So, Destiny 2 is going the way of the dodo—content updates will end in June, and a Destiny 3 likely isn’t even in the cards for Bungie. As someone who has had one of my favourite MMOs shut down before my eyes (and later given an official license to operate on a private server, score) I nonetheless commiserate with you.
One thing players might be asking themselves in their grief is—could the game have been saved? Are there any alternate universes in which Destiny might continue on forever. Perhaps into… infinity? This is a really cheesy segue, but the answer is yes, reportedly.
Per Paul Tassi of Forbes, unnamed sources at Bungie claim a soft reboot of D2 was considered in the aftermath of the disastrous expansion Edge of Fate: “One idea was scrapping the two-expansion model and going back to one big expansion again and renaming the game ‘Destiny Infinity.’ The goal there was a kind of relaunch as opposed to doing a true Destiny 3 to kickstart momentum.”
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The twice-yearly expansion schedule wound up being a bit contentious, because—well, it led to the aforementioned Edge of Fate, a sour-note follow up to The Final Shape, which PCG’s own Destiny 2 expert (and editor-in-chief) Phil Savage called “one of the best expansions in the series’ history” in his The Final Shape review.
In other words, changing to a twice-yearly expansion cycle after releasing some of your best work probably wasn’t, er, the best choice.
At the very least, Marathon’s just-decent performance—we’re speaking in industry terms, here, it still did make quite a bit of money—can’t be blamed for Destiny 2’s death. Well, not entirely. Quoting one of Tassi’s sources: “if the game made a billion dollars, would Destiny 2 have a chance to continue? Sure, maybe,” but the report states that “no one was sitting there on launch day deciding if its performance would kill Destiny 2 or not.”
I cannot say whether a return to form for Destiny 2—or a soft relaunch rebranding the entire thing—would’ve landed. But call it 20-20 hindsight, I do think anything would’ve been better for Destiny 2’s playerbase than what we got. I shall pour one out for you in MMO solidarity, my friends.
