At a time when the future of Destiny 2 seems less certain than ever, Bungie has announced the next year of its live-service shooter in a livestream full of surprising details. The game’s next expansion, The Edge of Fate, was given a substantial preview to start the showcase, followed by announcements about other upcoming content updates, including a later expansion inspired by Star Wars.
The bulk of the new Destiny 2 announcements centered on The Edge of Fate, the game’s next expansion, which kicks off a multi-year storyline. Starting with the expansion, Destiny 2 will focus its upcoming story on The Nine, the pantheon of god-like beings who have been present in Destiny’s mythology for the start but haven’t gotten much direct development until now.
The Edge of Fate takes place on Kepler, a planet awash in dark matter that will grant players some new movement abilities to aid in exploring its unique terrain. The new planet will incorporate more puzzle and platforming elements that are typically seen more in its dungeons than in the game’s open-world environments. Bungie says the level design of Kepler will have some aspects of Metroidvania games, with players needing to unlock new powers to discover all of its secrets. The Metroid influence in particular is extremely strong, as one of those new movement abilities turns Destiny 2’s Guardians into balls of lightning that can roll around the environment, even through pipes and other small openings like Samus’ morph ball.
Along with the new story campaign in The Edge of Fate, Destiny 2 is making some changes to how the game is played. Through a portal, Players can choose from solo, team-based, endgame, and player-versus-player content, which Bungie says will make it easier to jump into a game without needing to travel to different planets or sift through menus. More ways to modify standard activities are coming as well, including customization for loadouts and mission difficulty to make the game’s activities more replayable, with increasing rewards based on which modifiers and difficulty options you choose.
The Edge of Fate launched on July 15, but a free update launching May 6 will start to lay the groundwork. The Rite of the Nine event starting today adds new weapons to three existing dungeons and a new storyline puts the pieces in place for The Edge of Fate.
Bungie also announced multiple future updates, the largest of which being Renegades. Launching on December 2, Renegades is the next paid expansion for the game, and it’s a twist on how Bungie usually handles its DLC that’s already drawing some controversy. Bungie refers to Renegades as a “Star Wars-inspired” expansion, but it might be more accurate to call it an official crossover. More than just taking inspiration from Star Wars, Renegades includes some explicit connections like lightsabers, blasters, and sound effects pulled directly from the films in the DLC’s announcement trailer, as well as a LucasFilm logo at the end. Destiny 2 is also set to get new Darth Vader and Kylo Ren skins.
Despite all that crossover content, Renegades is meant as an in-canon continuation of Destiny 2’s story. So far, Bungie hasn’t explained how it’s going to thread the needle of introducing direct references to the Star Wars series while still telling a story set in Destiny 2’s own world.
The next year of Destiny 2 will be a major test of how Bungie’s new approach to expansions — releasing two a year with large content updates in between — holds up. Players had largely grown weary of the old model of less frequent expansions with more seasonal updates tied to each one, but it’s not clear that the new approach will be any better received. Whatever happens with Destiny 2 in the near future, it’s clear it’s heading in a much different direction now that its long-running story of Light vs. Dark that previously dominated the game is over.
