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The Starter Pack
Bungie
Normally on the second day of a new season of Destiny 2, I would be writing about how day one went, though today, that’s not the case with Season of the Wish. Rather, my attention is captivated by the absolute body horror that is the new “Starter Pack” Destiny 2 is selling, something pitched to new players as a way to get them started with the game for the low low price of $15.
Would you imagine that a Starter Pack contains some of the expansion content that’s now 3-4 years old at this point that serves as a foundation for the current storyline? Guess again. Rather this is a bundle that includes the following:
Three Exotic Weapons – Ruinous Effigy, Sleeper Simulant, Traveler’s Chosen
Three Cosmetics – Sparrow, ship, ghost shell
Materials – 125,000 glimmer, 50 enhancement cores, 5 enhancement prisms, 1 ascendant shard
You sort of have to be a Destiny 2 player to understand what an outrageously bad deal this is, but that’s the point! This is being sold to new players as some sort of thing to “get them started” in the game, when it’s utterly useless with three wildly off-meta exotics, three cosmetics that do nothing and materials you could probably earn in an hour or two of gameplay at most.
At a time when Destiny 2 desperately needs to be onboarding new players, this feels actively deceptive, and if I bought this and came to understand just how much I’d been ripped off, I’d put Destiny down and never look at it again.
Forsaken Pack
Bungie
It’s wild to compare this to other, also bad offerings Bungie has on sale. The Forsaken Pack, something I firmly believe should have been moved into the free-to-play column by now, has around two dozen exotics, a dungeon and a raid included in it for $20, though it’s currently on sale for $5. Even that felt like a bad deal when it went live, but this? Actively offensive. These would be free login rewards in another game. This is mobile game garbage in a fully AAA title.
This is Bungie executives trying to squeeze blood from a bone-dry stone. At this point we all know about Bungie’s 45% revenue miss for the year, so what are they doing now? Blasting the game with even more microtransactions, even worse deals. This Starter Pack is the worst of it, but after players complained that individual shaders were being put behind paywalls, guess what? Now there’s a four pack of shaders completely behind a paywall. Or we have another crossover armor set that cannot be earned with Bright Dust and costs more than a normal set would. And we seem to be losing more and more things that can be earned with Bright Dust over time.
I’ve been told in the past by people at Bungie that I’d be surprised at who buys what in Destiny 2, like a lot of people do buy old expansions I’ve said should be free, or they actually buy event passes that seem very bad. But clearly something is not lining up here if Bungie’s revenue is 45% off targets, whether that’s people buying seasons or people spending money on these increasingly ludicrous microtransactions.
Destiny 2 may not have the worst monetization system in gaming, that’s reserved for gacha gambling. But the sheer breadth of what it sells, from chopped up expansions to forty different kinds of cosmetics to now whatever this Starter Pack is supposed to be, it’s descended into live service hell, even if gameplay and story content and all the rest may be just fine, or even good lately! Whoever is making these microtransaction decisions, and I’m guessing they were not the ones recently laid off, needs to really, really look at what stuff like this is doing. At this point it’s genuinely embarrassing.
Update: Destiny appears to have taken the Starter Pack down, and it’s currently unavailable to buy on any platform after today’s mass outcry.
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