Bungie continues to fire into its feet with both barrels: A new armor set in Destiny 2 has just been disabled because it makes the player who wears it completely invisible

It's been years since I played Destiny 2, and the game has changed dramatically since then. But some things never change, which brings us to the new Blackletter armor ornament set for Warlocks, which you currently cannot use.

The Blackletter set, which was released today, doesn't strike me as all that: It basically dresses players up like a stained glass window, surrounded by mossy brickwork. Fine if you're into cosplaying as a church, I suppose. It costs 1,500 silver to purchase in the Eververse Store, which works out to roughly $15 in real money—not cheap.

Problem is, it doesn't seem to be rendering properly in the game. What this means in practical terms is that players with the ornaments equipped are literally invisible to anyone else in the game, which as you can imagine is not ideal in PvP modes.

The issue was reported on Reddit shortly after the set went on sale, and was confirmed by Bungie shortly thereafter. "We are investigating an issue with the Blackletter armor ornaments," the Destiny 2 Team account wrote on X. "We have temporarily disabled these ornaments until this issue can be resolved."

Look, these things happen. The problem for Bungie is that they keep happening. I used to think this sort of thing was amusing and even endearing, but that was in 2017, just a few months after the game's launch. Now it's 2025, and Bungie is still stepping in it: I know making and operating games is hard, but some of this stuff—like, for instance, 'Does this new armor render properly so players can see it?'—is basic shit.

And yes, I have biffed on basic shit myself now and then, but with Bungie it's a habit, and I genuinely wonder who's actually behind the wheel over there. It was only two months ago, for instance, that after revealing planned nerfs to Prismatic subclasses in the Edge of Fate expansion, Bungie quickly wheeled them back in the face of player upset—before they were even live. To my eyes that reflects a game unmoored, with no clear sense of direction or understanding of what players want, a troubling situation exacerbated by ongoing struggles with bugs, botches, and unpopular decisions.

Meanwhile, Bungie itself continues to be weighed down by ill-conceived cosmetic crossovers, stolen art controversies, the Marathon albatross, and the withering, increasingly impatient eye of Sony—amidst all its usual day-to-day travails. It's at a point where the studio doesn't need a win so much as simply to demonstrate that it has the fundamentals locked down, and it just doesn't.

The Edge of Fate expansion doesn't appear likely to turn that around. The launch on Steam was met with relative indifference—"the lowest Steam concurrent count for any Destiny 2 expansion," according to PC Gamer's Phil Savage, a certified Destiny 2 superfan—and only 43% of the more than 1,400 user reviews are positive.

Phil described it as "simply bad value for money" in his own 54% review: "A good story attached to a middling campaign tied to a disastrous overarching structure that demands too much of its players with too little in return." Those are big problems to be sure, and Bungie's seeming inability to manage even the small problems leaves me with serious doubt that it has any hope of handling them.