• News

Cursed by Osiris, Bungie Cancels Destiny 2 Live Stream Amid Community Outrage

May Anubis weigh their hearts justly. 

Sam Chandler

November 28, 2017 8:00 PM

34

Bungie was supposed to have their third and final Curse of Osiris stream this week, a mere seven days out from the launch of the somewhat anticipated first DLC for Destiny 2, but after the recent controversies, the unusually silent developer has decided to cancel the Twitch stream. In its place will be a blog post where “studio leadership” will have an opportunity to talk about the state of the game.

This came to light after Community Manager, David “DeeJ” Dague, posted on the Bungie.net community forums with a straightforward announcement:

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.

That will appear on the Bungie Blog on Wednesday.

For those who might not be up to speed with what’s happening in the wild world of Destiny 2, it recently came to light that the amount of XP the game said players were earning wasn’t exactly correct, in fact it was way off. Though this is a relatively tame problem on the surface, the outrage stemmed from the fact Destiny 2 has its own version of microtransactions – the hot button issue of 2017. Players can either gather XP and receive a Bright Engram (Destiny 2’s loot crate, albeit with no major game-affecting boosters à la Star Wars Battlefront 2) or pay real money to receive one instead.

As it turns out, Destiny 2 was purposefully throttling the amount of experience players were earning when earned in vast quantities – essentially making it take longer for them to receive Bright Engrams. This has obviously been perceived as a means to funnel people to spend money on Bright Engrams. Cue the justified outrage. The throttling has since been removed, but the amount of XP needed to earn a Bright Engram has been doubled. Yay?

All of this has left a bad taste in the mouth of hardcore and casual players alike, and when coupled with the almost three months of zero game balancing (in the form of weapon and subclass nerfs and buffs), the community is at a boiling point.

A cursory glance at the DestinyTheGame subreddit might have you perceive it as a salt mine, but there are a lot of dedicated players there who want nothing more than for Destiny 2 to return to the glory that Age of Triumph captured in the original title. The news that the Curse of Osiris stream has been cancelled is generally seen as Bungie taking the community concerns and complaints seriously.

There is a lot of cautious optimism in the air at the moment, but it’s a fragile thing and its future depends on what the studio leads have to say about the game and the direction they plan to take. If the perceived underlying problems of Destiny 2 aren’t addressed, then there’s a good chance the community will be just as outraged as they are now. And rightly so.

Sam Chandler

Guides Editor

Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as a Guides Editor. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler