Yes, the meme is “Bungie has sunset sunsetting,” which will sound idiotic to anyone who doesn’t understand the biggest pain point in Destiny 2 ever since the arrival of Beyond Light. Sunsetting was the name given to the caps placed on Power infusion. This prevented a player from infusing their gear in order to maintain parity with the current Power level of the game, effectively eliminating that gear from common use.
Sunsetting sucked for many reasons, not the least of which because it felt like Bungie was taking away all our favorite toys. Destiny 2 is, first and foremost, a looter shooter. The acquisition and collection of loot is a central pillar of the game. For many players, placing an expiration date on loot shook that central pillar to the breaking point.
Destiny 2 often gets accusations of being a “grindy” game, and of course it is–all looter shooters eventually turn into a grind of repeated playthroughs, but the point of the grind was to get the best stuff. You might get lucky and get something highly coveted on the first try, but more often than not you’ll spend hours clearing raid after raid in search of the latest and greatest gear.
For every Destiny player, that grind came down to a very personal calculus. You might not have that much time to play the game, so you’ll do the bare minimum to get the loot you need for other content. Hardcore players will spend much more time grabbing the absolute perfect example of whatever loot they’re after. Most Guardians fall somewhere in between these two extremes.
But sunsetting altered that calculus. After all, why bother grinding for hours on end just to get a weapon that has an expiration date?
It was that feeling that all that effort will someday be for naught that most likely spelled the end of sunsetting, but there were other problems with sunsetting too. When Beyond Light first arrived, Bungie failed to update the world loot pool with enough new weapons to make it even feel like sunsetting would be a future problem. Instead, players got weapons from several seasons ago which would then be sunset in a matter of months or sometimes even weeks.
There were other problems with sunsetting too. When Bungie brought back the recently-sunset Moon and Dreaming City gear, it caused an uproar from players rightly accusing the developer of taking away their toys only to offer them back with minor updates. For many, it was a slap in the face that surely ended their time in Destiny.
And what of players that had already taken a break from Destiny and came back, only to find all their gear had been sunset and they’re just starting fresh? Sunsetting not only discouraged people form playing, it discouraged people from returning to the game they’d already sunk hundreds or even thousands of hours into.
The only good thing to come from sunsetting (at least, from Bungie’s perspective) was a general reset of the game’s loot. This got rid of certain problematic weapons (I’m lookin’ at you, Mountaintop) and cleared the slate for Bungie to add new weapons, but there were probably ways of achieving both without the negative side effects of sunsetting.
In fact, Bungie not only sunset Mountaintop, but also nerfed its efficacy to ensure that damned grenade launcher stayed dead and buried. In the future, Bungie will take a careful scalpel to problematic items rather use a sledgehammer against its entire loot pool (with the first items of business being Felwinter’s Lie and Warmind Cells).
But now, sunsetting is gone. Any weapons and armor that you already own you’ll be able to keep forever. And given how Bungie described Destiny 2 as “eternal” in the same breath that they announced sunsetting is being sunset, that could be for a very long time.
