The planned third Destiny 2 “Curse of Osiris” stream has been cancelled. Posting on the Bungie forums earlier today, David “DeeJ” Dague announced the cancellation and the reasons why.
Destiny 2 has had a rough couple of weeks with fan and player backlash going into overdrive. Users on Reddit discovered that an XP cooldown was in effect while playing Destiny 2. The cooldown meant that players were earning much less XP than was being displayed on-screen. Many took this as a way for Bungie and Activision to prevent players from unlocking Bright Engrams too quickly.
Bright Engrams are earned every time a Guardian levels up once they reach level 20. They can also be purchased with real money. While Bungie disabled experience scaling, it has now set the required XP to level up at 160,000 which appears to be double what it was before. In effect, Bungie has simply kept the longer length required to unlock Bright Engrams in place, while removing the contentious scaling system.
DeeJ’s note on the forums doesn’t explicitly mention the scaling issue, but it does come close. It also seems to acknowledge that Destiny 2 has been unsuccessful in keeping and retaining players.
Tomorrow, we had planned to conduct the final stream prior to the launch of “Curse of Osiris” to show off some of the weapons and armor the expansion includes. Instead, we are investing all our efforts into delivering some higher priority information about Destiny 2.
You’ll hear from studio leadership about their assessment of Destiny all up, they’ll talk about our goals for the game going forward, and you’ll also learn about how we’re reacting to your feedback with some game updates that will arrive in the next few weeks.
The blog post will go live on Wednesday, North American time and Activision confirmed with GameSpot that no stream will take place this week. We’ll be watching closely to keep you updated as soon as we know more.
Destiny 2 is available now.
