As successful as it might be, Destiny 2 has had its own fair share of problems throughout the years, most of them technical hiccups that never go unnoticed in the eyes of the players. Despite there being quite a few of these issues, only a handful of them come close to being as disastrous as the game’s second-ever database rollback was.
Bungie, in a never-ending effort to deliver quality-of-life improvements, rushed an update that resulted in consequences nobody could have seen coming: a complete halt of the game for 24 hours, where players’ progression on triumphs, seals, and exotic catalysts vanished without a trace.
How one Destiny 2 update turned out to be a nightmare for Bungie
Post-launch updates are the lifeline of any game that wishes to survive longer than a few weeks in the gaming world. What’s more important is the timely scheduling of these patches, or else you threaten to awaken the wrath of the player base, something that Hidetaka Miyazaki is way too familiar with.
Destiny 2’s second database rollback 2 years ago was one of the worst days for the studio. Talking about what exactly went down, the game’s principal designer, Alan Blaine, stated the following at GDC, as noted by PC Gamer.
In our haste to ship quickly and vigorously, as was our mandate, we accidentally shipped a nasty character corruption bug that caused us to take the game down for 24 hours and issue only our second rollback of a character database in Destiny history, -A test pass actually caught the symptoms of the bug, but none of us took it seriously enough or understood the root cause.
The designer revealed how the update had a corrupted bug that caused the massive wipeout of player progress in several areas, forcing Destiny 2 to be shut down for a whole day as Bungie worked on a fix. He also unveiled how a test run of the update did successfully catch the bug, but was pushed out either way as it was not taken ‘seriously enough’ by the developers.
Bungie’s Blunder: And its aftermath
It is easy to say that the most frustrating part of this whole episode was that it was entirely avoidable. As revealed above, a test pass had already flagged the bug before the update went live, which means that the studio was fully aware that this update had the potential to cause major issues in Destiny 2, but it was pushed out either way.
As is the case with many studios out there, Blaine also discloses how Bungie works on close deadlines, making them work with ‘haste’ in order to get done with patches for the game as soon as possible.
These close deadlines were most likely the reason why the database rollback done in January 2023 came to be in the first place. Many players even lost valuable in-game time and had to redo entire sections of content because of it.
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