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I was actually curious and looked up the numbers. At least on PC, the number of players spikes with an expansion, then levels off and basically stays put. It seems like there in fact are a lot of regular players who stick around and do play constantly. It's kind of remarkable actually, given the quickly moving landscape of gaming and entertainment in general today.

It's just a good, fun, hobby that I play with a solid group of people on a regular basis. The amount of work I'd have to do to cover all the itches that Destiny scratches for me (that sounds weirder than intended) is gargantuan, so why bother?

We need Destiny 3 really badly. Or I do, at least. Destiny 2 is no longer compelling. SkillUp’s arguments about difficulty good true, and it means Destiny isn’t fun anymore on a fundamental level. I don’t blame Bungie completely—they’ve clearly found a formula that works for the massive number of people that still play, and it keeps them playing and probably spending money. Even if I think it’s dogshit, I can’t really be mad at them for developing the game the way they have.

I was actually curious and looked up the numbers. At least on PC, the number of players spikes with an expansion, then levels off and basically stays put. It seems like there in fact are a lot of regular players who stick around and do play constantly. It's kind of remarkable actually, given the quickly moving landscape of gaming and entertainment in general today.

I still play D2 frequently (not every day, but close to that). For me, it’s probably 90% down to the social experience at this point. D2 is where my friends and I hang out together most often. However, even that is starting to slip. Every season, there is less and less content in the game that anyone in my clan has any interest in playing, and the content we do still enjoy is becoming restricted by qualifiers.

For example, it used to be a given that most of my clan would spend most of a given weekend playing Trials. But now it’s only IF there’s no solo-Que playlist that weekend, IF it’s not the control variant of Trials, IF the adept weapon is one we care about chasing, etc. If any of those qualifiers are not met, we’ll probably still play a card, but that’s about it. This kind of approach is bleeding into many aspects of the game. We won’t touch the strike or gambit playlists unless it’s a triple XP week and we can knock out some seasonal challenges real fast, because otherwise we just find both activities mindlessly dull. We’ll do Grandmaster nightfalls IF the adept weapon is a good one. We’ll do regular crucible IF there are at least 4-5 of us in a fireteam together… any less than that, and matchmaking becomes hopelessly frustrating. Bungie has removed any reason to ever touch the competitive playlist, so that’s gone for us. The seasonal activities and missions tend to wear themselves out after the first week or two. We’ll do the latest raid once or twice per week, and we’ll really enjoy it for a little while, but that eventually turns into exhaustion and frustration as we run it week after week after week just because a couple people in the clan won’t get the raid exotic until their 75th completion or something nuts like that, lol.

For me, it’s a stark contrast from Foresaken era D2 when I genuinely enjoyed many different parts of the game (Forsaken even made me love Patrols!). My clan was poised and ready to jump ship and move over to Halo Infinite, but that game was such a huge miss for most of us that we’re still going back to D2. But I could easily see us switching to another game if something comes along that clicks with enough of us.