Bungie launched a Destiny 2 starter pack in Season of the Wish and quickly removed it after players’ furious response. It’s pretty easy to see why as well. “Starter pack” ostensibly sounds like something meant to ease players into the space game, which is particularly helpful given how convoluted Destiny 2 is for newcomers, with its vaulted content and confusing expansion progression.
The incident comes after Bungie released Lightfall to lukewarm reception, admitted it messed up, and laid off several staff members before delaying The Final Shape to June 2024.
For $15, the Destiny 2 starter pack offered players:
The first three items are Exotic weapons – that’s Destiny-talk for rare stuff – but they’re old and not very useful in most of the game’s current activities. You can also get them for free in the in-game shop after putting in a bit of work.
The labeled Exotic items are just cosmetics. Your Sparrow is a space motorbike, and the ghost shell just covers your little flying companion. The ship only shows up during loading sequences, which makes Bungie’s descriptive note “Fly between destinations in your new Exotic ship” seem just a little misleading for players who have no idea what’s even going on.
$15 for this "Starter Pack" is outrageous.
You could just buy a Season, and get WAY more bang for your buck.Any New Player who buys this is going to be told
"Yeah bud you just got ripped off"
by their veteran friends.Do you think they would want to keep playing after that? pic.twitter.com/Lgchhk5Bul
— KackisHD (@RickKackis) November 29, 2023
The materials are a mixed bag. Some are useful, but only once you make a fair bit of progress in the game, and others, like Glimmer, are useful for everyone – but the amount is trivial.
“These would be login rewards in any other MMO,” one Twitter user wrote.
“$15 for this ‘Starter Pack’ is outrageous,” another said. “You could just buy a Season, and get WAY more bang for your buck. Any New Player who buys this is going to be told ‘Yeah bud you just got ripped off’ by their veteran friends.”
The reaction on Reddit wasn’t much better.
“It’s an immediate question who thought this was a good idea, market it as a starter pack but comes with no expansions and the contents are something dying MMOs/online games would give for free as login rewards,” Reddit user Ashviar wrote.
“If they really wanted to make a ‘starter pack’ for this game, it should be something like bundling together a bunch of the old expansions’ content together for cheap,” Redditer LettersWords said. “Of course, Bungie would never actually do that, though.”
What Bungie did do was remove the pack entirely, just a day after launching it.
Hey everyone, we launched Season of the Wish yesterday and have been monitoring the conversation around what you’ve been enjoying and what you haven’t. We’ll start things off with the Starter Pack, which is not something bringing joy.
Which is why we’ve pulled it from stores.
— Destiny 2 Team (@Destiny2Team) November 29, 2023
“We launched Season of the Wish yesterday and have been monitoring the conversation around what you’ve been enjoying and what you haven’t,” Bungie said on its Destiny 2 Team Twitter page. “We’ll start things off with the Starter Pack, which is not something bringing joy. We’ve heard your concerns and agreed that there are other parts of Destiny 2 that new players should want to dive into first before chasing these Exotic weapons, cosmetics, and upgrade materials.”
Over 100 people responded to that tweet by telling Bungie that wasn’t their concern with the pack to begin with, but Bungie didn’t say whether they plan to offer a different starter pack or a clear road for new Destiny 2 players in the future.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
