Starfield is what I always wanted Destiny to be, but it too fails to deliver

From an objective point of view, Destiny 2 is a thoroughbred Bungie shooter. Satisfying movement and gunplay, loads of gear to chase after, and all the trappings of a modern live-service content treadmill. Yet, the fantasy it sells to the player is a fair bit different. The Destiny you see in passing isn’t quite the Destiny that lured me in.

The bit that spurred me to actually articulate why I first started playing Destiny 2 came about very, very recently, with Bungie’s announcement of the content structure for 2025. Now, the stuff Bungie told us about sounds fine. Interesting, even, but that’s not really what I want to talk about here at all. Instead, it’s the artwork. Specifically, the very picture I use as the featured header above.

Now, Destiny has always been excellent at showing awesome alien vistas without actually allowing you to actually properly interact with them. And, to be perfectly frank, “interact” in this context is basically sci-fi overlanding with a bit of survivalism thrown in, for good measure. Obviously, that is not what Destiny is, but much of its art does rhyme with the concept.

One of Beyond Light‘s most striking pieces of media wasn’t a screenshot of a decked-out Guardian taking down a squad of Fallen in a single (frosty) attack. Instead, it was a calm image of a Guardian taking a cliffside breather, with the Pyramid vessel in the far background.

This piece of art is most certainly not an outlier. Huge, sweeping vistas come part and parcel with every single pre-release artwork package Bungie puts out, and they help ground the world in a way no in-game vista ever could. Destiny has always been famous for all of the delightful views Guardians witness on their way to pummel this week’s new ontological hyper-predator. This is a surface-level nod at the grander; it’s a suggested exploration happening in-universe and is about as far as Destiny 2 goes.

Yet, I often find myself wanting to interact with the environment and just explore the world of Destiny, and I’m most definitely not the only one. That’s where Starfield comes into the picture.

Pre-release, Starfield, too, targeted the same sense of awe as Destiny often did. And from the beginning, one key difference kept their journeys distinctly apart — Bungie’s world stayed neat and focused, whereas Starfield, by virtue of its gameplay, could not. Then it was hey, presto, suddenly I could reach out and venture into the concept art to explore all those places I could never access in Destiny.

In this respect, Starfield is perfect. It’s an effectively infinite exploration engine, brimming with places to be and weird things to find. I’ve also upgraded the exploratory aspects of the game with the delightful Desolation – POI Overhaul mod by agd25, as well as Shade’s Vehicle Tuner. The former makes POIs a bit more sensible and far spread out, while the latter adds actual overlanding features to the REV-8 buggy. All this plays further into the free-form sci-fi exploration niche I’ve hoped to experience for literal years now.

And sure, perfect is a bit much, as Starfield isn’t on top of its game elsewhere. It’s clunky and underbuilt in some major ways, and after about 120 hours of gameplay, it struggles to truly surprise me in a meaningful way. Such is the nature of these things. I was never under the impression that an actual playable game could deliver the same sense of awe as static concept artwork could, of course, so I’m generally okay with the trade-off.

Raiding and completing dungeons is, understandably, the high-point of any Destiny player’s experience with the game. Yet, those aren’t the bits I myself appreciate the most about the game. Instead, I’ve always been fond of just snooping around the maps, finding one-off setpieces (now entirely devoid of any activity) and enjoying the Bungie artists’ penchant for detail. Try looking up the old Niobe Labs in the EDZ map, for example, and it won’t take long at all to feel like you’ve unearthed a forgotten secret in the far-future, post-apocalyptic Switzerland of Destiny.

I’ve never been particularly fond of live-service offerings, and Destiny 2‘s infamous sunsetting, in particular, managed to break my infatuation with the game itself. The artists’ hard work I still very much appreciate, of course, but the removal of Io and Titan – some of my favorite stomping grounds – nudged me to look elsewhere for my exploratory adventures. Starfield is so close to what I wanted in this respect that it’s gotten annoying by now. Yet, the game’s insistence on repeating points of interest over and over again, populating its worlds with fauna that doesn’t act like it belongs, and generally being just the tiniest bit too janky to achieve proper immersion really pulls me out of of the world.

Starfield could very well be the game I want it to be, but it just isn’t yet. Maybe in a few years’ time, when Bethesda pushes out a few more meaningful, game-changing updates such as REV-8, modders release more delights such as Desolation, and we’ve had a few more big expansion packs in tow. It’s a big maybe, to be sure, but it’s not an impossible hope, either. And hey, the same absolutely cannot be said about Destiny, which is more than happy to stick with its unreachable vistas and tightly curated combat hallways.

Now, obviously, I don’t expect this topic to make sense to everyone. For most players, Destiny 2 is all about those things that keep us glued to the screen in the moment-to-moment gameplay. That is, of course, perfectly fine and valid. If you’d like to get a better idea of what I’ve been mulling on about here, though, I recommend checking out Bungie’s very own 10-year Destiny “Art Blast” over on ArtStation to begin with. Then, if you’re still up for it, scroll on through the absolutely phenomenal unofficial concept art collection hosted by Redditor Dark129. It consists of about 2,000 pieces of Bungie’s Destiny artwork, and it communicates the scope and scale of this universe incredibly well.

Bungie isn’t likely to lean into the more exploratory, conceptual aspects of Destiny anytime soon, I’m afraid. The game’s patrol zones are simply too busy and too small to properly deliver on that promise. That’s okay, though. Starfield is extremely imperfect in many of the things it tries to do, but it almost gives me that oblique high that Bungie’s been hinting at all along. In that sense, it certainly fails to deliver, but looking at it from a different point of view, it sure as heck is the closest I’ve gotten to it. So, I’ll take it happily.

In the end, I suppose I’m just trapped between Starfield‘s comparative mediocrity and Destiny‘s forever-unattainable fantasy, forever bouncing between the two until the end of time. Or, rather, until Starfield‘s been appropriately modded.