Bungie unveils big Destiny 2 shift with Shadowkeep expansion and free-to-play version

Game studio Bungie has decided to get ahead of the E3 news cycle with the announcement of the second major Destiny 2 expansion, and its first ever without publishing partner Activision. The expansion is called Shadowkeep, in line with a data mined leak revealed on Tuesday, and will bring players back to the Moon, a popular and narratively important destination from the original Destiny. The character, Eris Morn, is also heavily hinted as a major force in the new expansion, with Bungie referring to her as an “old ally” you’ll reunite with to “confront new nightmares.”

Yet in a surprise turn of events, Bungie is also outlining a drastic shift in how it releases new Destiny 2 content going forward. Shadowkeep will be the first ever standalone expansion the studio has ever produced. That means it will not require you to own any of the previous Destiny 2 expansions.

Bungie also says it’s designed Shadowkeep to be an a la carte expansion, so you only have to pay for the parts of it you feel like you’ll enjoy or actually sink time into. Bungie has been experimenting with this option through its season pass model recently, but this seems to go a step further. You’ll be able to buy Shadowkeep and a single season pass for $34.99, and it launches on September 17th.

Because Bungie is no longer published by Activision, itself a part of the bigger Activision Blizzard brand, Bungie will no longer distribute the PC version of Destiny 2 through Battle.net. Instead, it will distribute it through Valve’s Steam, and current PC players will be able to migrate all of their progress to the Steam version when it launches this fall alongside Shadowkeep. Not only that, but Bungie is announcing a new version of Destiny 2 called New Light, a free-to-play version of the game that Bungie says will include all of its ”foundational modes, activities, and rewards.” It’s not clear right now whether that means it comes with just the base game, or all of its initial expansions, Forsaken, and the annual pass content, too.

Bungie is also supporting cross-saves for Destiny 2, allowing PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia players to keep character progress across all platforms. While this will solve progression, you still won’t be able to jump on a a console and play against PC players with cross-play support.

Shadowkeep is now being designed with similar scope and size to last year’s Forsaken. It’s likely intended to be the final major expansion for the game, marking the beginning of Destiny 2’s third and final year before what maybe players presume will be a third game in the series. In that way, Shadowkeep would be like the original Destiny’s Rise of Iron expansion that came out in fall 2016.

Bungie’s new “armor 2.0” support

However, since Bungie split with Activision earlier this year, its roadmap for the Destiny series has been subject to change. And that means Shadowkeep could be the beginning of an even bigger shift for the Destiny franchise that sees it turn into a perpetually updated game in the vein of Epic Games’ Fortnite or competing looter shooter Warframe.

The studio has not officially confirmed a third Destiny game, and it was never entirely clear if it would follow the same release cadence it set forth with the original game or in the first year of Destiny 2 once it began self-publishing the title back in January. Starting last year, Bungie introduced a new model for how it developed, released, and sold post-game expansions and updates called the annual pass, which effectively bundled a major fall expansion, in that case Forsaken, with three smaller expansions that would release seasonally throughout the ensuing 12 months.

With Shadowkeep, Bungie isn’t saying whether it’s committed to following the annual pass model. It’s also not clear whether there will be additional expansions tacked on to Shadowkeep seasonally. That said, the way Bungie is positioning these announcements makes it sound like this could be the biggest, most dramatic departure from how its developed, released, and sold games in its history as a game developer. On Bungie’s stream, the company constantly referred to Destiny as a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), and that’s not something we’ve heard from the company before. Bungie is also promising to focus on the social aspects of the game so that will clearly tie in with the new MMO focus.

Destiny 2 has had a long and somewhat troubled life cycle. Since its launch in the fall of 2017, Bungie has struggled to meet player expectations and design a product that would satisfy both its internal desire for a more mainstream, accessible product and the hardcore community’s desire for a deep, challenging game that could be played every single day for months on end. Destiny 2 first launched to critical acclaim for the ways Bungie made the game more player-friendly and less dependent on repetitive, mind-numbing activities, but the developer made a number of near-fatal mistakes in the process, like watering down the game’s competitive multiplayer and a lack of end-game content, that almost lost it its most hardcore fans.

After a number of moderate course-correcting updates, Bungie launched the massive Forsaken expansion in 2018. The update provided a miraculous turnaround for the game, giving both casual and hardcore players an expansive series of activities to perform, loot to collect, and smaller, achievement-based goals tailored to fans’ various play styles. It was the best Destiny had ever been. But the annual pass model that launched with Forsaken has proved inconsistent at keeping quality high and incentivizing players to stick around, and the community began falling off again with the launch of the first post-Forsaken update, the Black Armory, roughly six months ago.

That’s been due in part to the substitution of smaller raid lairs instead of full-blown raids, a lack of attention toward the competitive multiplayer scene, and activities that in general just feel overly tedious and repetitive on purpose, so as to keep the hardcore players from complaining about a lack of content. That said, over the past six months, Bungie has experimented like never before in trying out new formats, like the Gambit-focused Season of the Drifter, and trying to tell a more cohesive narrative with unlockable cutscenes and elaborate backstories to the more popular loot items.

Destiny 2’s player base is now still awaiting the next big expansion to see if Bungie can finally pull together a vision for the game that is wholly its own and manage to bring the game back to its peak in popularity. After all, without a healthy player base that keeps queue times low and activities well populated, a game like Destiny withers until only the tiniest fraction of hardcore players is left. But with Shadowkeep, Bungie sounds like its going further and laying the groundwork for an even more ambitious version of Destiny, one that could see it turn into a true live service game like the massively multiplayer online titles that first inspired it.

Update, June 6th 2PM ET: Article updated with more information from Bungie’s live stream.

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