After All These Years, I Still Wish Destiny Had An Offline Mode

As I sit here, on June 6, 2024 at 11:45 a.m., two days after The Final Shape launched—Destiny’s last expansion in the story arc it clumsily started more than a decade ago—I am notably not blasting aliens nor taking in sweeping sci-fi vistas. I am not playing at all.

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Nope, I’ve been sitting here looking at the “One Moment Please” screen for about 15 minutes now, with repeated interruptions of “Destiny servers are not available” that take me back to the title screen, where I then need to hit Enter just to wait yet again. Well, at least there’s some nice music to listen to.

This connectivity issue speaks to a larger discomfort I’ve had with Destiny since 2013: its existence as an online-only game—one that not only requires an active internet connection, as well as multiple players to complete its bigger and more rewarding activities, but one that has removed, or “vaulted” earlier parts of the game. If this were an offline game, it would still be mine to play.

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That last point has been exacerbated for me during my time spent playing The Final Shape, which sends players to an old location not seen since Destiny 2 launched in 2017. If I wanted to remind myself of its consequence, to relive it in its original context, I simply cannot. I don’t like that I can’t go back and play all of this story from beginning to end without massive gaps.

I get that Destiny didn’t have some sort of grand plan for its story to unfold over the course of a decade. You don’t need a degree in literature to see that recent developments weren’t in the minds of writers when the game first shipped in 2013. Hell, if you finished the first Destiny campaign, it was pretty obvious that there really wasn’t much of a story, beyond references to wizards on moons and characters literally saying they didn’t have time to explain why they didn’t have time to explain.

But I would still like to be able to play this solar-system-spanning adventure from beginning to end. I want to see and hear the evolution of its world-class far-future sci-fi aesthetic shift and evolve over the course of a massive campaign. Heck, right now, I want to be able to play it at all. I want to play it like an offline, single-player game.

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Alas, I can’t. The original Destiny 2 campaign and the three expansions that followed are locked away. And several other events were temporary, ephemeral, only to be lived in and enjoyed in the moment. I can appreciate that conceptually, but I’m not sure if I like it in exchange for concrete experiences I can take in on my own, with the ability to go through a complete story arc, and see how this wild sci-fi story came to be what it is now.

There’s value in multiplayer experiences for sure. But as I sit here and am still looking at repeat “Error” screens that have persisted throughout my entire writing of this blog, I just really wish I could play the main story on my own, without an internet connection. Even Redfall now has that. C’mon Destiny.