While Bungie has announced that it is stopping further development on Destiny 2, a new report indicates that the studio was looking for other ways to keep the shooter alive. According to a report by Forbes, Bungie started having internal discussions about “what the future of Destiny 2 would look like” after the release of the Edge of Fate expansion.
While the report notes that the decision to end support for Destiny 2 was made earlier this year, discussions started getting more serious following the release of Renegades owing to the expansion’s poor commercial performance. A major subject was whether Bungie would give up on its more recent two-expansion model in favor of switching to its older model, where it would release a single, larger expansion that would then be supported with year-long updates.
Destiny 3 was also discussed, and there don’t seem to be any indications that Bungie is keen on revisiting the franchise, at least for now. Another interesting idea was for a major relaunch, dubbed Destiny Infinity. While it wouldn’t have been a full-fledged sequel, the report indicates that it would have been closer in its release cadence to older Destiny and Destiny 2 expansions.
Interestingly, aside from its own recent commercial downturn, Destiny‘s demise was seemingly further helped along by Marathon not doing well right out of the gate. One source told the publication, “If [Marathon] made a billion dollars, would Destiny 2 have a chance to continue? Sure, maybe.”
It doesn’t look like players will have much say in Bungie potentially reprioritizing Destiny 2 either, with the report noting that “neither the petition nor the planned login surge on the 9th has any chance of reversing the decision or greenlighting Destiny 3.” As for now, Bungie is facing pressure to succeed with Marathon, and Season 2 will seemingly be a major part of this.
Bungie had announced earlier this month that June 9th will mark the release of Destiny 2‘s final content update. In a statement, the studio said that “it has become clear that after The Final Shape, we have reached the time of our shared worlds, and Destiny, to live beyond Destiny 2.” While active development on the shooter is coming to an end, Bungie has noted that its servers will continue to live on.
Interestingly, another report noted that, when Bungie made its announcement to stop supporting Destiny 2, many of the developers at the studio were also caught off guard. At the time, work was reportedly underway for a new expansion that was seemingly titled Shattered Cycle. Employees who already knew about the decision described themselves feeling isolated, and “begged” studio leadership to let the other developers know.
The last major expansion for Destiny 2 was Renegades, which was quite poorly received both critically and commercially. In our review, we gave it a score of 6 out of 10, noting that despite its intriguing use of Star Wars themes and references, the same aspects often felt overtly heavy-handed. The expansion also suffered from repetitive objectives in the Lawless Frontier missions, and its new faction being little more than a new set of vendors.
