, expansions bring people back for a few weeks, but then the population dips hard. It’s been happening for years, but it feels even more noticeable now. Bungie is trying to fix that with the free quarterly updates, but whether that’s enough to keep folks around is still up in the air.
Part of the problem is the stuff happening behind the scenes. Bungie’s been through some turbulence lately—leadership changes, layoffs, and pressure from Sony now that the studio’s under their umbrella. It definitely feels like Bungie doesn’t have quite the same freedom it used to, and some of that shows in the game. I wouldn’t say Destiny’s losing its identity, but you can feel that the studio is in a weird, transitional place.
Sometimes I catch myself getting nostalgic for the early days. Back in Destiny 1, the sense of mystery was unmatched—wandering into the Vault of Glass for the first time with no guides, no clue what we were doing, just a fireteam of friends yelling over comms as we figured out oracles and the Templar. Even in Destiny 2’s first few years, there was this excitement around every new expansion drop, the community buzzing with secrets and theories. These days, it feels like we’ve seen behind the curtain. We know how the systems work, we know the grind loop, and it’s harder to capture that same magic. Maybe that’s just what happens when a game sticks around this long, but I think that nostalgia is part of why so many of us keep coming back—chasing those moments that made Destiny feel truly special.
Looking forward, the next big thing on the horizon is the December expansion, Renegades. And I’ll be honest: I don’t know what to think about it yet. The whole thing leans into a space-western vibe with some pretty obvious Star Wars inspiration—gear, cosmetics, even some of the enemy designs look like nods. On one hand, it’s kind of fun and different. On the other, it risks feeling like Destiny is borrowing someone else’s style instead of sticking with its own. Either way, people are going to have opinions, and Bungie is clearly banking on that buzz.
So where does that leave the game right now? For me, Destiny in 2025 feels like a gamble. Bungie deserves credit for finally ditching the old formula and trying something new. You can see the creativity is still there, and the raids prove they can still deliver magic when they really lock in. But the grind hasn’t gone anywhere, and the community feels smaller and more cautious than ever.
If Renegades nails the tone and delivers on the gameplay side, maybe we’ll look back on this year as the start of a new era for Destiny 2. If it doesn’t, it might just be remembered as the point where Bungie kept resetting the board without ever really solving the core problems. Either way, as someone who’s been here since day one, I can’t help but keep logging in—half out of habit, half out of hope that the next drop will finally stick.
