Destiny 2
A free-to-play looter shooter with some of the best gunplay in the medium, built on a monetisation architecture specifically engineered to erode your spending discipline.
- //Free to play, but staying current costs roughly $80-120/year minimum: seasonal pass (~$10/quarter), annual expansion ($40-50), dungeon keys (~$20), plus optional cosmetics. Many players spend significantly more.
- //Uses a variable reward drop system, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines effective -- documented behavioural research, deliberately applied.
- //The 2020 Content Vault removed content players had already paid for; some was later resold in Legacy collections.
- //Made by the same studio, and in some cases the same engineers, who built Halo -- a series that shipped complete, with no seasonal content, no battle pass, and no weekly reset pressure.
- //Bungie was acquired by Sony in 2022. Marathon, Bungie's next major project, is in development.
Destiny 2 is a free-to-play looter shooter from Bungie, the studio that made Halo, where you fight across the solar system as a Guardian collecting weapons and gear through strikes, raids, and PvP. The core shooting is exceptional -- every weapon has distinct physical feedback, and the raid encounter design is consistently the most sophisticated co-operative PvE content in any live service game. Staying current costs real money on top of the free base game: seasonal passes, annual expansions, dungeon keys, and a cosmetic store, all layered with variable reward drop tables and time-limited content designed using documented behavioural psychology research.
The gunplay is genuinely exceptional and the raids are some of the best co-op design in gaming. Both things are true at once: it's also the most sophisticated psychological manipulation engine I've encountered in a game, and the manipulation works precisely because what it's built around is this good. Play it with a hard spending cap written down before you start, or don't play it at all.