If there’s a studio out there that addresses its player’s concerns faster than Bungie, I’ve never heard of it. Just a couple of weeks out from the initial panic over the new episodic structure for The Final Shape’s year ahead, Bungie has already made a dramatic decision to change course for the very next episode, which launches in October. Rather than the three weeks on, three weeks off schedule we’re getting with Episode: Echoes right now, Destiny 2’s next chapter will unlock each act all at once. During this week’s developer livestream, narrative director Alison Lührs described this as an experiment that will allow players to tackle each act at their own pace.

Those dissatisfied with the current time gates can play through the entire act right away if they want, while those who prefer the drip can still space the mission out week to week if they so choose. As is typical of this fanbase, even a plan designed to satisfy everyone is drawing plenty of criticism, inspiring arguments between people who want weekly updates and those who hate to wait. God help us, binge-watch discourse has come for Destiny 2.

The arguments on both sides are familiar. Those who prefer weekly updates worry that this change will negatively impact the community’s collective enjoyment of the story. There’s a watercooler aspect to Destiny’s Tuesday resets that many people, myself included, really enjoy being part of. Others hate having content on a schedule and want more control over when and how they play the game. They want to binge the whole story at once and move on to other things, rather than feel beholden to the game’s schedule. I’m less concerned about which release schedule is best, and more worried about the fundamental flaws at the core of Destiny’s seasonal/episodic model that this change doesn’t address.

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As far as immediate changes to answer complaints go, this is a win. The three weeks on, three weeks off plan was a non-starter destined to cause even more fatigue than the tired old seasonal model, and unlocking each act all at once will at least let people decide for themselves how to best enjoy each chapter. I’ve seen a lot of comments saying that all they’ve done is make a one-week on, five-weeks off model that will just create longer gaps between updates, but that is the heart of the issue. It doesn’t matter how many weeks are on and how many are off, the problem is that a predictable structure exists at all.

With Episodes, Bungie wanted to shake up the stale seasonal model Destiny 2 has been using for years. It uses the three-act structure to strengthen each individual episodic narrative, and it's easy to see just in the first act of the first episode how much the approach has changed. A lot remains to be seen, but to the extent that the goal of Episodes is to present self-contained stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end, I think the model will be successful. But this change won’t solve the real problem players had with the seasonal model.

It won’t matter if it's three weeks on, three weeks off, or one week on, five weeks off, or, like seasons, six weeks on, six weeks off. Destiny players are tired of having a predictable, structured model for content updates and story progression. From the standpoint of a developer that needs to organize hundreds of people around a content creation pipeline, these models make sense, but for the players worn out by the seasonal treadmill, there’s no set cadence that can fix this problem.

What we need are storylines and updates that feel organic. The best Destiny seasons were the ones that felt like events played out in real-time, that used time gaps to create cliffhangers and build tension. In an ideal season, story beats would happen not on a schedule, but when it was necessary for them to happen.

There need to be different ways to progress the story other than waiting for a specific Tuesday. This is something Bungie has frequently done with raids, including the most recent one, Salvation’s Edge. When the first fireteam finished the raid and weakened The Witness, the Excision mission unlocked, allowing the rest of the community to confront the Witness and take it out for good. Excision didn’t launch on Tuesday at reset, it launched when the story demanded it.

This is a lot to ask, but it's what Destiny needs. Bungie set out to refresh the seasonal model, but it hasn’t addressed the core issue of why players are tired of seasons, and changing which Tuesdays updates happen isn’t going to fix that.

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