As a longtime fan of the Destiny series, one who’s invested an unfathomable amount of time into both mainline games and their countless expansions, I’m a little lost knowing I won’t have any more of it to look forward to in the near future. Come June 9, when Bungie pushes one last update to Destiny 2, the journey is over.
And yet, while it fills me with a genuinely profound sadness that one of my favorite imaginary worlds is coming to an end, and that so many of the people who’ve worked on it are reportedly being laid off at Bungie as a consequence, I’ve known for a long time that in order for the series to live, Destiny 2 had to die.
Over the years, I watched Destiny 2 transform into something wildly out of scope and beyond even Bungie’s control. In the time since its launch in the fall of 2017, Destiny 2 has worn hundreds of faces. I’ve seen it wrestle with its own identity, never quite sure whether to lean into its FPS lineage, dive deeper into the MMO elements that first made it stand apart from its competitors, or become something else entirely. I’ve seen experiments to enliven the sandbox come and go and watched metas rise and fall. I’ve seen Bungie wrest the game from the hands of Activision, bloom from the glow of this emancipation, and subsequently wilt as the reins were handed over to Sony, which would cut the studio deeply and often.
Destiny 2 changed before my eyes over the years, growing from a hopeful retooling of the original Destiny’s fundamentals into a sometimes bright, but often misshapen tool. A monster of a game whose creators could barely keep it in check, it seemed, let alone massage it back into good spirits and health.
For one, Destiny 2’s Eververse shop–the game’s microtransaction hub–appeared to take precedence the longer the game was in operation. Increasingly, it appeared that Destiny 2 received more armor and emotes having to do with kind of bad brand collaborations than anything to do with the Destiny community itself. Listen, I understand that making a game, especially one as pricey as Destiny 2, requires lots of capital that these deals produce, but I also wish that if the company were taking on these collaborations, that they might at least find a way to inject some of these crossovers–like a set of Dungeons & Dragons skins in celebration of the tabletop game’s 50th anniversary–into the game’s active loot pool and activities that already have players grinding for shiny new rewards.
Countless other live-service games have found ways of at least delivering some of that content to players through gameplay, all the while offering further rewards for people willing to pay. As Destiny 2 neared its end, though, announcements of these Eververse crossovers seemed to come more frequently than updates about Destiny’s upcoming content and what players might look forward to playing, rather than buying. That, to me, sounds like the surefire sign of a game that’s lost sight of what its players actually want. It’s no wonder players eventually grew so discontented with the game and platform, given how much it seemed to view them as wallets to be drained rather than a community to serve.
Of course, no conversation about Destiny’s worst practices would be complete without mentioning the Destiny Content Vault. Content players paid for was ripped out of the game under the promise that it could come back later, after Bungie refined and improved it. It was only later that we found out, in court of all places, that there was, in fact, no longer any possible way to return large chunks of it–like the base game’s campaign–to the game. Occasionally, Bungie has found reason over the years to return parts of the game, like a reworked version of the Leviathan destination (sans the raid aspect) that launched alongside Destiny 2, but by and large, the Destiny Content Vault has swallowed parts of the game that have yet to return. Given the recent news, I think it’s unlikely we’ll ever see any of the Red War campaign returned to players, nor the vaulted expansions released in that first year of the game’s lifetime.
Destiny 2 bent a lot in its journey, and outright broke on a number of occasions. It was often “so over” and six months later, it would be “so back.” It was turbulent and beautiful to the end, unlike anything before it and surely anything to follow. Much like the game’s weapon and ability balance, Destiny 2 only ever ping-ponged from extreme to extreme, rarely enjoying any sense of equilibrium. A game’s existence should not be so tortured, though, nor should its developers or its community. These things are work to make and work to enjoy, which isn’t always such a bad thing, but on some level, this should be easier than it is. Destiny 2 is a video game at the end of the day, so why does interacting with it usually resemble some Sisyphean ordeal?
Why does understanding the story of Destiny require a Youtube video game historian’s 10-hour video recounting the parts of it that players can’t access? Why does it feel impossible to make a definitive claim when someone asks you what content the game actually contains? Why does Destiny 2, at any given point in time, feature at least half a dozen nonsensical currencies, with little or no explanation or direction provided as to where to spend them? Why is it possible for the game that I love one month to become something completely different the next? Why does it seemingly take the development team on Destiny increasingly longer to iterate and implement changes for the health of the game, which seems to have instead nosedived in recent months and years? Why are there more announcements of upcoming microtransactions than there are content roadmaps? Why can I never recommend Destiny 2 to a friend without couching my praise and adoration in several mind-numbing caveats?
These are questions that have plagued Destiny for a long while, primarily because there are plenty of answers, but few good ones that offer a path forward and away from the game’s untameable chaos.
The game and its team, as well as the community that formed around both, have most assuredly earned a break, a reset, or something new entirely. I just wish it weren’t like this. They deserve better than the inconclusive, abrupt, and harsh end that the Destiny franchise is getting, one coming part-way through a Star Wars-inspired narrative and expansion meant to grow the bounds of Destiny, not bring it to a close. What an insipid final shape for this once-wondrous thing to take on its way out. It reeks of an ending that stems from a thoroughly inept management suite full of suits better equipped for the circus than games production.
Destiny 2, as it is, resembles in no way, shape, or form a tenable game or product. It’s incomplete, not for lack of effort but because chunks of it, like mechanics and levels, can simply disappear. I’d be surprised if there were any narrative thread that a player can follow from beginning to end in Destiny 2’s current incarnation, since it is constantly shifting and surrendering parts of its identity while struggling to deliver value to its audience. Maintaining Destiny 2 sounded like a wayward project with a dwindling crew of passionate and talented developers working against the powers that be to rehabilitate it into something the players can still love. And while many, like myself, have managed to, it’s obvious that love is not enough, and that Destiny has become near-impossible to sustain or grow, an unfortunate but necessary stipulation for live-service games in 2026.
Destiny 2 didn’t have to be run into the ground like this. As Bungie’s announcement makes entirely clear, The Final Shape expansion that arrived in 2024 could’ve been a grand closing on an immense chapter of the series. Better to go out on top than to meander and ultimately peter out like we’re seeing now. Especially when such bullishness comes at a brutal and real cost: layoffs that will not only cut loose a number of talented developers who may never work in the industry again, but also greatly impact Bungie’s ability to continue and make the kinds of marquee titles that Sony desperately wants the developer to realize.
Instead, Destiny 2 was pushed so much further than it ever should’ve been, eventually becoming the de facto platform on which Bungie meant to iterate endlessly, taking the place of any potential Destiny 3. Rarely has there been a shakier foundation to try and build a house upon, let alone pile every aspiration for an aging franchise past its prime.
The thing is that even though Destiny 2–sandcastle that it is–is winding down, its end does not mean we’re getting a Destiny 3 anytime soon, if that’s what anyone is holding out for. Bloomberg‘s reporting on the state of Bungie makes mention of the fact that Destiny 3 is not in production. And while I think there’s certainly an appetite among the fanbase for a third installment to realign the maligned franchise–perhaps one of the most hotly contested topics among Destiny fans over the last several years–resources are not being reallocated at the already hemorrhaging studio to produce a silver bullet of a game that will fix the franchise’s ails. This pipe dream isn’t any closer to coming true with Destiny 2’s end of active development, and it might be time to let this one go. For now, at least.
Maybe by sunsetting Destiny 2–effectively neutering the game and putting it out to pasture, rather than wiping it out completely–all parties caught in its gravitational pull can be free. Maybe the developers who will be left can dream up something else. Maybe its community can find a kind of semblance of peace from the content treadmill that so often seemed to hurt them, and the game that turned them into cash cows rather than players. Maybe coming to a standstill and being able to soak in the breadth of everything that Bungie and Destiny did accomplish and get right is exactly what this game and community need. A respite from the takes and discourse and vitriol that flowed from its die-hard forum commentators. Lord knows that r/DestinyTheGame‘s most ardent posters are about to have much more free time on their hands to do anything but provide armchair commentary on game development.
Maybe they’ll move onto Bungie’s other game, Marathon, or something more similar to Destiny’s ambitions, like Warframe. Maybe, they won’t.
Maybe this is the chance to find a way for Destiny to live on in a way that doesn’t come at a cost to everyone involved. There are a lot of maybes hanging around this still-unfolding story, but the one thing I do know for sure is that this ride has gone too long, and we all need off for now.
