I bought Destiny 2 the day it came out. I was ready. I joined a clan, played the beta and listened to all the positive reviews. I was ready to finally play a game as it came out. The same time as everyone else. I had never done this before. I was excited to be a real gamer.

Things started going wrong very quickly. The Wi-Fi in my house was so atrocious that the 40+ GB game took 36 hours to download, finally finishing Friday morning, just in time for me to go to work.

I work 10 and a half hours a day. 8:30am to 7pm. By the time I get home and out of my work clothes it’s 8pm. I have a total of 30 minutes to play games before dinner and that’s only if I want to completely ignore my fiancé, who is bored to death by Destiny and who’s been stuck at home and hasn’t seen me all day. After dinner I may have another 20 minutes to play while she’s in the shower, but that’s a rare occasion as she prefers to shower in the morning.

Nevertheless, that Friday I was determined to play my new game. We were going to visit my parents that night and my fiancé was anxious to begin our hour long car ride as soon as possible. I changed, grabbed my controller and booted up Destiny 2.

“Why are you playing that? We don’t have time.”

She was right. I was hungry and dinner was an hour away. But I had waited three days to play this game.

“I just want to see the title screen. I want to see at least that much.”

She agreed that was reasonable, although it totally wasn’t.

I booted up the game and was greeted by that awesome opening. It showed all my past accomplishments in Destiny 1 — which weren’t many to be honest — and then it presented me with this line of text:

“Begin your new adventure. Press A.”

Awesome. Just awesome. I pressed A, got to the character creation screen and quit out.

At my parents I checked out what my clan was doing. To my dismay, most of them had appeared to have already beat the campaign. So much for my hope of playing with everyone else.

I sat down Saturday morning to play. This is the only real time I have to play video games. I wake up early and my fiancé wakes up late. This gives me 3–4 sweet sweet hours of non-stop gaming time. I sat down to play.

Destiny 2 was awesome. I don’t play a lot of AAA games and my goodness was it incredible. The graphics, the story, the wandering out of the destroyed last city, it all was amazing. I was in heaven. A couple hours later I tuned the game off and went to eat breakfast.

I had to say hi to my parents. I had to talk to my fiancé. My mom’s awesome friends were staying with my family so I talked to them. I had a fun weekend with people I liked.

But I barely played Destiny. Maybe a total of three hours that weekend. The first weekend I bought it. Life got in the way.

As of now, it’s been 14 days since Destiny 2 came out. In that time I still haven’t beaten the story, I just got to level 10 and I’ve racked up a total of six hours of gameplay.

In the meantime all of my clan mates seem to have beaten the game, are nearly maxed out, and are trying to beat the raid. A raid, mind you that takes more than six hours just to attempt.

I keep feeling like today’s video game culture isn’t meant for people like me. People who can only spare a few hours a week for a new game. All the Destiny YouTube videos are about tackling the raid and maxing out your character. In order to keep pace with the gaming community you have to dedicate hours a day every day, something I can’t do without pissing off the people in my life.

I’m not sure what that means. I just know that AAA hardcore video gaming isn’t meant for people like me.