Destiny 2

Released to overwhelming critical aclaim, Destiny 2 was bound for success after learning from the mistakes of its prequel. In fact, only one month after the launch of the original title, IGN reported on talks of the next installment and its potential new features to improve upon the gameplay. The hype went on for a few years, hitting a perfectly postive sentiment score on two occassions, and hovering close to it for the rest of the time. It was not until launch when expectations tapered off, and coverage has hovered within the 0.6 to 0.8 range ever since. Only in November of 2023 did Destiny 2 manage to achieve its peak sentiment of 0.87, which quickly fell of the following month with the release of a controversially priced starter pack for the game.

Historically, coverage of the game has remained volatile, spiking with the release of new content and DLC's, with its first intial spike at launch of 264 articles not being reached until March of 2023, following the death of voice actor Lance Reddick as well as the release of the Lightfall season. This spike was a culmination of build up to the games finally, as article count has slowly creeped upwards following launch. The game is expected to conclude with the release of the final season The Final Shape to release sometime in 2024. A decline in coverage is expected to occur after this period as new content is expected to decline in frequency.

Despite the games modestly postive sentiment, monthly average sentiment only dipped below 0.50 on one occassion in August of 2021, following leaks to the games final season as well as concerns that newly anti-cheat software is reducing performance and banning innocent players.

The largest gaming news outlet is by and far Game Rant with almost 6,500 articles comprising 64.2% of the total articles for Destiny 2. Game Rant's top for authors, Derek Nichols (801 articles), Andrea Trama (777 articles), Weston Albert (620 articles), and Anthony Taormina (534 articles) making up 42% of Game Rant's articles and roughlly 27% of Destiny 2's total articles. Only Phil Hornshaw from Gamespot manages to squeeze into the top five authors covering Destiny 2, with approximately 6% of the total. Surprisingly, despite IGN ony publishing 4.4% of the total articles, they make up nearly 19% of all journalists, or a total of 82.

As mentioned earlier, the data shows that Destiny 2 has held a modestly postive sentiment of 0.69 historically. However, this may not be an accurate reflection of all viewpoints, as four of the five covered gaming news outlets report a sentiment above the average. Gamespot and Game Rant, which report scores of 0.71 and 0.67, respectivelly, drag down the average score considerably as the score would be 0.74 by source if unweighted, a difference of 0.05 points. In fact, the different between the most postive sentiment from IGN of 0.85 and of the most negative sentiment from Game Rant of 0.67 is a whopping 0.18 points. Therefore, it is important to take Destiny 2's historical sentiment with a grain of salt.

When looking at the sentiment of the high and lowest sentiment journalists with more than 10 articles, a single journalist managed to achieve a perfect score of 1.0 while across a large number of articles, Travis Northup (94 articles) of IGN. Conversely, the most negative author coincidently manages to achieve a incredibly low sentiment score of 0.08, Saniya Ahmend (16 articles) from Game Rant.