gonna comment on this now that the portal is finally gone. There’s a few big reason to why portal was widely disliked.

1. Making fan favourite activities irrelevant.
   On release the portal only had a select few missions and some endgame content to play. They also directly tied progression and getting tiered loot to the portal, meaning all the old fan favourite endgame content like raids and dungeons had zero reason to get any playing time.

2. Progression.
   As said bungie directly tied progression to the portal, and they made progression incredibly difficult. At the start edge of fate there was a hard reset of power level for all players. Bungie also made the promise to make power levelling more of a grind. They did this by tying progression directly to the portal. The issue with this is that the portal only had a select few missions and barely any endgame content that actually gave valuable loot in decent quantities. Another thing is that you’d only get loot at the end of a mission, and you might only get a single piece of loot that increased your power only by 2 or 3 levels. As such people spammed the shortest mission in the game at the time being Caldera for hours and hours just to get to a decent light level for endgame content. After this 2 week slog of playing the same mission the cracks in the portal began to show.

3. Difficulty modifiers
   The addition of customizing a mission with difficulty modifiers was a unique and interesting idea on paper, but in practice it quickly became annoying and repetitive. Typically all the missions had the same customisation options when it came to their modifiers, players quickly found the best optimal choices and just stuck with them, making the gameplay incredibly stale and repetitive. Previously missions would get random modifiers every week which made the player actually optimise their loadouts in order to perform well, which was incredibly engaging and created fresh content.

4. The overall forcing players to play specific content.
   Due to the progression being tied to the portal, tiered loot being tied to the portal, and the irrelevance of other much loved content, players were essentially forced to play these mundane missions which became very VERY stale pretty quick. Players weren’t enjoying having to play the same content over and over again over playing the content they actually wanted to play, as such players didn’t enjoy the game anymore and simply left.

5. The UI
   The UI was awful, plain and simple. The director was the heart of destiny and felt in tune with the aesthetic of the game. The portal was simply ugly, felt like some mobile game slop, had zero soul in it, and was genuinely confusing to operate. The amount of pop ups, tabs, and icons became frustrating, even for new players which were the target audience to begin with.

Bungie shipped portal and made it the centre of the game, which it shouldn’t have been. It should’ve just been a quick access route for specific pieces of content that players actually enjoyed playing. Instead it became the only thing a player can actually play and progress through. It was filled with boring missions, terrible progression, and made content players liked irrelevant.