Active development on Destiny 2's live-service model officially came to a close on June 9 with the launch of Monument of Triumph, a massive update that serves as both a celebration of the franchise's past and a final gift to the players who stuck around until the end. It's a fitting conclusion for a series that spent nearly 12 years surviving one existential crisis after another.

Spend enough time scrolling through the Destiny subreddit, and you'll quickly discover that one of the game’s greatest traditions isn't raiding, chasing exotic weapons, or arguing about balance changes. It's declaring that Destiny is dead.

Every era of the franchise has had its obituary. The original Destiny launched to mixed reviews. Destiny 2's first year nearly drove away much of the community. Expansions like Shadowkeep and Lightfall sparked doom-and-gloom discussions about the game's future. Rival games were constantly positioned as "Destiny killers." Anthem was supposed to replace it. Then it was The Division. Then Marvel's Avengers. Then whatever live-service shooter happened to be launching next. Nobody even talks about those games anymore. Most of them are dead. It’s fitting, then, that even when Destiny may have sporadically been defeated by hype, the Guardian’s Ghost was always there to resurrect them. Because Destiny endured.

The community's relationship with the game has always been complicated. Looking back at the most popular Destiny subreddit posts from the past year alone, it feels like watching a conversation between two entirely different communities. Last September, shortly after the poorly received Edge of Fate expansion, one player bluntly argued in a Reddit post that went viral: "If you truly loved this game, stop playing it." One of the community's most popular posts from the period after Monument of Triumph was announced struck a dramatically different tone,........

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