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.

A new three-person activity, Court of Blades, has become available and sees players battling through throngs of enemies. Of course, the difficulty keeps rising, but you can harness runes to improve your capabilities. Five new weapons are also available, including a new glaive, bow, fusion rifle, sidearm, and SMG, each with Adept and Masterworked versions.

If that weren’t enough, new Artifact Perks are available, providing even more power to Arc subclasses and Trace Rifles. They can now stun and exhaust Overload Champions, heal your team with rapid final blows, and deal more damage to enemies afflicted with debuffs matching the same element type.

Of course, even more content is inbound in Act 3, including Heavy Metal, a PvP mode with Brigs and Drakes, a reprise of the Sunless Cell Strike, and Rite of the Nine, a new Dungeon gauntlet of sorts. Stay tuned in the coming months for more details.

Those who beat it in Contest Mode would receive the dedicated Exotic, Triumph, and an Emblem. Given the limited-time nature of the difficulty, the PSN outage caused PS4 and PS5 players to miss out. Thankfully, Bungie has recognized the issues and is planning an additional weekend of Contest Mode for the dungeon.

Dates and timings will be revealed later, but the developer clarified that this isn’t a repeat of the World First race. It’s simply “an additional opportunity for those who had fireteams impacted by the outage to attempt to clear the Dungeon at Contest Difficulty.” All platforms will have access to the same, so even Xbox and PC players who missed out can get another shot.

Sony hasn’t clarified the reason for the outage, though it did provide five additional days of PlayStation Plus to subscribers.

Due to issues affecting PlayStation players’ ability to sign in to Destiny 2, we are planning an additional Sundered Doctrine Contest Mode weekend for all platforms.

Specific dates and times will be announced at a later date.

Note: The Sundered Doctrine Race has concluded. This…

— Destiny 2 Team (@Destiny2Team) February 8, 2025

First, the new Heretical weapons, which look sleek and have Adept versions with an additional Origin trait, more perks and Adept Mods. Their perks are also pretty cool – the Adamantite Auto Rifle spawns Unraveling projectiles from healed allies, while the Pyschopomp Grenade Launcher grants Bolt Charge with final blows.

The Vault of Glass raid is finally getting craftable weapons, complete with new perks, while Trials of Osiris receives a new armor set. And then there are the Exotic weapons, including Barrow-Dyad, perhaps the most unique-looking Strand SMG yet. Its main property is creating Blighted Seekers when firing and regenerating ammo.

There’s also Lodestar, the first Trace Rifle that uses Primary ammo. Available in the Season Pass, it emits a beam while hip-firing, but aiming down sights activates burst-fire. Crown of Tempests Warlocks should also note the Arc Alignmeter, which fills with all Arc damage dealt and, when maxed out, Jolts enemies after a special reload.

Destiny 2 – Episode 3: Heresy goes live on February 4th for all platforms. Stay tuned for more details en route.

“What’s significant about the Dreadnaught’s return for Heresy is that it’s going to be changing, and we’re going to be fighting through it in ways we’ve yet to experience,” he said on the PlayStation Blog. “The Dreadnaught has reawakened for the first time in almost a decade, spurring the Vanguard and Guardians across the system to take notice. We finally get to see what has become of the Dreadnaught years after Oryx was felled and its halls were left to corrode, without a Navigator.”

Heresy introduces a new activity called The Nether, which combines patrols, “multiple bubbles full of challenging enemies,” and boss fights. Once these bubbles are complete, enemies will increase in Power. However, new boons help even the odds.

Minor boons improve stats; major boons provide passives like sprinting to accumulate Static Charge stacks; and corrupted boons. The latter will affect you negatively, but the pay-off can be worth it, like massively increasing damage dealt and received.

Senior designer Ryan Harris added, “We’ve also experimented with player modifiers, with increased health pools, no regenerating of health, low ammo drops and revive tokens, and a modification on healing in the sandbox throughout play. Players should look to build their loadouts geared for survivability as the game mode modifiers increase health pools of players significantly while also stopping all health regen.”

Players can also look forward to new weapons, including a new Support Frame Auto Rifle, Origin Perks, gear, and more. Interestingly, the livestream for the episode noted Oryx, the Taken King, as returning in “some capacity.” Perhaps he plays a role in the next dungeon, which launches on February 7th.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Launch issues, Career Mode bugs, performance problems (more so on PC than console) – even with all that in mind, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a worthwhile new addition to the Xbox library. The sheer range of new aircraft combined with new activities in Career Mode, World Photographer – including walking outside your plane in multiple rich biomes – and additional aircraft systems offer a rich experience. And when it works, there’s nothing quite like soaring the skies and peering down all creation.

The First Descendant

Kicking things off with free to play third-person looter shooter The First Descendant, this co-operative RPG tasks teams of up to four with saving humanity from a string of hostile invaders. It harbours everything you could ever want in a modern-day shooter: flashy gunplay, intricate visuals, and a varied cast of colourful characters each with unique skills and capabilities. However, there are problems in its frustratingly slow progression, non-existent story, and atrocious balancing. Sort these issues out and The First Descendant could achieve some longevity in what is becoming an increasingly challenging domain.

So, nearly a year later after the total failure of one of those live service games, is Sony changing plans? Well, they would be wise to do so since Concord was only one of many stumbling blocks keeping the company from attaining the glory of their PS2 days. PlayStation is at their best when they don’t chase trends, and the current trend of always-online live-service is one that is obviously collapsing under its own colossal weight.

Concord was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Sony regarding its push for AAA live service trendy games. Saying that trend-chasing in today’s gaming landscape is a recipe for disaster is like calling the kettle black, and Concord was the cataclysm that finally cemented that reality for everyone to see. The reason Sony put all money on the project is they intended it to be one of their huge tent-pole titles spanning spin-offs and merchandise in Star Wars-like fashion. Well, that ambition didn’t go so well, with Concord shutting down its servers only two weeks after launch. Concord would go on to be PlayStation’s biggest gaming failure of all time.

But Concord is just the most visible failure in the AAA trend-chasing bubble. PlayStation’s initial push to develop 12 live-service games by 2025 was chopped in half to just 6 last year. What could have caused PlayStation to step back a bit on the trend-chasing train? Well, Sony’s acquisition of Bungie in 2021 wasn’t paying off as well as they’d hoped, with Destiny 2’s latest expansion The Final Shape, reportedly selling less than previous expansions. Worse yet, Bungie just had 17% of its workforce laid off earlier this year, demonstrating that Sony most likely overpaid their $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie and need to cut costs.

But Sony didn’t just waste money on Concord and Bungie; Naughty Dog’s standalone The last of Us multiplayer game was suddenly cancelled in December of 2023. Naughty Dog’s statement concerning the cancellation speaks volumes about the sustainability issues inherent in live service titles; they went on to state, “We had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.” Thankfully, Naughty Dog decided to walk the latter path, cutting their live service ambitions; hopefully Sony follows suit and makes the same decision.

Concord and TLOU Online doesn’t cover the full gamut of live-service hurdles the industry has faced recently, but they can give us some insight into why the AAA live service bubble is bursting. AAA liver-service games simply cost too much to maintain and cannot capture an audience that has already found their game of choice. The phrase, “We already have that at home,” sums up the situation well enough. Why play an imitation of the thing you like rather than the thing itself? What PlayStation needs to do is go back to their roots as an industry leader in innovative first-party experiences that cannot be had elsewhere. Why pay $40 for Concord when Overwatch 2 and Destiny 2 are vastly more feature complete, and multiplatform to boot? It’s a Sisyphean uphill battle to make a live-service game from scratch and expect the kind of audience that a longstanding game with an existing infrastructure has.

PlayStation has always been at their best at providing “prestigious” first-party games like Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon, just to name a few. Astro Bot is currently sitting as the most highly rated game of the year with a stunning 94 from critics and users alike on Metacritic. Astro Bot also sold well, ranking at number 2 in US unit sales for September 7th, only sitting behind NBA 2K25. UK sales were record-breaking too, with GamesIndustry.biz confirming that Astro Bot is the “fastest-selling original platformer IP outside of Mario in the last decade”, with 21% higher sales than Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.

If you look at the best selling PS4 games, you’ll find an interesting trend: single-player first-party games with overwhelmingly positive consumer reception. The top ten list has nary a live-service game in sight while marque single-player experiences like Ghost of Tsushima and Marvel’s Spider-Man dominate with $10+ million in sales. Good games sell, and unique games create fresh new audiences, which is exactly what PlayStation has excelled at in the past and needs once again.

What PlayStation doesn’t need is another Concord on its hands. And it’s looking like that could be a possibility down the line with their 5 or so live-service games in development. With the success of Helldivers 2 earlier this year, it’s still tough to determine how committed Sony is to their initial live-service push. According to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, Sony’s internal attitude is still very hot on delivering live-service titles; he goes on to state, “PlayStation’s live service initiative was no joke, everybody was like… it’s live service games all round”. According to Schreier, Horizon Online is Sony’s next big live-service gamble, and it’s reportedly coming out before the next Horizon single-player game (Horizon 3). Fairgame$, a heist-based extraction shooter, is another of Sony’s tent-pole online games that they’re betting big on. And then, of course, there’s Bungie’s Marathon project. We have no idea how Marathon development is going at the moment, but considering Bungie’s mass layoffs recently, it may have been slowed and restructured a bit.

Sony hasn’t made a statement amending their live-service push since the failure of Concord, and they’re still going forward with a handful of big budget projects with enthusiasm. If insider sources like Schreier are to be believed, single player experiences like Horizon 3 are being put on the backburner for live-service titles like Horizon Online and Fairgame$. The recently announced Ghost of Yōtei gives a shred of hope that Sony’s single-player strengths are still alive and well, but without much else, it’s hard to pin down what Sony is focusing on. One thing is for sure, Concord spoke to Sony’s wallet and must have at least shifted their commitment to live-service titles in some small way. Add the numerous layoffs at Bungie and the amount of staff and budget required to keep online games ongoing through the years and you have a model that is unsustainable at the rate Sony initially wanted under Jim Ryan’s leadership.

It’s likely that Sony is now aiming for balance between premium first-party single-player titles and live-service games, but until we hear an official statement, it’s all speculation. Regardless, it’s clear to anyone that the live-service market is oversaturated, and the AAA bubble has effectively burst. If a game publisher wants to gain an audience and grow, it needs to offer unique experiences that players can only get there and nowhere else. This is what their competitors have been doing with success despite significantly weaker hardware and what made PlayStation such a leader in the console space for generations. If Sony can keep producing successes like Astro Bot and last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, they can potentially capture some of the success they had in their PS2 days.

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.

The dungeon goes live on October 11th at 9:30 AM PT for those who own The Final Shape Dungeon Key. However, you might want to prepare accordingly since Contest Mode will be active for the first 48 hours due to the dungeon race in collaboration with Twitch Rivals. Those who complete all encounters and open the last chest in that window will receive a custom Vesper’s Host Activewear hoodie and bracelet.

Destiny 2: The Final Shape is available for Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC, and Xbox One. Check out our review here – we gave it a nine out of ten. Vesper’s Host is the first of two dungeons launching this year – stay tuned for details on the next in the coming months.

New weapons and armor arrive in Act 1, including a new Exotic which shoots Stasis stakes. Players can also look forward to new Activities, Artifact Perks, and a new system that involves brewing Potions for specific effects. It also seems that turrets are back on the menu for mowing down hordes of enemies at a time.

Of course, Revenant will also introduce quality-of-life changes and new features. Instead of waiting for the story to play out over subsequent Acts, players will have access to its entirety on day one. The raid and dungeon rotator is also getting some new additions, while two of each activity will be available weekly to aid in farming.