Destiny 2 is out this year – this much we know officially – and apparently, it will be a major and dramatic leap over the existing game (this is the part that we know from some rumors from some very trusted sources about the game). One of the things that this might possibly entail (according to those same rumors) will be your character not carrying over to the new game, and you simply getting some kind of reward if you have a character built up in the existing Destiny.
Now, that is very obviously unfortunate, especially if you are among the people who spent hundreds of hours into their characters in the game, trying to get all the best loot for multiple characters, but decisions like this are unfortunately par for the course for Bungie. They come from a shocking dissonance in what they said Destiny 2 will be, and how they actually treat it.
When Destiny was announced, Bungie promised a shared world that would grow and evolve over 10 years- in other words, in drier, cynical, more cut and dry corporate terms, they promised a game as a service, or a game as a platform, that they would add to and iterate on over time. Note that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that- every MMO is a platform, for example! But Bungie then need to stop faffing around, and actually make the damn game the ‘platform’ it should be.
I understand why there may not be any cross platform play or compatibility for Destiny (though even there, maybe Bungie can make something work between PS4 and PC, and Xbox One and PC- and hey, maybe they can support keyboard and mouse controls on consoles), but at the very least, your characters should be constant and carry across, no matter what platform you play Destiny on. If I have spent hundreds of hours on my character on PS4, there is no reason I shouldn’t be able to access and use him right away when I log into Destiny on PC or Xbox.
It’s something for Bungie to consider, particularly as the launch of Destiny 2 approaches- will the new game be forward thinking and future proofed? Or will Bungie make the same mistakes again?