Instead of something monumental and game-changing for a key part of the game world, the Almighty event ended without any meaningful change in direction. Instead of delivering a strong narrative pay off on a season’s worth of otherwise dull and repetitive activity.

Developer Bungie has been building up a clash between the destiny world’s artificial intelligence supercomputin and a large planet-destroying ship called the Almighty. All of this past season’s activities have revolved around communicating with the AI character. Players were asked to participate in a mind-numbing number of public event activities to unlock an old destiny 1 weapon and a brief story mission.

Some players expected the Almighty to crash into the game’s tower social hub. Others expected a cutscene or a real-time space battle that would destroy or in some substantial way change the tower.

‘it’s a single single single… It’s not known.. He’s now…’it is a.. I’..’. It.. spines.

The event got off to a bumpy start when nothing appeared to happen. The delay, whether intentional or not, lasted more than 20 minutes.

Emote is a reference to Gandalf’s legendary line when facing down the Balrog in the lord of the rings.

The Almighty is running a few minutes late, but this is that good MMO. pic.twitter.com/kldjl4glkccc shows the man running a short short short.

When nothing happens so you immediately go to Twitter # destiny2 pic.twitter.com/3jkpjwfpyw.

The process appeared to be dynamic, so the lasers grew closer over time, but at a painfully so pace that made it hard to track minute-by-minute movement.

The lasers made contact at around 1:50pm et, nearly a full hour after the event supposedly first launched. It’s unclear if there actually was an initial real at first or if Bungie purposefully designed it to be as slow-moving as it actually was.

The ship began to explode in apparent slow motion. But that’s the only actual dynamic part of the event, as everything else felt like a series of subtle screenshot changes to in-game sky.

The landing site appears to be a permanent fixture of the tower. If players end up inspecting some of the crash debris, Bungie will award an emblem.

The conclusion required 90 minutes of build up and resulted in just an emblem. Not much more shows the mismatched expectations Bungie may have inadvertently cultivated.

I think this is cool but you got to give more of an indication of how much time people should budget. I thought this would n’t go past ten minutes.

The game’s new location, the dreaming city, underwent a transformation after the very first raid team bested the last wish activity. This is Bungie’s first real attempt at building a months-long narrative culminated in some form of shared experience for the player base.

Fortnite has emerged as an industry leader in what can only be described as live, simultaneous events. These are in-game events that happen in real time and are experienced only once by every player who log in and be present for the show.

Epic has proven it has the technical chops to do what video games even just five years ago considered almost impossible. Epic held a stunning Travis Scott show that projected the rapper as a skyscraper-sized hologram for more than 12 million players.

Epic, through whatever technical achievements it’s built under the hood of its battle royale game, is able to change its map in subtle ways almost every day. Some of its most successful feats have included a live event that then kicks players right into an all-new, changed game map, no update required.

Players spotted all the non-playable characters having changed their positions. The changes were minor and it will be interesting to see if Bungie can step up its game for future live events.