“We don't want to be a death game” – Destiny 2 director re-evaluates the future of shooters

Destiny 2 may be one of the most influential and widely played online games, but it's been going through a rough patch lately. Developer Bungie knows this too.

“Destiny has been committed to strengthening its core[audience]over the years,” explained game director Tyson Green. “More and more core players are staying and playing the game, but relatively few (new) players are coming into the game. There's tension and contraction, and that creates problems for your game when you're trying to maintain an online service, especially when you want to continue to deliver great, compelling expansions to those core players.”

After launch Edge of Destiny Expansion Pack Player activity in Destiny 2 dropped significantly in July. It's not necessary because of its vision for a new storyline, but because of how it redesigns the flow of power progression to complete the campaign. Since then, Bungie has been steadily working on making changes to once again expand its audience, as well as upcoming expansion packs, Star Wars themed traitorwill mark the next step in the developer's efforts to lay out a better path for its ever-evolving universe.

For many developers building online games with live service elements, player base stagnation has been a recurring obstacle. Often, it might just be a matter of time – Destiny 2 has been running for almost 10 years, and it's inevitable that only the most dedicated will stick around to play the entire game. But one of the recent obstacles Destiny has encountered is one of its own making: Bungie wrote an ending to the story.

Since the original Destiny in 2014, each new expansion and update has formed a chapter in the saga of Light and Darkness, a lore-dense story that spans ten years. But with expansion in 2024, final shapeBungie brings the saga to an end. Of course, it does set the stage for what's to come – another multi-year storyline with a whole new focus. However, like the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Endgame, this poses a problem for Destiny 2, with many long-time casual players viewing it as the natural end of their journey. As you can imagine, this makes further adventure a challenge and a must-see experience.

“‘Final Shape’ brings things to a climax, like a fantastic ending that ties together a lot of threads,” Green said. “People are happy and satisfied with the games they're playing, and then a big (downward) surge in population (ensues). That happens because we end the saga. So you get what you pay for, right?”

“From a business perspective, that was not the plan,” Green continued. “We still want to keep making Destiny; we still have a lot of stories to tell in this universe. There's a lot to do and we have to keep developing the game. Unfortunately, it's not being managed very well, but we have to try something.”

The first step in making a compelling case for returning to Destiny after the conclusion of the Legend of Light and Darkness came with July's Destiny's Edge expansion, where Bungie laid the groundwork for its next major storyline, titled “The Legend of Destiny.” It transports players to a new area of ​​space where they come into conflict with the mysterious Nine Factions. This new campaign introduces new story threads and twists, shakes up the series' lore, and provides an interesting setup for Destiny 2's next phase. However, the expansion received mixed reactions from loyal players – and struggled to bring in new players. The most controversial changes were updated power levels and steeper grinds, which made progression more daunting than expected, creating barriers to reaching higher-end events.

Greene was candid in his review of “Fringe.” He recognized that the expansion didn't offer players a more satisfying way to level up their characters – a hard but necessary lesson for the development team to learn.

“We looked at the problems we had[after Final Form]and we said, 'We think there's a route here,' which is to lean toward more of a pursuit system, with access to new gear levels and armor sets and power progression, and things like challenge customization,” Green said. “Those are the things that allow the core gamer audience to really say, 'I'm really going to take this game and put it through its paces and get good rewards for it.'

“It sounded great on paper, but it didn’t work,” he admits. “I think we've learned a lot of hard lessons about what players want, and there are really two real-time games: one that listens to players and responds, and one that doesn't. We don't want to be a dead real-time game, we want to keep building Destiny. So we're listening to players, and what our players are telling us is they don't want to chase a simple rising number, they want real rewards.”

Following the release of The Final Shape, Bungie announced changes to its release plans for the major expansion. Instead of one release per year, the developer will release two mid-sized expansions per year, each with seasonal events. With the upcoming Renegades expansion, Bungie has the opportunity to showcase the recalibrated power progression it has steadily built in recent updates, while also unveiling new campaigns that celebrate the Star Wars and Destiny universes.

Green said the new release model helped the development of Renegades by giving the team more flexibility to adapt to feedback. This new expansion not only reevaluates the current gameplay and controversial system changes made earlier in 2025, but also presents a new campaign with the same tone as the 2018 expansion Forsaken, and a Star Wars story full of dark edges such as blaster weapons and lightsabers.

“One of the advantages that the new release model gives us is two expansions per year, which means you can experiment more in these individual expansions – you can try different things,” Green said. “So we saw what we wanted to do with a 'space western' revenge story, and we thought, let's do that within that story, let's aim for that. So we took the idea of ​​Star Wars as an overarching inspiration and built the Destiny expansion around that; that's what we've always done. In this case, I think it's a lot richer because it's more thoughtful in its influences and style, but it's still fundamentally a Destiny expansion.”

from me Practice time with the rebelsIt's clear that Bungie learned valuable lessons from Destiny's Edge's launch and post-launch content. I found the new campaign goals to be more straightforward and offer a fairly generous amount of power grinding, focusing more on participating in the new activity rather than grinding rare gear to push the power level up a bit. It also touches on classic Destiny by reintroducing a more advanced version of the faction system. There are a lot of thoughtful changes that really breathe life into the Destiny 2 experience, but the question remains whether this will keep players coming back in droves.

This challenge has become all too common for live gaming in 2025. While the Destiny series has had an influence on other games, it's now in a similar position to its many imitators. Still, Bungie sees this as an opportunity to re-evaluate Destiny 2. Reflecting on the current state of Destiny 2, core creative director Ben Womack is confident in the current roadmap and believes that by rethinking the rules, a new future will be built for the future of the game.

“When you're making something new, you often have to think about a bunch of conventions and boundaries, especially for a game like Destiny that's been around for a long time,” he said. “It's easy to think of these conventions as the boundaries of the rules, but the truth is, when you're trying to really create something special and make a splash, you need to revisit all of these conventions every time. That's especially true when working with Lucasfilm.

“We've looked at how we make the sandbox content that we've done, we now have blaster weapons that are going to be with us going forward, look at how the (lightsaber-like) Praxic Blade turns out, and we have all kinds of new Syndicates that turn out well. There are things we definitely won't do, but we have to accept and go beyond those usual boundaries to do them, and as long as it's still fun and people respond to it and it feels like it's there, then it's the right decision.”