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Bungie walks back major changes made to Destiny 2

by: Rob - posted: 10/16/2025 10:18:00 AM
More On: Destiny 2 Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate

Just about all of the changes to the economies of Destiny 2 has finally been walked back with Update 9.1.5.1. They were bad ideas from the start, half-baked in preparation, and rolled out to near unanimous community disapproval. Bungie had tried to boldly refresh the game with the latest expansion, The Edge of Fate, but as I noted in my review they missed the mark badly, essentially locking the loot behind an awful leveling grind and making the entire focus of what once was an expansive game into the narrow confines and restrictions of the portal - a place where you always play at a power disadvantage and are forced to load up on negative modifiers to sap whatever fun remained in a once great franchise. But one by one the sweeping changes are being dialed back, as that update details:

  • Unstable Cores - a bane to leveling up old gear is being eliminated entirely and all players are being gifted 777,777 cores to tide them over until the currency can be removed
  • Reward Power - buffed across the board greatly reducing the insane time commitment required to level guardians in the game
  • Techsec Supply Drop - all players who log in between now and the end of Season 27 (December 2nd, 2025) will get a free set of Tier 3 armor set to power level 300 to boost them past the initial stages of the grind

These changes aren't coming in a vacuum. Bungie knows Destiny 2 is in trouble. Player counts are hitting all-time lows. API scraping by https://popularity.report/ paints a very grim picture: 

 
The daily player counts are hovering below a threshold where at a similarly previous low point during Curse of Osiris Bungie leadership claimed the game was "weeks" away from being shut down. Thankfully Bungie still appears committed to the game - especially with the upcoming Star Wars crossover expansion, Renegades, set to release in December. So while these economy changes are great, there are still issues that need to be addressed - namely finding a way not to lock the game behind a portal that limits both the power fantasy (through power deltas) and build-crafting (through negative modifiers) that are the hallmarks that made the game so fun to begin with. Then we need to drag the rest of the rich worlds and lore into the new systems (which really should have been the focus from the beginning, not the portal). As a redditor aptly summarized it:

Well, no need to kill the old gods. they are only +0 and drop +0 starsplitters, +0 worldrenders and +0 lifedrinkers. Yea they were cool but they aren't +5s so they don't have the new buffs or do the new damage.

The old world, the Starsplitter the lore...none of it matters anymore. You have killed a rat +5 and gotten a wooden stick +5 and that is the game.

Once that is done, the game desperately needs to find a way to salvage the new player experience, which is probably the worst in all of gaming right now. There's no point in fixing the thing if you continue to abandon a pathway to inviting new players into the fold. Bungie created a hamster wheel to artificially boost playtime numbers in the portal, and everyone hated it. It's good to see the course correcting on the ship.