The Final Shape
It’s no secret that the Destiny 2 playerbase is unhappy right now, probably at a level they’ve never been before, and it really has nothing to do with the quality of the current season. That has translated into a specific sentiment toward the future of the game, and where things go from here.
I stumbled upon a thread from Ryan Gilliam the other day, my mirror dimension Destiny reporter counterpart at Polygon, where he was trying to make the point that no, Bungie has said repeatedly that Destiny 2 is not ending after The Final Shape, the last expansion of the Light and Dark saga which spans…essentially the entire series thus far (Bungie claims it began in Shadowkeep, but no).
This is true, Bungie has said this, that a new “saga” will begin in Destiny 2 from there. However, a lot of responses to that tweet were something along the lines of “well, I’m done after The Final Shape.”
Maybe no game was meant to live forever.
Destiny 2 is old at this point. It came out in 2017 during the last console generation, and has chugged along since then as a very successful live service game that countless others tried to emulate, and ultimately failed. But after years of an expansion + four seasons a year model, endless monetization and a lack of attention to specific areas of the game (PvP), many players may just be looking for an excuse to be done.
My actual prediction for what’s happening after The Final Shape is at least one more trilogy of Destiny 2 expansions with the same engine, same .exe, all of it. This will last until the beginning of the next console generation, and probably through the next two Bungie releases of Marathon and Matter.
Destiny 2
But I think what most fans are hoping for is an actual fresh start. Bungie has hinted that post-Final Shape, there will be some sort of change that helps with new player onboarding, where they will not have to catch up on five expansions and a bunch of permanently vaulted content to follow the story. But we don’t know exactly what that means, and if the new stuff is taking place within Destiny 2 as it is now, it seems unlikely a full reset is coming, a-la-a vault wipe or characters being knocked down to zero again.
I do think that Destiny players do not want to let go of Destiny as a franchise, but they are ready to move on from Destiny 2 specifically. I also do not believe Bungie is going to abandon its flagship franchise, the one that allowed it to warrant a $3.6 billion asking price from Sony and make a bunch of different IPs which are coming out shortly. I don’t think they can afford to lose the Destiny playerbase because it’s unclear if its future titles will perform nearly as well.
But things have to change. I think there is going to be a massive migration of players to other games if Bungie does not spell out A) what is coming after The Final Shape and B) why it’s different than what we have now, more than just the Traveler and the Witness dying or disappearing or whatever. And C) how all aspects of the game will warrant attention, including the 40% of the population that plays PvP every day, even if Marathon exists now.
You can’t just ask for a Destiny 3 right after The Final Shape. I mean you can, but it’s not going to happen. As Ryan says, Bungie has said explicitly that more Destiny 2 content is coming, and they’re not going to pull an Overwatch 2 and just re-label the same game as Destiny 3. But a reckoning needs to happen or things are going to go very badly after next year, that much seems pretty apparent as of late.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
