The impact of Bungie’s recent layoffs on Destiny 2 has started to take shape, as a leaker reveals changes to its future content plans.
The future of Bungie has been thrown into question after the studio announced it was laying off 17% of its workforce earlier this week, but many players are also wondering how this will impact Destiny 2 moving forward.
While the studio said it still has over 850 team members working on Destiny 2 and its upcoming extraction shooter Marathon, a prominent leaker has suggested the studio’s plans for the former will be notably stripped back next year.
What’s happening with Destiny 2?
According to Liz, a prominent Destiny leaker who has shared accurate information in the past, Destiny 2 will only have two ‘content packs’ and two seasons per year in the future.
As outlined in a post on Reddit, each season (now called episodes) will apparently last six months and be entirely free, outside of the usual season pass rewards.
According to the leak, new story content will be severely reduced, with no more weekly story updates and only a single introductory mission to set up each season, while other story beats will only come through character banter.
Every season will consist of two week-long Rally events, where players can use seasonal weapons and armour across a mix of PvE, PvP, and Pinnacle activities.
Earlier this year, Bungie announced it was switching from the traditional season model to a new episodes format, which will be split into three acts released every six weeks. The first of these was Echoes, which debuted on June 11, with the next episode Revenant set to arrive on October 8.
Before this, there was typically three to four seasons per year in Destiny 2, which lasted roughly three months each. If this leak is true, the shift to two six month-long episodes is a notable downgrade – especially in a shooter which has maintained an avid fanbase partly because of its story content.
While this leak hasn’t been confirmed, games industry insider Jeff Grubb has supported the idea that Destiny 2 will receive ‘lighter’ and ‘smaller’ content drops in the future.
‘When it comes to Destiny 2, the expectation I believe internally is that the future content will be lighter, smaller, to take less time than what The Final Shape did, and require fewer people,’ Grubb said on Giant Bomb’s Game Mess Mornings.
He added: ‘So, there will be expansions and updates, but they will be sort of… not a shell of their former selves, but they’ll definitely have that vibe about them. Those expansions for Destiny 2, they are not even using that term internally anymore, they are calling them ‘content packs’.’
Just to clear up some rumors floating around, Destiny 3 was not canceled because it was never in development, per people familiar. Bungie did some very early work on a spinoff project called Payback, but they canceled that a while ago. I’ll have a story tomorrow with more info
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) August 1, 2024
For Destiny 2 players, this would be particularly disappointing following The Final Shape, which is widely regarded as one of the best expansions so far.
While you might assume Bungie is working on something else Destiny related, in light of this reported downgrade, reliable insider Jason Schreier has cast doubt on those hopes, claiming neither Destiny 3 or a rumoured spin-off project, titled Payback, are in the works after the latter was cancelled ‘a while ago’.
According to him, work on Destiny 3 has never begun in earnest, despite reports to the contrary and mistaken assumptions that Payback was a new sequel.
Following the cancellation of Payback, which apparently happened in mid-June, it’s been reported that Destiny veterans Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy left Bungie as part of the ‘leadership restructuring’ at the studio. They were both believed to be working on the spin-off project.
This likely means Bungie is doubling down on its reboot of Marathon, which was announced in May last year but hasn’t been since since – with no word on when it will be released.
We’ll likely hear more about the future of Destiny 2 once the third episode of The Final Shape cycle, titled Heresy, launches, which is expected sometime early next year.
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