The now inevitable and slow death of Destiny 2 has shocked the gaming world after Bungie announced it would no longer be producing content for the beloved sequel.
After 2024’s The Final Shape served as the culmination of many ongoing stories in Destiny 2, fans believed the series had entered a new era and that the march towards Destiny 3 had begun. It would seem that they were wrong.
While Bungie will continue to support Destiny 2, the game’s Star Wars-themed Renegades expansion will go down as its last. And as the company focuses its efforts on Marathon, reports suggest that Destiny 3 is looking increasingly unlikely. I feel for Destiny fans, as this is a colossal shame, but there’s a part of me that isn’t surprised, and it’s why I can’t count myself among the fanbase. At least, not when it comes to Destiny 2.
You see, I loved the original Destiny. As a longtime Halo fan, I was always going to be first in the queue when it came to any other first-person shooter Bungie developed. But while Halo was more of a traditional FPS, Destiny arrived during the live service boom and somewhat alienated me with its bullet-sponge enemies. Note to all AI enemies in video games: if I deliver a perfect headshot to you, I expect you to go down, not keep coming.
I soon forgave Destiny’s resilient enemies and was sucked into the franchise’s silly sci-fi story that conveniently made every identical Guardian the main hero. As a massive Warhammer 40K guy, I giggled at times at how much Destiny wore its influences on its sleeve, but I still had a solid 100 hours of fun — I even liked Dinklebot.
The thing is, though, I never got fully on board with the live-service nature of the game. I mostly just Doomed my way through its campaign, stopped when the credits rolled, and did the same thing again when the expansions arrived. I mostly ignored Raids and all those things that Destiny fans hold dear, but I did look forward to Destiny 2.
However, as any games journalist will tell you, the games you play are often dictated by the needs of your job, and Destiny 2 became a casualty of this. The game ended up in my backlog (a pile I’ve since realised I’ll never be able to fully clear in this lifetime), and I was excited to finally jump back in when I eventually got to it.
So, I was shocked when the opening of the first Destiny title played out again, rather than the opening of Destiny 2 I had seen others experience. I was back in the Cosmodrome, only this time I was greeted by Nolanbot, rather than Dinklebot. Confused, I Googled why and to my horror, discovered that I was so late to the party that the original Destiny 2 content, plus a couple of early expansions, had been “Vaulted” and were no longer playable.
Sure, I was free to jump into the current expansion, at least, once I had retrod some old ground, but I didn’t want to do this without experiencing the story in the way I was used to. Other players told me, “Who cares about the story?” and “Destiny isn’t about that, it’s about grinding loot,” but that’s not what I got into the series for. So, I exited the game, uninstalled it, and went to play something else.
While I know it isn’t for all players, vaulting content is a major barrier to my enjoyment, and to me, it sets a worrying precedent about game ownership. It also feels like Bungie is dictating to me about when I play its products, doing it in a window it decides rather than when I decide. Of course, I understand the practical reasons why this decision was made, but the points still stand.
Games like Destiny 2 should encourage and motivate players to return, not penalize them for doing so at their leisure. They should also cater to new players by catching them up on the story so far, rather than communicating that this doesn’t matter. After all, the whole selling point of The Final Shape was the satisfying end to the story, so it feels odd to prioritize it from one side and treat it with contempt on the other.
As my late friend, Destiny superfan, and gaming industry veteran Patrick Dane once told me, “The Final Shape was the end of the story they’d been telling since 2014. The thing that everything had been leading to. They’re entering a new story now. No one really knows what that’s going to be, but supposedly it will kick off the new era and chart where the franchise is going in the future.”
The fact that this is now unlikely to happen really is a slap in the face to the fans who’ve loyally supported Destiny since the very first game. I also can’t help wonder, would Destiny 2 be in this position if it had done more to woo lapsed fans who fell in love with the story, and more to help new players acclimatize to the experience and its expansive universe?
I can’t know for sure, but I do know that Marathon or no Marathon, fans should absolutely not give up on Destiny 3 — and neither should Bungie.