Any time there are millions of people itching to play a new expansion, there’s bound to be difficulties. You might even call it Destiny... 2: Beyond Light’s rollout, which is happening right now. Today, Bungie’s sci-fi flavored entry in the “bad guys fall down, numbers go up” genre is within spitting distance of a new player count record on Steam. But not all of them can actually, you know, play.
According to Steam’s own stats, Destiny 2 peaked at 241,843 concurrent players today and continues to hover around that number. That means it’s currently the third most-popular game on the platform. The only time Destiny 2 has ever topped that number was shortly after the game first launched on Steam last year, when it peaked at 292,402 concurrent players. This is impressive considering the day the game has had.
It began with a heck of a lot of downtime, which kicked off after last night’s pre-expansion event ended at around 10 pm ET. The floodgates were set to reopen at 6 am ET today, but when they did, players began reporting server issues, sign-in errors, and connection problems on all platforms—not just PC. In light and/or darkness of all this, Bungie announced additional background maintenance, which is set to last until 7 pm ET. Players can, however, still login and play.
But even then, there’s no guarantee of smooth sailing. Many players are reporting lengthy login queues due to server capacity. Some of them are reaching the front of the line, only to get booted out after miniscule amounts of playtime, according to PCGamesN.
Speaking personally, I just tried to login with my freshly rolled Destiny dude who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Conan O’Brien. I was immediately greeted by a screen that informed me I was the 3,200th person in the queue. But I only had to wait 10 or so minutes to log in, and so far, I have not been booted. Not great, but not horrible either.
As for Bungie, the developer says that it’s “seeing an improvement in error codes,” but adds that “investigations are still ongoing.” So things are looking up, er, probably.