With Christmas right around the corner, Destiny 2 released its “Dawning” holiday event, and players are not impressed with it.
Destiny 2 has been gaining a lot of notoriety in the month of December. It seems like every week, new shady behaviour on behalf of Activision and Bungie is being discovered by players.
What could have been a fun, Christmas themed event for the MMO-styled shooter instead turned out to be a cynical attempt to push players towards the Eververse—Destiny 2‘s only means to unlock the “Bright Engram” loot boxes earned in game—which is also the storefront where players purchase the game’s premium currency with real money.
During the Dawning event, players have the chance to earn Dawning Engrams which include special holiday gear exclusive to the event. However, as players began to dig deeper, they began seeing how restrictive this would be.
As Reddit user NLaBruiser discovered, upon leveling up, players were still awarded the regular Bright Engram rather than the limited-time Dawning Engram, with the drop rate for Dawning Engrams being very low.
Another Reddit user by the name of MEX_XIII seemed to suggest that players would only be able to get seven Dawning Engrams per account as, “Each account is limited to two Dawning Engrams for the Weekly Milestones…The Dawning will stay for three weeks, which means if we count the first free Dawning Engram (which is also only one per account), this will amount to a total of only seven Engrams.”
MEX_XIII goes on to say, “Considering leveling is giving just regular Illuminated Engrams and that the daily Dawning Gifts have a different drop pool which doesn’t contain the Winterheart Sets, it’s literally impossible to get complete armour sets for your characters without using Bright Dust or buying more engrams.”
Coming off the controversy of Star Wars Battlefront II, players are becoming more aware and less accepting of this kind of behaviour. You need only look to YouTube or the Destiny sub-Reddit to see players voicing their anger and disappointment at the increasing frequency of games attempting to employ these underhanded tactics.
Considering this also follows news of Destiny 2 capping end-game EXP and paywalling content from the vanilla version of Destiny 2 behind the “Curse of Osiris” DLC, it seems that Activision and Bungie are continuously attempting to get players to pay extra money for Destiny 2 until they get caught and “fix” the broken systems like they did with the EXP cap and the Curse of Osiris raid debacle.