It’s been a confusing and chaotic year for Destiny 2. There have been delays, multiple rounds of cuts at Bungie, and a constantly shifting content roadmap of what we’ll be rolled out when. The Final Shape capped off 10 years of storytelling in a way that dazzled diehard players, but now everyone’s wondering what will come next. Today, Bungie detailed the future of Destiny 2 and one thing is very clear: The big, annual story campaigns of the past are dead. What will replace them sounds potentially exciting, but still vague.
Starting in year 11, Destiny 2 will move to an annual model with two mini expansions and four free content updates. The summer of 2025 will see the release of the Apollo expansion followed by the free “major updates” Arsenal and Surge, with the Behemoth expansion arriving in Winter 2025 followed by two more updates. There will also be quarterly reward passes like the current season passes that let players earn weapons, armor ornaments, upgrade resources, and cosmetics.
Codename: Frontiers will go back to free seasonal updates
Here’s what expansions and seasonal updates will include:
Expansion
- New Stories
- New Locations
- New Missions
- New Weapons
- New Gear
- New Raids and Dungeons
Seasonal Update
- New and Reprised Activities
- New Gear and Artifact Mods
- New Modifiers and Challenges
- New Sandbox Meta
- New Events
When it comes to what these new mini-expansions will look like, game director Tyson Green said Bungie is looking to move away from the existing model of a story campaign that players quickly exhaust and move on from in favor of something less linear, more repayable, and that brings some mystery back to the Destiny universe. “We are actively prototyping non-linear campaigns, exploration experiences similar to the Dreaming City or Metroidvanias, and even more unusual formats like roguelikes or survival shooters,” he wrote. “Each expansion will present a new opportunity to try something different.”
With that in mind, the studio is referring to the first of these new expansions, Apollo, as a “nonlinear character-driven adventure.” While The Final Shape concluded players’ 10-year struggle against The Darkness and eventual face-off against The Witness, the next era of the game, codenamed Frontiers, will focus on new threats. ”This next saga is also based around a core theme, much like Light and Darkness did,” wrote narrative director Alison Lührs. “It will introduce plenty of new characters, factions, twists, and more. There’s a lot more here we will say eventually, but we don’t want to spoil the journey for you. This will be a multiyear journey, one we can’t wait to take you on.”
It sounds like what Destiny has needed for a while, and a smart way to keep the game more engaging without burning through ever ore resources and content. But the proof will be in how it’s executed, and whether the more modular stories feel meaningful and rewarding or just another way to stretch out the player grind between updates. Destiny 2 is getting major overhauls in three other areas as well, including a massive change to how loot works.
The first is the cosmic map players have traditionally launched activities from called the Director. It will be superseded by a one-screen menu called the Portal that is aimed at making it easier for players to understand what activities they need to complete next and what rewards they get for doing so. It seems like a smart idea to help onboard new players, something Destiny 2 is uniquely bad at, though I’m unclear on whether the original map is going away or players will effectively just have a second screen to contend with.
Destiny 2 is getting rarer forms of loot
Another big shakeup is coming for Core Game activities. Instead of having a very basic set of difficulties with slightly better rewards for each, a new system will let players customize the challenge and modifiers for each PVE activity in the game. The idea is to mix things up more and make loot feel more rewarding the higher up the challenge ladder you go. The hope is players will experiment more with different playstyles and buildcrafting, as well as calibrate the difficulty of an activity more closely to what is right for them.
But the biggest changes coming are for Destiny 2’s loot system. The bulk of the loot chase in recent years has resolved around finding weapons with “god rolls,” sets of perks that are largely considered the best for that particular piece of gear. Moving forward, loot will instead drop across various tiers, with higher-tier, rarer loot having higher stats, enhanced perks, and other bonuses that distinguish them from “standard” versions of that weapon. “The baseline tier of Legendary weapons and armor will be equivalent to current day Legendaries, with higher tiers being generally equivalent to Adept weapons in terms of upgrade,” the development team wrote.
The devil with Destiny is always in the details, however, and a big part of whether these changes work or not is how grindy they end up feeling and whether the time players put into chasing particular high-tier loot feels worth it or not. I can imagine a system where it feels great to slowly get better and better at a specific activity, overcoming various challenge modifiers and increasing the quality of rewards until you finally get that coveted highest-tier drop for the gun you love and it feeling great. I can also imagine a version where, unless you play dozens of hours a week, you never get to see the good stuff and none of this means anything for you.
Things that Bungie didn’t talk much about in today’s big future of Destiny 2 preview are things like power leveling, drop rate RNG, or onboarding new players when it comes to all of the story content that explains the game’s world but which has disappeared over the years. PVP modes like Crucible and Gambit also didn’t get much attention, with their status likely to get previewed at a later date. But for now the message from Bungie was clear: Destiny 2 isn’t going anywhere, and in fact the studio is looking to make the future of it potentially more interesting, approachable, and sustainable than at any time in the recent past.
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