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

By Alex Wiltshire

Game Destiny 2: Beyond Light

Developer/publisher Bungie

Origin US

Format PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Release November 10

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 star-eating 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.

“IF WE JUST CONSTANTLY ADD MORE AND MORE AND MORE, EVENTUALLY THE BALLOON JUST POPS, RIGHT?”

“We want Destiny to be sustainable for us to be able to actually develop,” says Noseworthy as he introduces a new metaphor for the experience of Destiny 2’s development. “There are limits to how big and complex the game can get, and if we just constantly add more and more and more, eventually the balloon just pops, right? So, hey, let’s take a little bit of air out of the balloon, so we could put some new fresh air in.”

If Bungie gets this right, it will have solved a long-held problem which many other live games are currently facing: the ever-increasing pressure of administering years of accumulated content and bloated installs. If it’s wrong, then Destiny’s appeal really is wrapped up in its entirety, and Bungie faces a playerbase hot with the indignation of having treasured places and things to do - that it paid for - taken away from it. So, yes. Making Destiny sounds painful.

Naturally, Beyond Light will add lots of new content. It’ll introduce a whole new destination in which to shoot monsters. Europa, icy moon of Jupiter, is a free-roam space where players will fight Eramis, Kell of Darkness, who has reunited the Fallen houses and poses a new existential threat to humankind. There, players will discover the first new class-based powers to be introduced to the series since the first Destiny’s The Taken King expansion introduced Void powers in 2015. Stasis is about freezing enemies to gain spatial control and make them susceptible to massive damage, and with it will come a suite of new ways to tweak and customise the way they work.