Difficult End of the Light and Darkness Saga in Destiny 2; Servers Crashed Under Wave of Players
The release of the Destiny 2: The Final Shape expansion proved to be a technical disaster, with servers unable to handle the crowds of players eager to experience the conclusion of the story started in the first installment of the series.
Yesterday, the Destiny 2: The Final Shape expansion was released. It was one of the most anticipated premieres of recent months, partly because the DLC is the culmination of the "Light and Darkness Saga," initiated by Bungie studio in 2013.
The previous expansion, namely Lightfall, turned out to be a big disappointment, so everyone wondered if the devs would be able to get back on track. Based on their first impressions, it seems to have turned out quite mediocre for them.
Servers couldn't cope
The The Final Shape DLC on Steam has received only 33% positive reviews, leading the website to categorize its reception as "mostly negative."
- Nevertheless, this outcome doesn't reflect the actual quality of the expansion, as the majority of players haven't had the opportunity to thoroughly evaluate it yet.
- The reason is the servers, which completely failed to withstand the release of the extension. Fans across all platforms eagerly awaiting the release spent last night watching error messages and making unsuccessful attempts to access the servers. Even a former Bungie employee, once responsible for community relations, had a problem with this.
The situation is best summed up by a comment from one of the players on Steam:
Best 40 bucks I ever spent and best 2 hours of my life... My favorite part was when Cayde said "Destiny 2 servers are not available. Dismiss this message to try again."
Even people who successfully access the servers are plagued by issues, as the game is capable of ejecting them from the campaign mid-play.
Only a few hours ago the situation started to improve, after Bungie restarted the servers, although it is still far from perfect.
High activity results
However, all these problems didn't deter the players - they really want to see how the whole story ends. Yesterday's record of activity on Steam was 314,634 players playing simultaneously. It's only slightly more than two thousand less than Destiny 2's overall record. It can be assumed that the situation on consoles is also record-breaking (or close to the highest popularity results).
Players also expressed their frustration by posting negative reviews for Destiny 2 on Steam. Here, however, review bombing wasn't very effective, as yesterday's reviews of the basic version of the game were dominated by positive ones.
Bungie clearly messed up, not properly preparing the servers for such an important event. As a result, it's difficult to assess whether The Final Shape fulfills the hopes placed in it. We will only discover if the devs have created a satisfactory conclusion to the story once the technical issues are resolved.
