Destiny 2 game engine complaints are rampant among frustrated Guardians due to a seeming influx of bugs, server crashes, and gameplay issues. However, Destiny 2 content creator Datto, who has more than 1.2 million followers on YouTube and 725,000 followers on Twitch that tune in regularly to watch him play Bungie’s popular FPS game, shares a thoughtful, if blunt, opinion on the matter in a video titled “Destiny 2: You don’t know anything about game engines.”
Throughout the 25-minute video, Stefan ‘Datto’ Jonke, who has been covering the game since its very early days, offers an honest response to ongoing player suggestions that “Destiny 2 needs a new game engine.”
“News flash: You cannot just save Destiny 2 into a .engine file, throw it into another engine file, and have it work,” he says early in the video, setting the tone for his charged commentary.
Datto acknowledges there are serious issues with game crashes and bugs and admits he knows little about game engines or the game development process. However, he notes he gleaned his insights for the video from a 45-minute conversation with developers who do understand game engines, suggesting his brief discussion granted more knowledge than the average Destiny 2 player complaining that the game needs a new engine.
“Destiny is such a complex game that in order to put it on a new engine, it would take years of configuration to do,” he shares. He uses an analogy that describes the process of fixing an old car and compares that to putting the parts of an old car into a motorcycle, which he implies is what the community seems to be suggesting with its “new game engine” complaints.
“A lot of problems that people have right now regarding connections, latency, lag, those are not even engine issues in the first place. Those are server issues,” he also asserts.
Further, he notes the royalty costs of switching to a new engine and the time-consuming nature of requiring the development team to learn to build in an entirely different developer platform.
Datto also suggests that, rather than complaining about the game engine, players should record bugs and submit them to Bungie while suppressing the urge to propose fixes.
“Bungie will handle the fix. They don’t need your stupid-ass suggestions on how to fix them because, chances are, the fix is something you probably can’t even fathom,” he says.
Regarding the suggestion that Bungie should build a Destiny 3, he also reiterates a point made in a video he made years ago regarding the Destiny 3 suggestions, noting, “Anything that Bungie could do for Destiny 3 can just as easily be put into Destiny 2.”
“I’ve just been having the conversation a lot over the past couple of months, and I’m tired of having it, so at least now I can send people to this video when I’m streaming on Twitch,” Datto cites as his reason for producing the video.
While the Destiny 2 community is known to be somewhat aggressive with its feedback, this commentary coming from a respected creator could help thwart ongoing uninformed player complaints regarding rebuilding Destiny 2 in an entirely new game engine or creating Destiny 3. The video has more than 219,000 views after only 20 hours and has also sparked discussions on Reddit and Twitter.
Guardians have only a few weeks left to complete Destiny 2 season 20 content and earn all the Destiny 2 Lightfall Exotics currently present in Bungie’s multiplayer game. Perhaps more fixes will come in Destiny 2 season 21. However, for now, players should consider doing as Datto suggests and be patient with the understanding that Bungie is likely working as hard as possible to deal with underlying game issues causing bad experiences for some.