If that wasn’t enough, any loot, cosmetics and currencies earned alongside unlocked Titles and Triumphs will remain with the player after Open Access ends. Even for those who have no interest in playing The Edge of Fate, it’s a pretty extensive range of content. The Witch Queen and The Final Shape are worthwhile campaigns, while Episode 3: Heresy features some great new activities and loot.

It’s unknown whether all the Dungeons are also available for free, but you can experience three of them thanks to Rite of the Nine. The limited-time event includes Prophecy, Spire of the Watcher and Ghosts of the Deep, alongside their associated rewards.

Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate launches on July 15th for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, and PC. Check out the launch trailer here and learn more about its post-game activity here.

Much of this is attributed to how damaging Lightfall was for the franchise. Despite selling well and recording high player counts, it disappointed fans who expected better writing, a more cohesive storyline leading to the battle against The Witness, and more. Interestingly, former community manager and accessibility lead Liana Ruppert revealed on Twitter that leadership wanted the expansion to fail.

“Sucks that leadership wanted it to fail – there were so many elements of Lightfall that could have been monumental had the teams been properly supported. Still proud of everyone a part of it. Swinging around like a manic Titan Spider-Man is still S-tier,” she said, responding to Forbes’ Paul Tassi.

Why leadership sought the expansion’s failure is unknown, but it’s widely acknowledged as a sharp drop in quality after The Witch Queen. It reportedly led to a “sharp drop” in engagement and popularity for the title as Bungie fell short of internal revenue projections by 45 percent.

Destiny 2 is currently in the middle of Episode 3: Heresy, with Act 2 slated to arrive soon. It also has a new expansion, Codename Apollo, coming this Summer. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

Sucks that leadership wanted it to fail – there were so many elements of Lightfall that could have been monumental had the teams been properly supported 🙏🏻 Still proud of everyone a part of it. Swinging around like a manic titan Spider-Man is still S-tier 🫡

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) February 28, 2025

CEO Pete Parsons recently announced that the developer was eliminating 220 roles – a 17 percent reduction to its workforce. However, 155 roles, about 12 percent of the studio, are also being integrated into PlayStation. The latter may seem like silver linings, but the process will take multiple quarters.

A new studio is also being formed to work on one of Bungie’s incubation projects, touted as having a brand new sci-fi universe (hopefully not another PvP shooter like Concord). Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that 40 employees are moving to this new studio. As a result, a studio of over 1300 has dropped to 850. Still fairly sizable, for sure, but tell that to those who lost entire teams, much less those who didn’t get lucky and have lost their jobs.

What happened? Parsons explained that developers became stretched too thin with all its incubation projects. It thus scaled higher to compensate, but like many others, the company was affected by the “broad economic slowdown” and “a sharp downturn in the games industry” in 2023. It also failed to deliver with Lightfall, a pivotal moment.

Couple that with delays to Marathon and The Final Shape – which costs money, let’s be real – and eventually, the studio “exceeded” its safety margins. “After this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change our course and speed, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Even with exhaustive efforts undertaken across our leadership and product teams to resolve our financial challenges, these steps were not enough,” said Parsons, resulting in the current layoffs.

You’ll probably remember that Bungie laid off staff last year, owing once again to issues with Lightfall (also subsequently poisoning the well for any future stories presented in seasons leading up to The Final Shape, as indicated in player counts). However, as always, there’s more to the story.

Game File’s Stephen Totilo spoke to anonymous sources (including those who worked at the studio), reporting that Bungie has been losing money since Lightfall’s launch. Not only is it consistently missing targets set by Sony, but one source feels the leadership may have “sold things they were just not able to deliver.” While the last round of layoffs was for Bungie to show how serious it was in correcting the ship, they were reportedly not enough – the most recent had already been planned earlier this year. The Final Shape allegedly sold through less than Lightfall, but the result was seemingly already decided.

It’s thus less of a matter of whether the expansion – the end of a ten-year-long saga, where it’s guaranteed that a large chunk of players would jump ship after everything – performed well critically or commercially; whether the enthusiasm and support of fans actually meant anything to Bungie’s bottom line. Instead, it’s the ramifications of leadership, once again, that utterly failed its developers working tirelessly to deliver an exceptional experience.

Given how consistently its executives have been missing, you would wonder if this would lead to any change in leadership, such as firing Parsons. That apparently won’t be necessary right now because, as Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb reports, Sony Interactive Entertainment joint CEO Hermen Hulst, also president and CEO of PlayStation Studios, allegedly runs Bungie. The studio will reportedly “lose its autonomy and will become like any other PlayStation Worldwide Studios under SIE and Hermen Hulst,” said Grubb, also noting that the process is already happening.

What shape the studio will take in the future remains to be seen, especially with Sony shifting course on its previously big live service plans. However, past and present employees speaking to Totilo believe that not selling to the publisher wouldn’t have been ideal either. One even went as far as to say “The alternate history is insolvency.”

What about the rumored Destiny 3, codenamed Payback? In the latest Game Mess Mornings episode, Grubb said that this experience, considered the “next Destiny,” has been shelved “indefinitely.” Internally, it wasn’t called Destiny 3; Schreier would then report that it was a “spinoff project” cancelled a “while ago” and the developer did some “very early work on it.” The cancellation reportedly happened before the layoffs.

All of this feeds back into the current approach for Bungie, which is devoting all resources to Destiny 2 and Marathon. The latter is still allegedly coming in 2025. There are no changes or disruptions to the current roadmap for Destiny 2 this year or beyond, which means

Codename Frontiers – whatever it may be – is still happening. However, Grubb reported there will be “lighter” and “smaller” content drops for the game known as content packs. “When it comes to Destiny 2, the expectation internally is that the future content will be lighter, smaller, to take less time than what The Final Shape did, and require fewer people.” This doesn’t completely discount epic expansions, but they may be much less frequent.

For whatever it’s worth, a former employee revealed that a new raid was in the works and “looking really good.” How that will mesh with the current content plan or whatever Bungie is cooking up in the future remains to be seen.

As a fan of the franchise, one who wants to support the studio despite management’s decisions, it’s hard not to feel bummed out by all this. The fact that several developers responsible for some of the best memories I’ve made with the franchise over the past few months are gone just outright sucks. There are also bigger worries over the studio’s plans for the future and these reported “content packs.”

Leave aside whether the studio will consistently hit the same quality benchmarks with its environments, story-telling, activities, visuals, music, weapons, and so much more. Fans are already mixed about the whole Episodic approach, which isn’t all that different from the seasonal format that Bungie abandoned. With big expansions de-emphasized, that’s one less revenue stream and another opportunity to get new players into the franchise, leading to further stagnation.

While I don’t think Destiny 2 will be abandoned outright any time soon – because it’s the only game earning Bungie any money right now – all these events paint a grim picture of the future. Why should anyone looking at all of this be excited for Marathon?

One could argue that it will set a benchmark for the extraction shooter genre, but that has its own challenges in a market quickly becoming stuffed with competitors. Between its delays, Christopher Barrett no longer directing (allegedly) and a reported shift towards playable heroes, it could also end up as another mess for the studio, further compounding its financial failures.

Maybe there’s some hope, and Bungie could make a comeback, but many believed that would happen with The Final Shape. Whether it’s due to bad leadership, economic downturns, etc, the franchise is entering a dark time. For all the triumphs and catharsis that the expansion provided to hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of fans in-game, the industry has proven once again that reality can often be disappointing.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

That’s as per journalist Stephen Totilo’s newsletter Game File, which cites an anonymous source who formerly worked at Bungie claiming that in spite of widespread critical acclaim, The Final Shape sold less at launch than last year’s critically panned Lightfall. Allegedly, however, even if the recent expansion had been a much bigger commercial hit, it would not have been able to avert Bungie’s most recent round of layoffs, which saw the studio cutting over 200 jobs.

In our review of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, we awarded it a score of 9/10, saying, “When Destiny content is bad, it can be some of the worst out there. However, when it’s good, there’s nothing quite like it. The Final Shape delivers on all its promises and then some, providing an emotional catharsis for long-time fans while paving the road ahead for the future.” Read the full review through here.

As of last November, reports suggested that pre-orders for the expansion were tracking below expectations. Whether its strong critical reception and word of mouth will lead to improved, prolonged long-term sales remains to be seen.

For starters, there’s Destiny 2: Lightfall, the looter shooter’s seventh major expansion, which launched in February last year. With the next expansion, The Final Shape, coming in June, this gives players the perfect opportunity to jump in and catch up. You will, of course, require the base game to be able to play the expansion.

Joining the service on the same day are EA Sports FC 24, One More Level and 505 Games’ acclaimed cyberpunk action game Ghostrunner 2, and Zelda-inspired action-adventure indie hit Tunic.

With all four titles becoming available on May 7, subscribers will have until May 6 to claim April’s offerings, which were Immortals of Aveum, Minecraft Legends, and Skul: The Hero Slayer.

As part of Destiny 2‘s annual Guardian Games event, players of all three classes—Hunters, Warlocks and Titans—compete with each other to prove that their class is the best. The event will take place over a period of three weeks, and the winning class will see a statue in the tower celebrating their victory.

This time around, the Guardian Games will also include a scoring system, along with new limited-time boosts dubbed Focus Activities, which reward players with extra medallions if their class wins.

The Allstar Vector Skimmer hoverboard will be made available to all players for free, and essentially acts as a new type of Sparrow. Other rewards part of the Guardian Games Event Card include the new Compressed Wave Frame Grenade Launcher dubbed Hullabaloo, along with cosmetic rewards like an exotic Ghost shell and emote.

Destiny 2 is also getting new armor sets that have been based off the various armor designs from Mass Effect, namely, the armor sets based on Commander Shepard for Titans, Garrus Vakarian for Hunters, and Liara T’Soni for Warlocks. These armor sets will cost players real money as is the tradition with other collaboration armors in Destiny 2, like The Witcher and PlayStation’s first-party titles.

The new collaboration armor comes along leading up to the game’s next major event—the Guardian Games. The event will see all three classes in the game fight it out to declare the winner of this year’s Guardian Games. April will also see the release of “Into the Light”, which will then lead into Destiny 2: The Final Shape in June.

In an update set for release before the release of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, players will be getting the ability to change their Guardians’ appearances whenever they want. There will also be no cost or limit applied to this new customisation option. The only real restriction will be that players can’t change their Guardian’s origin. This means that Human Guardians can’t switch to Exo or Awoken.

The post also talks about other updates coming to Destiny 2, including a major quality of life addition in the form of a higher Glimmer cap. Rather than being stuck with 250,000 Glimmer, players will now be able to hold on to a maximum of 500,000 of the all-purpose currency. This change will arrive in Destiny 2 in an update set for January 30.

The rest of the post talks about some of the new armour that is currently in the works for the next iteration of the yearly Festival of the Lost. The studio has provided two distinct armour sets for each class, allowing players to vote for which set they want to see in the game.

Wish-Keeper is a Strand bow, and by scoring final blows and precision hits, you can create a Snareweaver Arrow. Fire this from the hip, and it lays traps that suspend enemies caught in it. Silkbound Slayer allows the weapon to deal more damage to suspended enemies, and grants faster draw time briefly after damaging a suspended enemy with this weapon. The latter also triggers when suspending a target using other means, like Shackle Grenades.

While it sounds complicated, it may be worth using for Strand Hunters and Titans, who have several tools in their kit for suspending targets outside of grenades. Whether it beats the likes of Ticuu’s Divination, Trinity Ghoul, or even Verglas Curve remains to be seen.

The return of The Dawning also means that players can take on the new Event Card, which offers a host of challenges for players to take on. The Event Card can also be upgraded to unlock fancier rewards, like a new Exotic Ghost, a Legendary emote, a transmat effect, and a Ghost projection. One of the rewards available as part of The Dawning is the Albedo Wing Arc Glaive.

Bungie has also announced that, starting in late January, Destiny 2 will feature new progression quests that change on a weekly basis. These quests, dubbed Riven’s Wishes, will be coming back alongside the Moments of Triumph. The Guardian Games will also be returning in March 2024, followed by a two-month content update in April titled Destiny 2: Into the Light.

Destiny 2 is slated to get its next expansion, The Final Shape, on June 4.