All critical writing on Bungie's Destiny 2, no matter how inexplicable, has a common thread running through it: this game could be your life. In the three long years since Destiny initially staggered to launch, Bungie has done everything in its power to cultivate an impression of their first-person shooter as a world-beating social experience, from useless social apps to useless in-game social spaces. As early as 2011, you can find Bungie personnel talking about how they "feel responsible" for "building a universe that . . . [is] going to take a life [sic] of its own." That ambition didn't quite pan out—it took several expansions to mold the anemic launch version of Destiny into a functional multiplayer shooter, let alone a massively multiplayer online game (or MMO). Yet, as Clayton Purdom and Gareth Damian Martin both wrote in their respective reviews of the initial game and its third and final expansion, "belief" is a fundamental part of Destiny. It’s not hard to understand why the game attracts such a following—I’ve played untold numbers of deathmatches because the gunplay is perfectly tuned, and the game’s hours-long raids appeal to the MMO heads who bought Bungie’s initial “space knights” pitch. But the continued inability of major games writers to conjure any insights about the game except what Bungie signed off on at preview events is hugely disheartening. Bungie created an image of Destiny it wanted to sell, and the videogame press+ has happily parroted that line ad nauseum. Wipe away the gladhanding frippery of “quality-of-life improvements” and “the promise of its predecessor” in Destiny 2 reviews and you’re left with a whole lot of nothing. Here is my experience with the game: Playing Destiny 2 after completing its campaign consists of completing daily quests and events to rack up tokens to score loot drops, a loop of activities more familiar from free-to-play mobile games. Repeat this cycle until it becomes clear there is no conceivable end in sight. When you’ve exhausted the day’s quests, wringing out the substance of its meager “content updates,” it feels like hanging around an amusement park after-hours; you’re free to play multiplayer matches or shoot aliens in various areas, but without the promise of new stuff there’s little point. Everyone I know has stopped playing the game (presumably for this reason), but corralling a group of people to tackle the raid would be intimidating even if that weren’t the case. The game’s first expansion rolled out just this week, and the press is again happy to give Destiny miles of rope, the hype cycle quickened by New Content. A lengthy blog post from Bungie addressing recent outcry over a bunch of its silly game-balancing decisions is almost unbelievable in how precisely it reinscribes the mythos around the game: “Destiny 2’s post-launch game systems, features, and updates are being designed specifically to focus on and support players who want Destiny to be their hobby,” the designers write—though incidentally, and I don’t expect any medals for catching a corporation in a lie, this is in direct opposition to their stated prerelease intent to make the game accessible and rewarding for casual players. Destiny 2, the designers write in the same statement, is “a game where friendships are made.” It is “a game that fits into your life.” It is “a world you want to be a part of.” It is, in reality, none of these things. It is a shooter with unimpeachable headshot animations. Bungie are master aestheticians if nothing else: the game positively sags under the weight of its visual craft. Everything down to the fucking kerning on the inventory screens is tailored like a $50,000 suit. And after playing these games for as long as I have, the sheer opulence of Destiny 2 is all that is left. If Bungie wants to sell you a lifestyle with Destiny, then the game’s meticulous art direction is a Williams-Sonoma catalog. It seduces—if it was openly crass, the player wouldn’t come back. Thus the environmental design is maximal and lush, but never garish. One touch I really like: Each environment gets its own color grade, a subtle tinting filter over the screen that helps differentiate the shooting galleries. The Galilean moon Io’s red-and-teal color scheme nods to Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky while simultaneously upping it in breathtaking scope. Or, ostensible scope, since the accessible space on the planet is the usual arrangement of open areas and subtle corridors between. Even so, the game’s luscious starfields and monoliths are more than window-dressing, as (again) Gareth Damian Martin points out at Eurogamer. They are a feat of visual engineering, backdrops that “seem to strain to upstage the landscape in front of them,” while also a display of dazzling artistic and technical labor on the part of Bungie’s hundreds of employees—indeed, all the more stunning for how they are kept away from the player, like the glimmer of a top-floor penthouse seen from the street below. But that scope is above all else a reminder that Destiny 2 is a product infused with unimaginable amounts of money; Activision infamously predicated a $2.5 million “quality bonus” for Bungie on a Metacritic score of 90 or above for the first game. Destiny did not achieve that score and Bungie did not get that particular money. But millions of dollars are churning behind the screen at any given moment. The way the game presents weapons in the player’s inventory directly calls to mind car showrooms, or ads for luxury watches. They gleam, suspended in air, weightless and beautiful. And the game just gives you them! They pop, sparking with chameleonic light, out of downed enemies, like gumballs spilling from broken machines. But . . . these aren’t the best guns, the game intimates. The best guns are hidden at the end of the raid. If you don’t like those, wait for the expansion. There’s some wild shit in there. Not to your taste? The next expansion is sure to do it. Or Destiny 3, maybe. Destiny 4? The pendulum swings from hype—kindled by Bungie’s canny marketing and fanned by the willing participants at major game sites—to disappointment, which comes with its own clutch of attention-hogging headlines. The game itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The “promise” of Destiny is the promise that with enough time, with enough money invested the fundamental hollowness of the game can be buried. It is the devouring endpoint of a culture that not only insists that videogames need to be half-a-billion-dollar enterprises but that they have to be, accepting unsustainable growth with zero self-reflection. Destiny 2 was built by a veritable creative army marshalled for no particular purpose except to get you to buy Destiny 3; it is an advertisement for itself. The destinies of the designers, the players, and the critical apparatus all entwine to create one directive: more.

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+ In this piece I am referring to the entrenched writer-editors at major publications who decide what gets covered and how.

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Astrid B writes about movies and videogames on the internet. Follow her on Twitter.