Briefly: Mourning the Living (Games)
I've been working on my Style Savvy shrine recently, and it's quickly becoming incredibly image-heavy (there are 48 more images I need to do for the brands pages - wowza). A very easy way for me to create those images while also playing the game is to just use the Snipping Tool to take a cropped screenshot and just paste them into an empty Discord server for editing later.
I've had my empty Discord server for a very long time - mostly to jot down notes for me to remember, or images to save, or things to do at some point. And while working through some screenshots, I came across my old Destiny stuff from about a year ago, and I was awash with emotions.
My parting with Destiny was not amicable - the game and its community were in an incredibly tumultuous state, and I had came to terms with my loss of faith in Bungie (TBF, they were never all that great post-Halo - if they ever were at all when you pull back the shiny green sci-fi armor). Hell, my first blog post was dedicated to the problems live service games have and I specifically focused on Destiny for a solid chunk of it. There was also some more specified beef I had with it I didn't specify in that post because it was interpersonal beef - namely the penultimate final raid I've ever ran, it was a teaching run for the one new raid from Lightfall that I didn't have time to run with everyone else - where I was outright ignored while my clanmates1 verbally abused one another and I wasn’t even taught the fucking raid. I was told to “just ad clear" two times they even allowed me a chance to speak. I was so pissed by how I was treated that it gave me the push I needed to delete VanguardVogue and finally quit Destiny for good.
But there's still a part of me that sorely misses the game. Sure, it was less about missing the gunplay and poorly written lore and more about missing space dress-up (though I don't miss feeling like I'm the only one who understood it, and getting routinely frustrated with people for not understanding Destiny's esoteric fashion system like an autistic person whose whole thing was that would lolol) and running raids with friends, but it was those things that made Destiny special for me. I went through a few different friend groups and clans in my time in Destiny, and the most memorable times I've had with them was almost always when I was shooting the shit, teaching raids to random people off LFG or helping newer players get stuff I've long already gotten. I think helping people and being a part of something was what made Destiny really special to me.
I'm not much of an online/live service player anymore. I like the ability to pick up and put down games whenever and not be beholden to the "five more minutes!" when you're in the middle of a raid and dinner's ready. I've recognized that Destiny - and live service games as a whole - are incredibly harmful to me mentally, emotionally, and financially, and I cannot play them.
But man, do I miss it.
EDIT: Oh god oh fuck they’re letting go a ton of staff including Michael Salvatori - the guy that’s been cooking Bungie’s music since Halo 2 - of all people.
At the time of running, I was in a clan that had some Bungie developers and employees in it - I don't remember if any of them were involved in the run, but knowing that just soured the entire situation more than it already had.↩