Stop me if you’ve heard this before: it’s fucked up that every year, Destiny 2 rips all of its seasonal content out of the game, never to be seen again. Though time has certainly numbed the pain of the removals, it still stings every year, especially when some of the stuff in Destiny 2’s seasons winds up being the most impactful. Sometimes, huge narrative beats are delivered through the seasonal pipeline, and other times, it just gives you a fun game mode or activity. This is a blog about one such feature.
With The Final Shape’s arrival this week, which will conclude the series’ ten-year story, Bungie is beginning its annual process. Soon, the various wings of the H.E.L.M will be vacated, and Destiny 2 will almost feel new again. That’s great, but I just wish it didn’t come at the cost of fishing, a mechanic that was introduced during the Season of the Deep, and brought me tremendous zen when I grew tired of shooting things ad nauseam in Destiny 2.
Fishing is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty pointless activity. I don’t want to suggest it didn’t have depth, but it was hardly the optimal way to earn anything during the Season of the Deep. It would net you seasonal reputation and captured fishes (which ranged in rarity akin to weapons and gear) could be deposited into a tank for further rewards, which was a nice touch. You could even begin an exotic quest line while fishing, but that was the most it ever mattered. Otherwise, fishing holes simply popped into existence on several of Destiny 2’s worlds for folks to kick back, cast a line, and catch a break. Saving the galaxy from being torn apart by the warring factions of the Light and Darkness is hard work. Guardians deserved the break.
Fishing was a fun idle activity, but it also reminded me of how important distractions like it are to MMOs like Destiny 2. I was just talking to a friend about how they went fishing in Final Fantasy XIV a few weeks ago, and they were so excited to tell me about it and what they got from participating. Fishing is a banal activity, but it helps people feel connected to their environment and the people around them. Why do you think certain father-son relationships are predicated on partaking in fishing trips? Why do you think so many MMOs—which thrive on fostering worlds that draw players in and incentivize them to stay—so frequently have fishing minigames? It extends beyond MMOs too! Folks love fishing in games like Stardew Valley, and they often plumb the depths of these pretty simple features just to spend time in these games and worlds.
Destiny 2 has never hurt for activities. If anything it has too many of them, and they often boil down to the same loop of shooting things, defending objectives, and moving on to the next target. These activities are fun because Destiny 2 remains one of the best-feeling FPS games on the market, not because they are inherently novel ways to pass the time. That’s why fishing felt like such an odd but welcome addition. It was actually something different, and even if it was ultimately pretty shallow, I preferred it to the similar combat gauntlets Destiny 2 has recycled and remixed for years. That’s why fishing’s removal is such a bummer.
The removal of content is something Bungie is still figuring out, and it remains a thorn in the side of its community. Many of the larger aspects of Destiny 2’s recent Into the Light update, such as the raid boss gauntlet Pantheon and a social hub with its own reward track, are already getting gutted from the game. Bungie has already said it’s looking for ways to reintegrate systems introduced via Into the Light into the main game, which raises questions about why they’re being removed in the first place. On the other hand, it does suggest there could be ways to reimplement features like fishing, meaning all hope isn’t completely lost.
The eternal problem with Destiny 2 is that it’s a huge game with a lot of technical debt: it currently comes in at more than 100 GBs of memory across its several platforms, and the number will only grow higher with the inclusion of The Final Shape. It’s why whole campaigns were removed from the game in the first place. Moving forward, Bungie’s got to be smarter about what it adds, especially if it’s going to keep taking things away from its players. Why is the game constantly growing only to continue shrinking? It doesn’t seem feasible or fair to either the developers or the players that vast swaths of Destiny will continue to disappear.
The hope is that whatever shape the Destiny franchise takes after this expansion accounts for these problems. It’s imperative to Destiny and Bungie’s long-term health that The Final Shape not only succeeds, but transforms the game into a more manageable one whose development doesn’t constantly cause fires like this. As a player, it’d just be great to have all the chunks of the game that I support every year stick around. For me at least, that begins by carving out a place for fishing, the most completely mundane part of Destiny 2 that I will miss so dearly.