Bungie Wants To Bring ‘Destiny 2’ Back, But Is It Too Late?
by Sage Ashford
Last week, Bungie premiered a five-minute video on YouTube talking about their plans for the future of the company. While they spoke about Marathon for a time, they led with a focus on Destiny 2. Alongside the promise that the story for Destiny isn’t over, they also mentioned the intention to bring back all the vaulted content for Destiny 2, including older campaigns, raids, and destinations.
Considering the trouble Destiny 2 has been in since the end of The Final Shape, I can’t think of many things they could’ve said that would drum up more interest than this. The vaulted content was always a sticking point for Destiny fans, and something that made it impossible to get new players into the series. After all, if someone wanted to play the original campaign for the game, they literally couldn’t as it no longer existed. For a universe that’s so proud of its lore, that’s a truly baffling decision that I’m happy they’re about to undo.
Ultimately, Bungie still needs to figure out a path towards a Destiny 3. According to Jason Schreier, that potential game still isn’t in the works. They’ve pitched it for years, but they’ve never been able to zero in on a version of the game that both feels like a meaningful jump over Destiny 2 and could also make an actual profit given a $400m+ development budget. As good as it is to have Bungie pulling content out from the vault, everything’s a wash if they aren’t eventually making their way toward Destiny 3. That makes a video like this all the more puzzling.
Game development now takes longer than ever, with many of the games announced near the start of one generation often taking until the next generation to release. Knowing that, even if Destiny 3 was approved after Schreier’s video, that means the earliest we could see it is in 2031. Make no mistake: Destiny is one of the most influential games of the last decade. But few franchises are so bulletproof that they can go a half-decade waiting for the next game, after fans had already been begging for the next game for years as it is.
As nice as it would be for Destiny fans to get their game back, part of me wonders if that type of game isn’t already a relic of the past. The AAA experience that constantly adds new content was expensive back in 2014; at this point it would probably cost GTA 6 numbers just to keep it running for two years. Something like Genshin Impact cost $200 million a year to generate the content it did. Even though Destiny 3 doesn’t need as much material as Genshin, being made in America means it’d still be far more expensive than anywhere else in the world.
I’m not sure the audience is there for that. Then again, I’m also not sure it should matter to Sony. They care about getting games-as-a-service off more than anything else right now, and few games-as-a-service have a better pipeline and built-in audience than Destiny. Figuring out how to build on that to create something that can work in the modern era is something PlayStation should absolutely be working on.
