Bungie’s new leadership says the studio lost sight of its players over the last few years, and its first step toward fixing that is restoring the Destiny 2 content it took away. In a blog post titled The Next Chapter for Bungie, Studio Head Poria Torkan and Marathon General Manager Josh Deane confirmed that work has begun on bringing vaulted Destiny 2 campaigns, destinations, and raids back into the game. Once that content returns, it will be available to all Destiny 2 players. It comes four months after Bungie announced that Monument of Triumph would be Destiny 2’s final content update, a decision the two say players responded to in force.
For those unfamiliar, Bungie began removing older content from Destiny 2 with the Beyond Light expansion in 2020, including the original Red War campaign, and placed it in what it called the Destiny Content Vault. Bungie now acknowledges that removing those experiences had a lasting impact on player trust and enjoyment of the game. Bringing the content back isn’t as simple as restoring old files, since changes made to Destiny 2 since Beyond Light require updates to lighting, encounters, combatants, and other underlying systems. No dates or specific campaigns were named, with Bungie promising more details in the coming months.
Bungie describes the restoration as the first step toward new Destiny stories and games, calling the franchise foundational to its future. Back in June, we said what comes next for the studio could be more Marathon, a new franchise, or Destiny 3. This post stops short of announcing a new game, though it does say Bungie has more stories to tell and new worlds to build. “All of this is to say, we are not done with Destiny,” Torkan and Deane wrote.
The two also wrote that Bungie “lost trust” and “lost incredible colleagues” over the last few years, with the studio most recently announcing layoffs across Destiny and Marathon in June. Going forward, they say Bungie will measure itself against four commitments: building a stronger long-term future for Destiny while restoring its past, evolving Marathon to grow its community, increasing transparency around development priorities, and communicating more consistently, especially when plans change. Bungie is working with its community team on a consistent way to report against those commitments.
As for Marathon, Bungie says it was never intended to replace Destiny, adding that the game launched to strong critical reception but didn’t reach as many players as the studio had hoped. The plan is to evolve Marathon beyond the genre constraints Bungie placed on it and expand it into a deeper survival experience, with something meaningful for players who prefer cooperative PvE, competitive PvP, or PvPvE. October’s Nightfall Refresh and December’s Symbiosis update, both of which we covered last week, are still planned, and Bungie said it would share more about its vision for Marathon separately. On Steam, Marathon has gone from an all-time peak of 88,337 at launch to a 24-hour peak of just over 5,000 in July.
