Much ado has been made about Destiny 2’s often record-low playercounts based on Steam data over the last few months since The Final Shape (sometimes by me, admittedly). But checking those same charts, I noticed something pretty cool that happened this week.
The launch of Destiny 2’s Episode 2, Revenant, of course resulted in a spike of more than double in terms of playercount, up from its previous lows. But usually while day one of a season launch is the highest you’ll see, no matter what comes after, this time around the new Vesper’s Host dungeon launch, and ensuing Contest Mode raid race, it actually beat day one numbers, 89,000 concurrents to 78,000 for Tuesday. As I write this at noon on Saturday, they have “fallen” to 79,000, still topping launch day.
This is very good! In an era when it’s easy to be negative about Bungie and Destiny’s prospects, this is indeed a pretty positive sign that new content can be well-received and widely played. The dungeon is generally thought of to be a big hit, and the “raid race” that was really a dungeon race ended up being cool, and contest mode for this weekend is proving to be genuinely challenging. The world’s first race actually went longer than the Root of Nightmares raid race, which says something.
In general, Episode 2 – Revenant, seems like it’s going to be better received than Episode 1 – Echoes, namely due to its better, more interesting theme, a greater investment in Onslaught, solid weapons and gear, and this dungeon. So that’s good.
But what may factor in here is the ability for players to complete all Act 1 story content for the next six weeks in about 90 minutes, which could be done on launch day (that’s when I and many others beat it). So from here, there is no need to check in at weekly reset for story updates, and it’s just going to be gear grinds by themselves or resets for things like Nightfalls and Iron Banner launch and so on. I think that despite these current highs, that could lead to some new lows. But we’ll see.
For now I think Vesper’s Host shows that even if Bungie scales back on content overall, they could turn dungeons into sort of “mini raids” with a bit more difficulty, tougher mechanics and this Contest Mode race idea. We’re going to do this again next Episode as passes for two dungeons have already been sold, but with the launch of Frontiers we are going down to just one raid and one dungeon a year (no more dungeon pass) as Destiny content continues to scale down.
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