Joe Blackburn on Destiny 2 conspiracy theories, what happened to the PvP team, and The Witness being able to 1v1 anyone in the universe
It's been two weeks since the mood music in Destiny 2 got so bad that game director Joe Blackburn took to his personal Twitter to deliver a video message addressing various community complaints and concerns. For a studio that tends to deal in lengthy blog posts, such a personal approach only underlined the perceived urgency of the situation. Ironically, the latest meltdown had been triggered by one such 'State of the Game' post, which, rather than allaying concerns, had air-dropped petrol onto them.
It should be noted that Destiny 2's audience is febrile at the best of times, as is perhaps inevitable with an almost 10-year-old live service game, but things have escalated this year. In a recent video, the veteran Destiny 2 content creator Datto described the reaction to the post as: «An absolute frenzy» and «the worst I have ever seen the community, surpassing even Curse of Osiris in season two».
The Destiny 2 community's laundry list of issues includes burnout with the seasonal model, aggressive monetisation, the lack of attention paid to PvP and the complete abandonment of the Gambit mode. Hell, you know it's time to worry when the lore guys are lighting pitchforks. None of this was helped by the fact that this year's big expansion, Lightfall, was substantially weaker than its predecessor, The Witch Queen, particularly in terms of its confusing narrative. Although Blackburn's video didn't address every complaint—microtransactions were conspicuously absent—it did serve as effective damage control, resetting the community's anger meter ahead of last week's showcase for The Final Shape expansion.
Joe Blackburn cut his teeth on the raid team at Bungie, where his work included the acclaimed Last Wish from 2018's Forsaken.
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