Never or always has been my tendency as long as I can remember. Either something is all-consuming or non-existent. Video games too. I played Destiny 2 from launch day until about 3 hours into the penultimate expansion, The Final Shape. I was obsessed with it until I just wasn't.

In the decade or so that I've been playing, I've amassed more than 3,700 hours in the game. Not flexing. That's time I could have been doing something more rewarding. Practicing bass. Coding. Writing. Cooking. Ultimately it's what publishers did to the game that caused me to lose interest. I'm not alone – the mismanagement and money-grubbing is why 90% of players left.

What does remain from the game are the friends I made along the way. Yes, I kid. But it's true. Months after I'd deleted the game from my machine, removed Discord from all my devices, and moved communications to Signal, my clan leader reached out to invite me to a raid as a last hurrah for the game.

The chosen raid has this bit of pure cinema in it, easily one of my top five gaming experiences – jumping around on a space station in orbit around one of Jupiter's moons while a haunting piano tune plays.

It brought me right back to the thick of it. Destiny 2 has such deep lore that the stories have been collected into its own site. There was so much mystery to plumb before it was turned into a free-to-play mess centered on microtransactions.

The invitation got me thinking about what made this game for me; why it held my interest for so long. And that's a complicated question with a very strange answer.

First some history.

I played World of Warcraft obsessively for a long time. I hated the lore, clicked through quest descriptions as quickly as possible, and did not enjoy the experience of playing the game at all. That is, except for raid mechanics. Group activities that required discipline and coordination. It was like playing an instrument in a band – if you did your part right, and so did everyone else, what an accomplishment. Everything else I did in the game was simply in service of this objective.

I didn't otherwise make friends playing World of Warcraft. I was an efficient cog. I played the twiddliest spec of the twiddliest class – Affliction Warlock. In short there are a number of spells that do damage over time, each with a different time to cast and duration. The challenge is to manage these spells. That's it. That was the addiction for me.

Destiny 2 has a similar gameplay loop for my chosen class, but that was never the hook for me. For that game, it was all about one beautiful weapon. This is the only time I'll use those words to describe an instrument of destruction.

I'm talking about Le Monarque. Yes, in this space-opera first-person-shooter, I was obsessed with a weapon so simple: a bow and arrow.

The gimmick is this: There is a tiny window after drawing the bow wherein if you release and hit an enemy's weak spot, not only does it do massive damage, it applies a damage-over-time effect to all enemies close to the one you hit. It makes a specific 'twang' noise when you properly release, and a 'thwippit' sound when you hit a weak spot. Watching the weapon's poison spread through groups is extremely satisfying.

That's once. If you're careful with your rhythm you can do it a bunch of times in a row. Bliss.

This is the whole thing. To the tune of nearly 70,000 of my 185,000 bow kills. I played this game entirely for the feel of this weapon. I haven't again found in gaming anything quite so satisfying.

Thankfully.

I'm not sure how I feel about Destiny 2's shutdown. I've played games to their end before, and like this it's always been with a whisper not a bang. It's just a thing that was, that could have continued to be great, but that just wasn't.