Earlier this year, Bungie and Sony faced backlash from fans when they announced that Destiny 2 support would end as the team moved to focus on Marathon. Around the same time, reporting suggested that Destiny 3 was not in active development, angering fans even more who were quick to point out that Destiny 2 was still bringing in more players than Marathon, despite being much older.
Today, Bungie has addressed their own future and that of Destiny in both a Youtube video, and a blog post.
“When we announced that Monuments of Triumph would be the final content update to Destiny 2, you responded in force. Your voices mattered, and the way you showed up made a real impact,”
says the official blog post.
Indeed, on June 9, the date of the final update, players showed up in huge numbers. They would also create a petition to get Sony to greenlight Destiny 3.
More importantly, Bungie goes on to discuss how important Destiny is to the studio, and straight-up state that more stories and games are coming.
“We are absolutely not done with Destiny. We have more stories to tell, but we have to do it right and give our teams the time they need to do justice to this amazing universe.”
“That restoration will hopefully lay the foundation for how we reforge into new Destiny stories and games that you all deserve and that we want to create.”
The wording seems very specific: it does not say the team is going back to work on just Destiny 2, it states new games are coming. Is this as close to a Destiny 3 announcement as they can get? Previous reporting suggested Destiny 3 was going to cost too much for Sony to greenlight.
Oh, and what about that “restoration”? This brings us back to Destiny 2 specifically, for which Bungie does have big plans. It starts by unvaulting the locked-away Destiny 2 campaigns, a decision Bungie admits damaged people’s trust in the company.
“We understand that removing these experiences had a lasting impact on player trust and enjoyment of Destiny.”
Bungie continues:
“We cannot change the decision we made, but we can acknowledge its impact and do the work to make it right by restoring these important parts of Destiny’s history.”
In a moment of honesty in the video, the team admits the content “Never should have been ripped away to begin with.” A feeling I’m pretty sure fans will agree with.
Bungie says it will begin work on bringing back all of the locked campaigns, destinations and raids, but also wants players to understand the process will take time, explaining that changes made to the game after Beyond Light mean they will have to go back and update lighting, encounters, combatants and more so that the locked away content can function properly. Which is why they haven’t given us an exact time all of the locked content will return to Destiny 2.
Poria Torkan and Josh Deane – who are apparently now forming Bungie’s new leadership – take responsibility for the last few years which have certainly been rather rough for the company, even with the backing of Sony and PlayStation. There’s a strong sense that PlayStation is not happy with Bungie’s performance, even having to file impairments against the price they paid for Bungie.
Torkan is now Bungie’s Studio Head, while Deane is Head of Product and General Manage of Marathon.
“For more than 30 years, Bungie has built these amazing worlds, and communities have formed around them. Over the last few years, we lost sight of that. The consequences have been real. We lost trust. We lost incredible colleagues. And our ambitions as a studio stalled. We chased vision without enough focus on what players loved, and that’s on us. We own that.”
Finally, Bungie wants people to know that Marathon is not intended to replace Destiny.
“Marathon is an important part of shaping where Bungie goes next, but it isn’t and never was intended to replace Destiny.”
Bungie nevertheless admits Marathon underperformed:
“It launched to strong critical and player reception, but it didn’t reach as many players as we’d hoped.”
Personally, the timing makes all all of this feel more than a a little reactionary. Bungie ended active development on Destiny 2 while putting its hopes into Marathon, only to watch Destiny players return in huge numbers for the game’s final update while Marathon struggled to find the audience Bungie wanted. Suddenly, Destiny is “foundational” again.
Still, if that has convinced Bungie to restore content it admits never should have been removed and give Destiny a genuine future, fans will be happy“New stories and games” is the clearest promise yet that the franchise will return, although this still isn’t an announcement of Destiny 3—or anything else specific. Bungie has asked its community for trust plenty of times before. Now it has to actually deliver.
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