Game intel
Destiny 2
The first chapter of a new Destiny saga is here. Guardians will venture into the unknown, where the mysteries of the cosmos – and The Nine – await.
I knew something was seriously wrong with Destiny 2 when I logged in after The Edge of Fate launched and the Tower felt like a wake. Not “late in the season, people are off doing other stuff” quiet – I mean ghost town. No chatter in LFG, orbit taking forever to find a match, friends list greyed out like a cemetery. Then I checked SteamDB and saw the numbers: struggling to crack 20,000 players at peak, nowhere in the top 100, and The Edge of Fate sitting on a brutal 10% rating on Steam.
I’ve been playing Destiny since the D1 beta. I’ve no-lifed raids, sweated in Trials when it actually meant something, and sunk more hours into this franchise than I’d ever publicly admit to someone I respect. I watched The Final Shape pull off something miraculous – a story payoff that actually felt like an ending we’d waited a decade for. And then Bungie followed it up with The Edge of Fate, which is… what, exactly? A content treadmill with a narrative Band-Aid slapped on top?
So when this Destiny 3 leak from “Colony Deaks” dropped – claiming, “Yes, Destiny 3 is in extremely early development” — it hit me right in the hypocrisy gland. Because I’ll be honest: a part of me felt that old rush again. A numbered sequel. A real reset. A chance to escape this bloated, confused live-service carcass Destiny 2 has become.
But the other part of me? The older, more jaded part that’s watched Bungie trip over the same rake for ten years straight? That part is screaming: they haven’t earned Destiny 3 yet.
Let’s lay out the situation bluntly. Sony paid $3.6 billion for Bungie in 2022. Earlier this month, Sony quietly slapped a $204 million impairment loss on Bungie’s “intangible assets” — accountant-speak for “this is worth way less than we thought.” That doesn’t happen because a studio is crushing it. That happens when your flagship live-service game is falling off a cliff.
Destiny 2 is bleeding out. The Edge of Fate flopped critically and commercially. The player base is at record lows. And now Bungie is trying to pivot with Renegades — a darker, more “outlaw” flavored expansion that leans into their Star Wars obsession so hard they literally froze the Drifter in Stasis like some discount Han Solo carbonite homage. Cute visual gag, sure. But also deeply on-the-nose for where Destiny 2 is at right now: frozen, stuck, and desperately cosplaying as someone else’s universe.
So when Colony Deaks posts on X that Destiny 3 is “in extremely early development,” am I shocked? Not remotely. Of course discussions are happening. Of course leadership is panicking. When your game has slid to a 10% rating on Steam and your new expansion struggles to maintain a mid-size indie’s player count, you don’t just “tweak the sandbox.” You start asking: do we pull the Destiny 3 ripcord?
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: slapping a “3” on the box doesn’t fix the disease. It just resets the hype meter. And Bungie has burned through so much trust that the idea of them getting a clean slate again — after the mess that Destiny 1 launched in, after the mess that Destiny 2 launched in — feels less like a fresh start and more like a get-out-of-jail-free card they absolutely haven’t earned.
Let’s not pretend Destiny 2’s problems are just “a weak expansion” or “some bad balance patches.” This game is collapsing under a decade of half-measures, contradictory philosophies, and straight-up cowardice when it comes to committing to an identity.
I felt it hardest trying to bring a friend in after Lightfall. We hit character select, got dumped into a firehose of unskippable cutscenes that assumed he knew who half these characters were, then spat into a Tower full of icons, currencies, vendors, seasonal artifacts, reputation tracks, and content that doesn’t even exist anymore because it was vaulted. I had to stop sharing loot excitement to explain what “sunsetting” was and why his guns from three hours ago were already obsolete. He bounced in a week. And honestly? I didn’t blame him.
The Edge of Fate just doubled down on the exhaustion. Recycled enemies. Recycled modes. Reskinned activities dressed up with the same grind we’ve been doing since Forsaken, only with worse rewards. Yes, the narrative work around The Final Shape was solid — but you can’t build a healthy live-service game on vibes and lore alone. The day-to-day experience has turned into a second job where the paycheck keeps shrinking.
That’s the core of it for me: Destiny 2 doesn’t respect my time anymore. Not as a long-time player trying to maintain builds across three characters, not as someone who wants to hop in casually and still feel like I’m making meaningful progress, and definitely not as someone who cares about innovation instead of reusing Lost Sectors for the 400th time.
On paper, Destiny 3 is exactly what this franchise needs. Hard reset. New engine. Modern systems. No more duct-taping new mechanics onto a creaking framework that was never designed to support a decade of live-service bloat.
Imagine a clean slate where Bungie can finally:
I want that game. I ache for that game. After The Final Shape, you can see glimpses of the Destiny we were always promised: emotionally resonant story beats, payoff for long-running arcs, encounters that feel handcrafted instead of algorithmically generated. If Bungie took that energy and built a proper sequel from the ground up — with time, with humility, with player trust — Destiny 3 could be the comeback story of the decade.
But does anyone honestly believe that’s the Bungie we’re dealing with right now? The studio that laid off long-time developers while Eververse kept humming? The studio that shipped The Edge of Fate in this state and watched its Steam rating drop into “abandoned Early Access survival game” territory? The studio whose new expansion is literally flirting with full-on Star Wars homage instead of doubling down on what made Destiny unique in the first place?
That’s what scares me. Destiny 3 could be a bold creative reboot… or a desperate financial maneuver, rushed out to placate Sony and reboot microtransaction economies under a shinier logo. And if it’s the latter, we’re absolutely screwed.
Since Bungie won’t say the quiet part out loud, I’ll do it for them: if Destiny 3 is really in “extremely early development,” then the design docs must address the live‑service rot that’s eating this franchise from the inside. Otherwise, don’t bother.
Here’s what Destiny 3 has to do differently, or I’m out on day one:
None of this is impossible. Other games have done it. Look at how Final Fantasy XIV rebuilt itself. Look at how Warframe evolved. Live-service doesn’t have to be synonymous with endless FOMO and exploitative grinds. It’s a choice. Bungie has just consistently chosen the worst version of it.
I get the counterargument. Believe me, I feel it. I still remember how pissed I was when Destiny 2 launched and my Fatebringer, my Gjallarhorn, my D1 history all basically got tossed into the bin. The idea of going through that again — saying goodbye to crafted weapons, exotic collections, raid clears — feels brutal.
If you’re saying “stop talking about Destiny 3 and just fix Destiny 2,” you’re not wrong on principle. Bungie absolutely should be patching the sinking ship instead of daydreaming about the next cruise liner. Renegades has to hit. The current sandbox has to improve. The Edge of Fate disaster can’t be how we remember Destiny 2’s twilight years.
But here’s the ugly reality: I don’t think Destiny 2’s foundation can support the game we all want anymore. The technical debt, the content vaulting, the convoluted onboarding, the half-finished experiments layered on top of one another — it all feels like a house built on six different sets of blueprints. You can paint the walls as much as you want; the structure’s still crooked.
The key, if Bungie actually cares about not nuking our history again, is to treat Destiny 2 as a legacy pillar for Destiny 3, not just trash it and move on. That means things like:
If Destiny 3 launches and acts like the past ten years didn’t happen — like The Final Shape, Forsaken, Witch Queen, all of it was just disposable content — I’m not sure I have it in me to roll the dice again. At that point it’s not a sequel; it’s a reset button for Bungie’s balance sheets, not our Guardians’ journeys.
What makes this whole Destiny 3 leak land so sourly is the timing. Sony writes down $204 million. The Edge of Fate craters. Player numbers nosedive. Renegades is already causing side‑eye with its heavy Star Wars energy. And right in the middle of this, we hear, “Oh by the way, Destiny 3 is in extremely early development, we’ve been sitting on this info for weeks.”
I don’t doubt Colony Deaks has sources. I don’t doubt early D3 conversations are happening — they should be. But I also don’t care about leaks as hype fuel anymore. Show me evidence Bungie can actually steward this universe without running it into the ground in two expansions.
Earn that trust by doing the hard, unsexy work now:
Instead, we get roadmap buzzwords, vague reassurances, and the increasingly obvious sense that the people making creative decisions and the people making financial ones are not on the same planet. “Live-service” has become an excuse for half-finished systems, for shipping content that “might get better later,” for building an entire monetization apparatus around selling back our own time.
Destiny has been the background radiation of my gaming life for a decade. I still remember loading into the Cosmodrome for the first time, seeing the Traveler hanging in the sky, and realizing this was a world I could lose myself in. When Destiny hits, it hits like nothing else. Raiding with friends at 3 a.m., clutch Trials games, that one perfect exotic drop — it’s magic.
But I’m done mistaking that magic for unconditional loyalty. If Destiny 3 is just another cycle of “launch broken, apologize, slowly fix, repeat,” I’m not signing up. If Bungie thinks it can ride one good expansion every three years and coast on nostalgia in between, I’m not the mark they think I am.
So here’s my line in the sand:
If Bungie wants me in Destiny 3, they need to prove with the rest of Destiny 2 that they actually learned something from this decade-long experiment — that The Edge of Fate was a wake-up call, not just a bad quarter to be smoothed over by the next marketing beat. They need to show they can choose player trust over short-term monetization, identity over trend-chasing, and substance over another round of Eververse drip.
Until then? I’m not preordering a damn thing. I’ll watch the leaks, I’ll watch the trailers, I’ll listen to what they promise for Destiny 3. But the days of blind faith are over. Bungie’s had two chances to define what Destiny is. A third one should be earned, not assumed.
I still want to believe this universe can be great again. I just refuse to let that hope be used against me one more time.
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