Destiny 2 is suffering. Bungie’s once-beloved MMOFPS game has seen a drastic reduction in player count since the release of The Final Shape at the end of 2024. While this year’s Edge of Fate expansion was supposed to be the start of a new era for the game, the expansion’s terrible reviews have only caused its player population to drop further.
Bungie is aware of this, explaining to fans in a recent discussion that there’s a lost of trust to be rebuilt. On the other hand, parent company Sony is also aware of this, publicly expressing upset at Bungie’s performance since its acquisition in 2022.
Speaking to IGN ahead of the upcoming release of the game’s Renegades expansion, Destiny 2 director Tyson Green admitted that The Edge of Fate was “not gracefully managed” by Bungie and the transition from the ending of the Light and Darkness saga should’ve been handled better.
“The Final Shape brought things to a crescendo, where it’s like a fantastic ending that tied off a lot of the threads,” Green told the outlet. “People were pleased and satisfied with what they played, and then the big [downwards] spike in population [came after]. That happened because we ended the saga. So you get what you pay for, right?”
Green explained that many players simply believed that Destiny 2 was over when that story came to a conclusion with the team not doing a good enough job at telling all players there was more to come.
“We still want to keep making Destiny, we still have many stories to tell in this universe,” he said. “There are still lots of things to do, and we have to keep building the game. Unfortunately, it was not gracefully managed, but we had to try something.”
As for The Edge of Fate, Green explained that the expansion was simply too focused on grinding instead of giving players satisfying rewards. The director explained that the expansion did not appeal to the core audience, but the team has now been “taught a bunch of hard lessons about what out players want”.
“There are really two kinds of live games,” he explained, “those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don’t. And we don’t want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny. So we’re listening to our players, and what our players are telling us is that they don’t want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards.”
Alongside the continued expansions of Destiny 2, Bungie is reportedly working on new games in the series, including the long-requested Destiny 2 Classic. However, most excitingly, multiple leaks claim that Destiny 3 is in “extremely early development” at the studio which could give the franchise the new shot of life it desperately needs.
