BRIGHT FUTURE

With Beyond Light, Bungie reshapes Destiny 2 for a new generation

- Alex Wiltshire

Making Destiny 2 sounds painful. Three years of expansions have seen it grow into a vast sprawl of multifarious activities, demanding an install of over 120GB on PS4 and developer Bungie’s constant maintenance so the monster-shooting never ends. Bungie knows there won’t be a Destiny 3. “We sometimes think of Destiny like running Disneyland, and there’s only so much space inside the Disneyland – but unlike Disneyland, it doesn’t close at 10 o’clock at night and is always running,” Mark Noseworthy, general manager of Destiny 2, tells us. And now, on the cusp of a new generation of consoles, it’s only halfway through its life. As Destiny 2’s attractions age; as Bungie stretches its resources to keep them going; and as the next generation raises expectations for the scale and fidelity of games another notch, something has to change.

So, on November 10, the very day the next generation begins with the launch of Xbox Series X and S, Destiny 2 will also begin a new future with the release of Beyond Light. On one hand, this expansion will kick off a new three-year cycle of storylines, magnificent sci-fi vistas and tight gunplay. On the other, it will be a far smaller game than it is today, because Bungie’s plan to prepare Destiny 2 for another three years is to cut a swathe of it away. Four entire planets, a starting spaceship and a farm, as well as all the activities that took place in them; three narrative campaigns, five raids, seven strikes, quests for guns, multiplayer maps, and four weapon forges. All this will be deposited into what Bungie calls the Destiny Content Vault, where all these pursuits will abstractly sit until Bungie decides to ‘unvault’ it: to pick pieces of world, pursuits, arenas, and make them playable again.