Bungie’s game director openly admits the studio mishandled Destiny 2’s latest expansion strategy, acknowledges a series of mistakes and stresses that they “do not want to be a dead game-as-a-service”, promising changes after a plan that clearly failed to deliver and insisting they still have “many stories to tell” in this universe.

What is going on with Destiny 2? Bungie’s live-service shooter has been pumping out new content for ten years, but something has clearly gone wrong since the studio changed how it handles expansions. After Destiny 2: Final Form, Bungie tried to keep players engaged with a fresh narrative arc and a model built around smaller, more frequent expansions. The first attempt under this plan was The Edge of Fate a few months ago, yet it does not seem to have won over the community, and the studio is now openly accepting responsibility.

Game director Tyson Green spoke to IGN about the situation facing both Bungie and Destiny 2. He explained that a drop in player numbers after Destiny 2: Final Form was expected, but admitted that the way they managed the period that followed was not good enough. Bungie had hoped that The Edge of Fate expansion, released this July, would be able to keep veteran players invested, but that simply did not happen.

The Edge of Fate launched to positive reviews, yet it only managed to attract about a third of the players who turned up for Final Form. Green summed it up very clearly: “It sounded great on paper, but it did not work out. That was not the plan from a business perspective. We still want to make Destiny; we still have many stories to tell in this universe. There is still a lot to do, and we have to keep building the game. Unfortunately, it was not handled gracefully, but we had to try something,” he confessed, as reported by VGC.

Destiny Timeline: Everything you need to understand the story of one of the most cryptic science fiction and fantasy shooters in history – the article reminds readers, underlining just how dense and hard to follow the game’s lore has become.

Green went on to reveal that one of the main issues with The Edge of Fate was its heavy focus on endlessly chasing higher levels, while players clearly wanted more substantial, meaningful rewards. “I think we have learned a lot of lessons about what our players want, and there are really two types of games as a service: those that listen to players and respond, and those that do not,” he said.

“And we do not want to be a dead game-as-a-service; we want to keep building Destiny. So we are listening to our players, and what they are telling us is that they do not want to chase a statistic that keeps going up, they want real rewards.” Despite the disappointment around The Edge of Fate, Bungie believes that releasing two medium-sized expansions a year will let the studio react more quickly to feedback and fold it back into Destiny 2 in a more efficient way.

The Next Destiny 2 Expansion

According to Green, one of the biggest advantages of the new two-expansions-per-year release model is the freedom it gives them to experiment inside each individual release. “One of the advantages of the new release model, with two expansions per year, is that you can experiment more within each of those expansions, you can try different things. We knew we wanted to tell a space-western style revenge story, and we said, ‘Let’s do it in Deserters, that is what we are aiming for,’” he explained.

Destiny 2: Deserters is currently scheduled to launch on December 2 and will introduce, among other things, a weapon inspired by Star Wars blasters. Green described the creative process like this: “We took the idea of Star Wars as our total inspiration and built a Destiny expansion around it, which is pretty much how we always work. In this case, I think it is much richer because we are being more deliberate with its influences and style, but at its core, it is still a Destiny expansion.” While one part of Bungie continues to work on Destiny 2, another team at the studio is pushing ahead with Marathon, which remains in closed testing and is planned to be released before March 31, 2026.

Source: 3djuegos