Bungie released the final update for Destiny 2 yesterday, Monument of Triumph, which featured huge overhauls of the game, just in time for all work to cease on the live service title from here.

The final result is that Monument of Triumph lived up to its sprawling previews, and then some. I’ll deem this the “everything” update, as by some miracle, Bungie made essentially every Destiny 2 activity worth playing again, from its top-tier raids to even Patrol mode, given the addition of relevant, appealing rewards and fun alterations. It’s a well, monumental achievement.

The main draw here is loot, loot, loot. Well over a hundred guns have been added to the game, with some new additions, as many as they could manage in the time frame, and many, many reprisals. But there are no “recycling” allegations here, as players have been diving into the classic gear with power gains and unique rolls. Specifically, practically all old favorites are back now, from Black Armory to Leviathan weapons.

This applies to armor as well, as Bungie has refreshed classic sets with new set bonuses, and added what is a frankly stunning number of earnable ornaments, something we’ve never seen at this level, and part of the “fire everything!” finale here, where players finally feel rewarded copiously for their playtime.

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The meta has once again been turned on its head with enormous buffs to loads of exotics and even new ability introductions across classes. The addition of seven full artifacts to flip through has made loadout building more interesting than ever, and not limited to seasonal focuses anymore.

There are plenty of surprises to be found in here as well. Destiny 2’ s narrative team had teased that while there are no traditional campaign missions per se, the finale would be loaded with as much lore as possible. These are not simply goodbye messages either (though there are plenty of those), rather, the snippets of stories we see are wild developments in the context of the history of the game, legendary characters resurfacing, baby Ahamkara, and previews of what might have been with the Nine storyline. These are entire potential expansions reduced to a handful of paragraphs, and a haunting vision of where Destiny 2 could have gone if it were allowed to live.

Players were not expecting to find an elaborate exotic mission buried in the new content either, a deep, deep dive into a multi-stage setting that’s already considered one of the game’s best. And given that it’s only been a day, there are likely more secrets to find.

The goal for Destiny players has been to show up in droves for the new update to prove to Sony that this was a franchise worth saving. They did show up, with 167,000 concurrent Steam players last night, ahead of this coming weekend. That flew past the 108,000 and 71,000 of the last two expansions, Edge of Fate and Renegades. It’s more than halfway to the all-time record of Lightfall back in the Light and Darkness era. So many people were checking just how high the playercount would go, at one point, the Steamdb actually crashed. More broadly, popularity.report tracked 389,000 concurrents across all platforms and 808,000 showing up on day one.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, as I often am, but despite all this, it won’t convince Sony to reverse course on killing Destiny 2 or cause them to instantly greenlight Destiny 3. It does, however, show that the Destiny fanbase still exists, and is still loyal when there’s great content to play, and you could argue there only hasn’t been as good of content to play because of layoffs and the resources sapped from the game. But I don’t believe that Destiny as an IP is dead. It’s too significant, too beloved by too many. When we see it again, however, I can’t say.

Despite what would have otherwise been a potential “turnaround” update with the promise of great expansions to come, Destiny 2 will now fade from here. It has to, as any live service would with zero new updates to come, no matter how good the last one was. The loot will be looted, and only a core will remain to play for well, fun. I’d say that’s good enough, but it’s not good enough. Destiny , Bungie and fans deserved better than this, but at least we’re going out on a high note.

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