Destiny Celebrates 10 Years with Mixed Emotions

• Destiny celebrates its ten-year anniversary this week.
• Bungie is giving away nostalgic armor for all subclasses.
• A new title, Legend, can be earned by completing tasks.
• Players revisit the Cosmodrome and Devil's Lair.
• Destiny's journey began ten years ago in Old Russia.

Destiny's Ten-Year Anniversary Event Is Bittersweet

This week marks the ten-year anniversary of Destiny, a game that accidentally became my whole personality when it launched back in September of 2014.

I've loved it since the days of its alpha tests and I still love it now in the form of Destiny 2.

Sometimes it's been hard to love, whether that's due to stumbles in its live-service offerings or its reckless ownership that resulted in years of creative turbulence and constant overhaul.

Perhaps in the wake of mass layoffs earlier this year and these massive changes, the celebration of this tremendous milestone has been somewhat muted.

But that hasn't stopped me from getting in my bag about it all.

As part of the festivities, Bungie has been giving away armor for all three of Destiny's subclasses that looks pretty damn close to the first pieces of equipment we ever saw in the original game's concept art.

My Warlock, who has stood with me since September 9, 2014, is currently donning a look that has felt annoyingly out of reach for ten years—he looks like I pictured him as a bright-eyed teenager.

Additionally, Bungie has added a new title to be earned in the game to complement the occasion.

Players who finish a few perfectly reasonable tasks and one bothersome one can equip the Legend moniker.

I'm not a Title hunter, having only earned a single one in the past, but considering the ease of it and my love for Destiny, I've begun to chip away at it.

By the weekend, I should already have it.

I'll have fulfilled the first game's tagline all these years later: Become legend.

The tasks that need to be completed to earn the Legend title are predictably nostalgic.

For one of them, you have to fight enemies and grind for loot engrams in the Skywatch area of the Cosmodrome, the first-ever destination in Destiny.

It's a place I know like the back of my hand after grinding away in my youth, and it's a place I rarely visit in Destiny 2, which is filled to the brim with more exciting locales with ongoing stories.

By comparison, the Cosmodrome feels like a snapshot frozen in time.

When I jump in there, I'm suddenly back in my high school uniform and running home after last period to get back to the game that would go on to consume my life for a decade.

It's nice being back.

As I queued up the weekly Nightfall strike, a mission designed to be enjoyed with a full fireteam that is otherwise made harder with modifiers, the location read Cosmodrome and I began racking my brain to determine which level it could possibly be.

Eventually, a soft pang hit me as the realization dawned on me that I'd be revisiting the Devil's Lair, Destiny's first strike, in a move that would be a hell of a coincidence if it wasn't definitely purposeful.

Completing the Devil's Lair back in TK was the moment where Destiny clicked for me; we've been inseparable since.

I know every last beat of that mission to the point where I coast through it on autopilot, and as I ran it for the first time this week, all the while still in my D1-inspired anniversary armor, I felt the magnitude of my decade-long history and relationship with the game crash over my body.

I didn't sob, but I did tear up.

It's been such a long ride, and I can't believe we're still here ten years later running the Devil's Lair ad nauseam.

It all takes me back to a time when it felt like Destiny had a million things to prove, and I believed in its ability to do so.

I had nothing to go on but Bungie's pedigree at the time, and as a kid, I ate that up.

That feels significantly harder to do given the increasingly precarious position Bungie finds itself in these days and the tide having turned against live-service games like Destiny 2.

I keep hoping against hope that it can weather the storm if only because, despite everything, Destiny still means the world to me.

I don't know that I'd be lost without it, but I also can't quite picture my life or career without it.

As Destiny 2 stares down the barrel of another few uncertain years and reinvents itself and its formula once again, I'm just glad to have been here at all.

To have fallen for the first game's mystique.

To have plumbed the depths of the moon's hellmouth.

To have defeated countless Hive royalty and gods.

To have avenged characters who have transcended their simplistic caricatures.

To have befriended once enemies, explored and wielded the darkness, and made countless memories with cherished friends along the way.

And to have played a small part in this wild, inscrutable, and highly inconsistent ride.

This journey began ten years ago in this little pocket of Old Russia, and look where we've gone since.