There’s only ever been one true competitor to Bungie’s Destiny: Warframe. With Destiny 2 development ending, the free-to-play RPG is now alone in the world with seemingly no one else coming to fill the gap, not even Bungie with a long-requested Destiny 3.
Warframe community director and live-ops lead Megan Everett finds the situation “heartbreaking”, not just for the fans who won’t be serviced anymore, but also for Digital Extremes as they have lost their sole competitor.
“It’s earth-shattering,” they said in a recent discussion with Eurogamer. “I never thought I’d ever see the day where I’d read an article from Bungie about Destiny 2 essentially shutting down.” While Bungie’s MMOFPS will still be playable with the servers staying on for the forseeable future, there will be no new content for fans.
“No one saw Destiny going away.”
Warframe’s Megan Everett
Everett explains that “no one is celebrating the fact that this has happened to Destiny”, despite Warframe and Destiny 2 being labelled as “direct competitors” by gamers. “I think a game is healthy when you have competitors, and [Bungie] have done such an amazing job at trying to grow that story regardless of whatever situation they were in.”
The Warframe developer also explains that it has been tough for Destiny 2. There has been a large wave of negativity towards the game for years, even during monumental moments such as The Final Shape. “I think what’s unfortunate and sad is they announced this was happening, and suddently people are showing all this support for them,” they said.
“They’ve been getting a lot of negativity for all this time, and it’s like, where was all this love! People need to put the hate away and show the love, because they could have really used that. I know it was there, but it wasn’t as vocal as maybe some of the negativity,” she continued.
Alongside the negativity, the reality is that it was just a huge surprise to everyone to see Bungie give up on Destiny 2. “No one saw Destiny going away,” she said. “They had their ups and downs – we’ve had our ups and downs. People talk about the content drought and the railjack – we all have scary days. To live in a reality where they’re gone isn’t a positive.”
For Everett, they see a comparison between Warframe and Destiny 2 “almost every single day”, and it being set for the farm isn’t a positive, “even though it ‘eliminates competition’”. Instead, Destiny 2’s life served to help inform Warframe, and Warframe’s successes should continue to inspire Destiny. It’s just like a comic book character: what’s the point of The Joker if he doesn’t have Batman?
Right now, Bungie isn’t going anywhere. While Destiny 2’s time is over, the studio is putting all of its eggs into the Marathon basket. With PlayStation’s blessing, Bungie has committed to years of additional updates for Marathon, despite poor sales.
