Destiny 2

Bungie

The death of Destiny and its sequel have been greatly exaggerated at points over the last decade, but now? The bill has come due. Bungie announced today that Destiny 2 as we know it will no longer exist, its future expansions canceled, and the game effectively put into maintenance mode, all of this coming after a six-month content gap that had players on edge, something like this may be coming. Well, here it is.

The game will received a handful of final updates this June, more tiered loot, a final Moments of Triumph and, after many years, Sparrow racing. But this is it. Nothing more, outside of a tease of we will be “the first to know” if there’s more Destiny news. A sequel or anything like it was not announced.

It is an enormously maddening situation for many Destiny fans, where a series they have sunk hundreds or often thousands of hours into was badly mismanaged when it reached the end of its “Light and Darkness” era, a time when the game was hitting lifetime peaks as recently as two years ago. Its slimmed-down plans have gone disastrously, the game unable to even get a full year of reduced content out with two small expansions and two smaller major updates, resulting in this most recent yawning content gap.

Past that, a lot of anger is directed toward Marathon, which has taken hundreds of developers away from Destiny 2, which has very clearly suffered badly for it. The extraction shooter had an underwhelming, below-expectations launch, and at the end of its very first season, is already putting up numbers well below Destiny 2’s even with that game in the middle of its worst content drought in history. There will be many accusations that Marathon killed Destiny. It’s more complicated than that, but yes, the shift in focus was definitely an enormous factor.

It’s not clear that continuing on Destiny 2 forever was even the correct move, however. Rather, there was a push for this to have technically happened earlier, the saga reaching its natural conclusion at the climax of The Final Shape. The hope was instead that Bungie would get busy on the only thing that seemed likely to carry on the franchise in the future, a full-on Destiny 3. Despite some rumored rumblings, there has never been any confirmation that’s happened, nor does it seem likely that after rounds of layoffs and drastic reallocation to Marathon, there would even be enough people around to make that at all. And that would be 4-5 years away in any case, and Sony has not exactly shown the kind of patience that would seem to allow for that sort of thing.

What happens from here is likely very bad for Bungie. With no Destiny 2 content coming past this light update, it seems very likely the studio will shift to Marathon, a game that has yet to show any indication it can drastically turn around its own fortunes, so some level of layoffs seems likely. Sony was even laying off Bungie employees when Destiny was putting up record numbers, so now? You can imagine what’s coming.

Best case, at least some more devs move to Marathon and perhaps others are absorbed into Sony for new projects, like we’ve seen with the recent, nascent Gummy Bears projects, now official under Sony. Sony has taken impairment losses against Bungie to the tune of $765 million so far, though even with that, it still values it at as a $2.9 billion asset. It’s hard to believe that is at all grounded in reality based on where we are now.

While in recent years, there has been a refrain from outsiders of “people still play Destiny?” the answer, before this past year, was a resounding yes. Destiny and Destiny 2 remain two of the most successful live-service games in history, spawning many imitators that tried and failed to emulate its success (though one of its biggest competitors, Warframe, is as strong as ever, figuring out how to continue to thrive as Destiny’s dropped). It is the end of an era and genuinely sad for players who just wanted something, anything to do in their favorite game, and found a void where content used to be.

What happens next isn’t fully clear yet. The planned “midseason update” drop players have been waiting to hear about for months is still happening, but it’s mainly quality of life upgrades and surprise, reprisals of old content. It’s not to say nothing new is ever coming to Destiny again in any capacity, but if the era of expansions and seasons is fully over, it’s not clear why almost anyone would stick around, and we’ve already hit record low playercounts for months before today even happened.

I’m genuinely sad. Destiny has been the literal cornerstone of my entire career, and I would not be where I am without it. I’ve written at least a thousand articles about the game, its ins and outs, its problems (many, many problems), its victories and everything in between. There’s nothing to fill this gap in my gaming life, certainly not Marathon, and I am in fact quite angry at how all this has been handled under the most recent Bungie administration, and how the past leaders practically fleeced Sony with the overvalued sale before bailing out themselves.

Bungie will not be the same after this. Not even close. I think it will continue to exist, hence Sony’s it’s-still-worth-a-lot-to-us valuation, but it’s going to get smaller, and it’s going to be focused on a game that would appear to have less potential than even the twelfth year of Destiny would have. Ironically, with pure PvE and PvP modes on the way, it appears Marathon is trying to become…more like Destiny, in order to attract those players. But no matter what, it will not be the same.

Destiny could have ended with a Final Shape bang and regrouped to bring us the sequel it deserved. Instead, it has slowly melted into nothingness, and at best, will exist as a mere shadow of itself. It deserved better than this. So did its developers. So did its players.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.