Image: Bungee LLC via AFP Relaxnews
The studio behind “Halo”, and more recently the “Destiny” franchise, is steering “Destiny 2” into the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X generations, unveiling its plan for three years of annual expansions.
Some of the first “Destiny” game’s original content is coming back to “Destiny 2” starting now.
Development studio Bungie, which found fame through the first “Halo” games and then transitioned onto the “Destiny” franchise for PlayStation4, Xbox One and PC, is looking to the future with a three-stage, three-year plan.
Instead of fracturing its existing community with “Destiny 3”, Bungie wants to make “Destiny 2” bigger and better than before.
“Our ambition is for ‘Destiny 2’ to be the best Action MMO in the world… but the simple fact is that our game’s size and complexity prevents us from improving ‘Destiny’ as fast as we, and you, would like,” community manager DeeJ explained in an extensive June 9 update.
That’s why the company is introducing the concept of a Destiny Content Vault. Cycling older content in and out on a yearly basis will enable Bungie’s teams to put more emphasis on more new experiences and more flexible technical improvements for the active “Destiny 2” game.
It also means that there’ll be opportunities to revisit some of the sorties and spectacles of the original “Destiny” within the scope of “Destiny 2”: the first game’s iconic Cosmodrome setting is being reintroduced during the new Season of Arrivals, which runs from now until Sept. 21.
Then, the game’s first top-tier team challenge, the Vault of Glass raid, is next in line when Year 4 of “Destiny 2” gets underway.
In other words, newer players (and nostalgic veterans) have until Sept. 22 to thunder through the game’s Mars, Io, Titan, Mercury and Leviathan locations before the DCV is activated and “Destiny 2: Beyond Light” debuts. Bungie also sketched out plans for “Destiny 2: The Witch Queen” in 2021, with “Destiny 2: Lightfall” set for 2022.
“We can now fit puzzle pieces we haven’t been able to pick up since the beginning of the original Destiny,” the announcement read, bringing “some of the greatest experiences in ‘Destiny’ to the forefront of the current game alongside new ones to come.”
“Destiny 2” carved off a large portion of its legacy content as free-to-play in September 2019 and continues to operate on the basis of paid expansions and season passes.
As a sci-fi oriented action game, it occupies a similar space to fellow free-to-play megalith “Warframe”, as well as paid entries to the “Borderlands”, “The Division”, “Call of Duty” and “Halo” franchises; “Fortnite” continues to dominate the free-to-play action game space and is broadening its appeal through non-combat modes like Creative Mode and Party Royale. JB
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