The State Of Destiny 2’s Festival Of The Lost is unacceptable

On Tuesday, Destiny 2 launched the Festival of the Lost, its Halloween event, and it didn’t go very well. The event started with a mission-interrupting bug that prevented all progress in the main path of the event, which kept all challenges locked and made farming the event pointless all day. But while Bungie jumped on the bug and got it cleared towards the end of the night, that’s just one aspect of why I find Festival of the Lost hugely disappointing, launching in what I consider an unacceptable state.

There’s a narrative among the Destiny community that these seasonal events are mainly focused on selling cosmetics to players rather than creating a fun experience, and to me, that’s exactly what we’re seeing with Festival of the Lost this year. Bungie is content to copy and paste the event to such an extent that even glaring issues from last year have not been fixed, while the main work put in is on the cosmetic side with new armor, ghosts, ships and sparrows to buy. The biggest change is the addition of a $10 “event pass” that includes some cosmetics (and not the best ones) as a new way to “engage” in the event.

Here are the issues with this relaunch of Festival of the Lost that have me pretty annoyed at this point:

The wait timer – Bungie has pulled off a really bizarre bug where if you kill 10 headless in a lost sector, which is exceptionally easy, you won’t spawn the boss. Rather, the arena will go silent, enemies will stop spawning, and you’ll simply have to sit and wait 60-90 seconds for the boss to appear. This was an obvious, annoying problem last year, and while Bungie said they wouldn’t have time to fix it at the end of the event, they haven’t fixed it in all of last year, and it really doesn’t help “did anyone actually play this?” narrative that players express when they encounter extremely obvious flaws in the game.

Missing features of origin – Another bizarre bug that happens is that the loot for Festival of the Lost also seems to include old replicas of festival weapons. Jurassic Green and Braytech Werewolf can drop with their old perk pools and no new origin trait. I’m not sure Horror Story has a new version at all. So if you farm a certain cast before the event ends, this just makes it even more difficult.

Side farming – Literally nothing was changed about how you acquire pages, meaning the most efficient way to do it is to repeatedly grind out public events. Or if you want more variety, playlist activities. The exact same problem as last year remains, where you’ll probably spend three times as much time on old activities painting out pages to convert with a single series of Haunted Lost Sectors. That’s not how the old Haunted Forest worked, at least not to this extent. Again, this should have been adjusted from last year and yet it remains exactly the same.

Recycled sectors – I was hoping for a new list of Haunted Lost Sectors this year, and yet all that happened was a single new one from EDZ. This includes about five new lines in total from Eido and a couple from Drifter, but the “narrative” part of this that started last year has been lost, since Glint still shows up and says all the same things, and it’s just been hacked together with some Eido stuff for this year.

Cosmetics – This is the “good” part of the event, because yes, the armor and the ships and the sparrows and emotes and such are all top class. But the Event Pass idea continues to suck as it did with last season’s event, and it just seems like ten times the work has gone into creating cosmetics than fixing and updating last year’s event. I don’t think that’s acceptable, given that Bungie wants these holiday events to be a regular part of every season going forward.

So, barring one major glitch, there are still plenty of issues with 2022’s Festival of the Lost, and I’m extremely disappointed with how this event has panned out this year.

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