The hope that I'll be invariably burnt out of Destiny by then is the light in the end of my tunnel

All things are temporary.

I mostly feel bad for other people who can never "replay" this kind of game if they missed out on it. I had to learn to live with that with I Love Bees, though.

I'll feel about Destiny the same way I feel about every other in a long sting of games I can no longer play. Happy that I got to play it but also sad that it's gone.

I think it absolutely blows. Still hoping to find a way to escape the close of this universe down the line, kinda like Durandal. You know?

...in the not-too-distant future, the servers for the last Destiny game will shut off, and you will never be able to play this game again. Your legend, your guardian, all of the exotics you worked so hard to earn, and all of the DLC you paid hundreds of dollars for, will be lost to you. Forever.

How do you feel about that?

It's all about the journey. In the end, nobody will care that I still have my Khvostov. It will mean nothing, except that I will know that through thick and thin, through Vault Space crises, and rising Attack values, I always made room for my First Gun.

We'll all be level 100, but my Hunter never let go of his Makeshift Scarf.

All things go away. We paid for fun experiences with friends, and got all of that and more. We scaled our mountains, became legends, and will have had more great memories than we could even remember.

To expect to drag that on forever is silly.
To think that having paid $60 entitles me to the game twenty years down the line is silly.
It has been, is, and will be a fun ride, but we all have to get off at some point.

...in the not-too-distant future, the servers for the last Destiny game will shut off, and you will never be able to play this game again. Your legend, your guardian, all of the exotics you worked so hard to earn, and all of the DLC you paid hundreds of dollars for, will be lost to you. Forever.

How do you feel about that?

This is not a troll thread. I'm interested to have a discussion about ephemerality in media and how people respond to it.

I have my own views (complete with nuance and ambiguity!) but I don't want to influence the direction of the conversation, so I will keep those to myself for now.

I'll be around 45 when this game comes to a close. It'll be interesting to see if I'm still gaming at that age. I'm assuming I will.

Most of the money invested in gaming/electronics is temporary. We buy into consoles and game franchises, but ultimately we move on to bigger and better things. I have very fond memories of Zelda games, RB6, Splinter Cell, Halo, but I don't play any of these any more with the exception of Halo a handful of times a year at best. If I'm feeling nostalgic, I'll watch some folks on twitch or queue up some youtube vids or find the game soundtracks. But really I don't have a desire to play the antiquated content.

Ultimately its all about the experiences for me. Those will never go away despite the fact that I won't be able to play one day.

That 10 years is "the not too distant future".

I mean I guess it is in the grand scheme of things. Ive just never even begun to think about it in that way.

I hope Im done with Destiny by then. I'm certain I wont have as much time to put into it by then. I'll get over it.

- No text -

...in the not-too-distant future, the servers for the last Destiny game will shut off, and you will never be able to play this game again. Your legend, your guardian, all of the exotics you worked so hard to earn, and all of the DLC you paid hundreds of dollars for, will be lost to you. Forever.

How do you feel about that?

This is not a troll thread. I'm interested to have a discussion about ephemerality in media and how people respond to it.

I have my own views (complete with nuance and ambiguity!) but I don't want to influence the direction of the conversation, so I will keep those to myself for now.

I'm loving the experience of Destiny. I still can remember vividly my blood pumping each and every time as I made it to the lighthouse. I have memories of team doubles CTF in Halo 3, landing on Halo for the first time, watching the Halo 2 E3 demo first hand, and doing my first backflip in Rift. These are all experience. They are not just code running on a machine. They are moments in time that involved other people back before I knew about certain things. I'll NEVER ever have those again.

When I write software, a lot of the time it's with every intention of it lasting as long as possible. But it's always done knowing full well that in a few years (hopefully) it's going to get replaced by faster code using better frameworks. I've even written a ton of code to support purely an experience, coding a robot that was controlled by a website so people could play a skilltester/claw game over the internet to support charity. When we broke everything down and packed it up at the end of the day, I felt a lot of relief/pride. I didn't have the expectation that I should be able to hold on to this experience forever.

I believe strongly in game preservation and making sure we save as much as we can about every game. But that doesn't mean I think spinning up Destiny on some empty servers down the line is "preserving the game", that's not Destiny as we know it and it's reductive to say it is. We should be cataloging videos of every version, of each blind raid. I love what Cody has done to save the Dinklebot lines. I think that's really important in capturing what Destiny ACTUALLY is. I do hope that companies like Bungie end up sharing their code so we can learn more about how the games of today were made. I just don't need that to happen any time soon. The only danger is over time, people forget, code is lost, sitting on servers that are taken offline.

As for my guardian? When the lights go off the final time I'm going to raise a pint, cheers to the good times and look forward to what my next adventure will be.

I love this analogy for life, and I find that it applies to many things. I'm happy that I get to savor every bite of Destiny while it exists. It's one of those moments in time that simply wouldn't be the same without the active and vibrant community that exists for it.

I look at it kind of like living in the 70's and getting to see the Rolling Stones tour the world in their prime. I wasn't alive at the time, but I'd be damned sure to go to as many shows as I could if I was at that time. Something like that just doesn't come around again. Looking back and watching videos of them performing live would be nothing in comparison to being able to be there in person and feel that energy of the music and the crowd.

To me, Destiny should be held in a similar light. It was entirely designed around being temporal and existing in its current form only by virtue of the always online format. There are times when that sucks, but knowing that it will come to an end around a decade from now isn't going to prevent me from enjoying it while it lasts.

I haven't played Legend of Zelda (the first one) in years. Long enough that the memory's battery has run down and my character is probably gone.

I booted up some old COD games on the 260, but there wern't many players.

I have a Warhammer fantasy lizardman army, a table top game where I own a bunch of models that I hand painted and assembled, but the new rules are too weird and I can't find anyone to play the old ones.

What does all of this mean?

I think you're wrong, and that it actually will be the quite very distant future. Here's why:

I'm 36 years old as I type this. There is one (ONE) video game that I have ever played for 10 years or more, and that game is Diablo 2. Which still has servers running. Okay, that's a special case. But let's look at the facts:

- Destiny has a "10 year cycle" planned. That means that the servers will be getting full support at the level of an active, AAA title, for at least 10 years.

- After that, I expect them to slowly pare down the server numbers as players drop off (initial drop off when I game's final content is expended is pretty steep, usually). So I'm going to say that you won't even notice (if you keep playing) any changes until year 12 at the earliest.

- After that point, the cost of maintaining a handful of old-hardware servers for the dedicated few is far outstripped by the future buying power of those few hardcore fans.

- Case and point: Find the oldest game you own for your current gen system. Fire it up and try to play multiplayer. I bet you can.

So I think Destiny will still have server support until 2030, and I'm throwing that out as the absolute earliest date that they drop it. I give really good odds there will be another game between now and then that takes your attention. You won't miss it, much.

Also, I think it's safe to say Bungie won't stop server support for Destiny until they have a replacement FPS game released. They have loyal fans whom they wouldn't want to alienate.

In a "principle of the matter" sort of way, I guess it sucks that the servers will be shut down and render Destiny unplayable at some point.

In a realistic way, I don't really care. I rarely revisit old games that are that old. I used to play through Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask every few years, most recently with the new 3DS versions of each game. I still through in Halo in my original Xbox maybe once a year, but realistically less than that. Other than those few games, I haven't touched anything that's not at least marginally current in a long time. I don't even have a 360 anymore; I gave it to my parents so they could use it for Netflix in the living room.

So no, it doesn't bother me. That day is so far in the future that I am almost one hundred percent certain I will have moved on from Destiny by the time that happens.