Destiny 2: everything you need to know about Bungie's new sci-fi epic

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.

Developer Bungie has a lot riding on Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion. It launches in September, and it promises to bring with it a number of minor and major changes to how the game looks and feels and what players will spend their time doing in the studio’s supernatural universe. Bungie’s main goal is to try and court back disheartened players who feel like the game lost the magic of the original. But unlike most game developers, Bungie typically chooses not to spill a lot of the details here at E3 in Los Angeles, where most of the game industry’s biggest players are trying to drum up hype for new releases.

Instead, Bungie brought Gambit, one of the more interesting additions coming to Forsaken, here to E3 as a playable demo. Gambit is a new game mode offering something Destiny fans have never quite seen before. It’s a hybrid experience that blends traditional player-versus-environment, or PvE, encounters with competitive multiplayer, known as PvP (player-versus-player). The promise is to deliver the best of both worlds for players who might not enjoy competing directly against other real players and those who do.

Game developer Bungie revealed new details today about its upcoming Forsaken expansion for Destiny 2, which will be the largest expansion since the game’s initial launch in September 2017. In a polished video put together by the studio and a live interview session after that, Twitch live stream viewers were given a broad overview of what the expansion would content. The theme seems clear: after months and months of turmoil and controversy, Bungie is trying to find common ground with its fans by bringing back the most asked-for elements of the first game.

In that sense, Forsaken seems like it will act as large reset, reintroducing core concepts of the first Destiny while simultaneously trying to surprise players with something new. If that sounds like it should have been the primary goal of the initial launch game, you’d be correct. But Bungie made a series of bold and perhaps risky decisions with Destiny 2 that have ultimately proved misguided, from restricted multiplayer options and watered-down combat to a lack of depth and fun factor in the overall progression of the game’s story. The player base started dwindling following December’s Curse of Osiris expansion, and last month’s Warmind was largely focused on putting the game back on track ahead of Forsaken.

Bungie today released the first substantial Destiny 2 update roadmap for the new year, after pledging in late November to communicate more with the game’s community and fix longstanding issues that have riled fans since the title’s launch in September. Contained in the blog post are a far-reaching series of planned changes, additions, and tweaks. But perhaps none are quite as important as the planned alterations to the game’s loot box system, called Eververse, which lets players pay money for slot machine-style “engrams” that randomly contain coveted cosmetic items.

“We recognize that the scales are tipped too far towards Tess at the moment, and Eververse was never intended to be a substitute for end game content and rewards,” writes game director Christopher Barrett. To try and remedy the issue, Bungie plans to start including in-game items that have thus far been restricted to Eververse — items like ships, sparrows, and ghosts — as rewards for playing activities in the game. Up until now, players could only earn a static amount of these engrams per week before having to pay real money for them.

The Destiny 2 community has been up in arms this week, even more so than usual, over the release of the new expansion, Curse of Osiris, and longstanding complaints with the way developer Bungie has handled its online-only shooter. The developer has a long list of changes it’s making, many coming next week in a post-update patch. But the community, which gathers mostly on the Destiny subreddit, isn’t having any of it. They feel that the sequel is irredeemably inferior to the original, and many have expressed how fed up they are with the state of the series.

Bungie’s response: let’s sell Prometheus Lens. The gun, a laser beam-like solar-powered trace rifle, shipped apparently with a game-breaking bug that makes it the most powerful weapon in the game by a long shot. That means that anyone who doesn’t have it — it only drops randomly from the game’s highest-level rewards — has been at a severe disadvantage since Tuesday with the expansion’s launch. Bungie has acknowledged the issue and plans to fix it next week.

This week, Bungie released the first expansion to its online-only shooter Destiny 2, called Curse of Osiris. The new content comes at a challenging time for the game, as its vocal and divided player base has hit a fever pitch over the state of the series and whether it can be redeemed. A few months after launch, Destiny 2 is a game that finds itself being pulled in every direction by the many contingents of its community, resulting in diametrically opposed opinions on the game and the direction it should take. It’s an environment that taints every discussion about the future of Destiny 2.

Amid all of this turmoil, Curse of Osiris is a solid step forward that brings much-needed improvements and more content to a community of players that’s habitually starving for more. The update brings new story missions and sidequests on a previously unexplored planet alongside new weapon and armor sets and a brand-new six-person raid activity.

Bungie today announced a large-scale series of changes to the world of Destiny 2 to address fierce criticism from players, many of whom have been voicing concern since the game’s September launch that the developer was either ignoring community feedback or uninterested in changing what fans saw as fundamental flaws to the sci-fi shooter sequel. Some of the changes will go live with the upcoming Curse of the Osiris expansion launching on December 5th, with more to come in a patch the following week. The company also detailed longer-term updates slated for 2018.

Now, certain weapons will once again have “rolls,” or a randomly assigned set of unlockable benefits that make a player’s version of the virtual firearm different and potentially superior and rarer than another’s. Bungie is calling its new system for these weapons Masterworks, and there will be a way to unlock variable perks for specific weapons, including those items that are part of the game’s rarest weapons collections. You’ll also be able to make a standard weapon into a Masterworks one and re-roll the perks on those weapons individually.

I remember it like it was yesterday. My Guardian, hobbled by his low power level and horrendously subpar weapons, felt at first so weak and incapable. He was struggling to reclaim the light that would restore him to glory, and by extension let me once again feel the rush of superpowers and the thrill of endless firefights.

Now, one month into Destiny 2, my Hunter is an all-powerful, emperor-slaying, magic-wielding warrior who fears nothing. In fact, I’m in control of two of those resolute superheroes; I’ve created my second character in the game, a Titan, and leveled up that Guardian to nearly as high as she can go. I still have a third character to start, a Warlock in the waiting, with a new gear set to collect and powers to unlock.

We’re just a few moments away from this year’s annual iPhone reveal — and it’s going to be a big one. But now it’s a great time to take a look back on some storied Apple history with a very clever Easter egg in Destiny 2 that appears to have been snuck into the game prior to release.

Bungie’s new shooter, which takes a far more hands-on approach to narrative storytelling and world-building this time around, now includes lengthy written backstories to each of its rare “exotic” weapons, which represent the pinnacle of players’ feverish collectathon impulses. One such weapon, an updated version of an original Destiny gun called Hard Light, has one you might recognize:

Bungie’s Destiny 2 has been out now for a few days, and players and critics alike are lauding it for a much improved narrative, a more respectful and thoughtful progression system, and an all-around superior game world with more activities to perform, neat gear to collect, and secrets to unearth. One aspect of the game that has been left largely unexplored is the Crucible multiplayer experience, which pits human players against others in a variety of strategic game modes.

In my original impressions piece detailing the first 20 hours of Destiny 2, in which I played the game at a Bungie-hosted event in Bellevue, Washington last month, I didn’t have much opportunity to try out the Crucible in its entirety. We were playing with only other game journalists on the same closed network, and we weren’t even communicating over mic when we were paired up with others and not simply queuing into matches solo. The console beta earlier this summer, despite focusing heavily on Crucible, was also a very limited in scope, restricting players to a couple game modes and maps and removing the ability to earn new gear.

Just two days after the release of Destiny 2, the game’s fervent fan community has already centered its focus on a grievance that’s threatening to tear it apart. You could call it ShaderGate. (Please don’t actually call it that.) In short, the issue stems from a critical shift in how cosmetic items, called shaders, work, and it has players accusing developer Bungie of overstepping its boundaries and caving to corporate greed.

Shaders, items that change your character’s color, are now one-time consumable items, a departure from the original game’s system that players use them infinitely. Only complicating the issue is Bungie’s decision to now charge real money for these items, which used to be free.

To mark yesterday’s global launch of online shooter Destiny 2, developer Bungie teamed up with Japanese dance choreographers Furitsuke Kagyou Air:man to deliver three minutes of subculture appreciation in the form of an extended and increasingly ludicrous Guardian dance-off. The video starts off with what looks like a passable live-action television trailer, like the very one Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts produced for Bungie’s English-language marketing launch last week. But it very quickly sheds its air of seriousness as elaborate breakdance moves bleed into a giant, contagious dance battle between Destiny’s magic space warriors.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with shooting aliens with fancy firearms, as Destiny 2 mostly revolves around, it helps to know a little bit about what are known as in-game emotes. As is the case in a number of other online shooters like Blizzard’s Overwatch, emotes are special signature moves your character can perform to express a certain emotion, be it elation or sorrow or spite. In the original Destiny, Bungie designed elaborate emotes for players to earn or buy with real money that ranged from Drake’s “Hotline Bling” dance and Alfonso Ribeiro’s “Carlton Dance” from The Fresh Prince to funky custom dance moves for each of the game’s signature classes.

I’m about five hours into the European Dead Zone and I’m finally starting to feel alive. The EDZ, as everyone calls it, is a barren wasteland of abandoned structures, decrepit tunnels, and long-lost architectural trends because, well, this is Earth in the far future. How far? We don’t really know. Perhaps it’s been thousands of years since humans colonized the Solar System and entered the realm of the supernatural. Except here we are, stuck back on Earth following a devastating attack from a foreign invader, trotting through the depressing gray debris and green overgrowth of a disaster zone.

Yet, the exhilaration is unmistakable as I fend off wave after wave of alien enemies on a covert mission to take back the land for humanity. I’m communicating by satellite transmission with a man — a grizzled sniper with an unplaceable accent — named Devrim Kay. Unlike myself, he does not possess the “Light,” which is a fancy way of saying that when he dies, he stays dead, while I come back to life to continue the fight. We’re in the process of trying to pit two alien crews against each other, by spoofing the signal of one and sending it to the other. It’s a clever plan, but I’m not really thinking too much about the specifics.

After working on Kong: Skull Island, his first big blockbuster film, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts was ready to tackle something a little bit smaller. “Kong was two and a half years of my life,” he says. “That’s a quarter of a decade. It’s such an enormous time commitment to working on giant monkeys. I’m so proud of the collaboration that that movie was, but you definitely go down a rabbit hole really quick.”

So when the opportunity arose to direct a live-action trailer for Destiny 2, Bungie’s much-anticipated shooter that launches next week, it was a perfect fit. Not only was Vogt-Roberts in the right frame of mind for a smaller project, he’s also a big video game fan with a particular love for Bungie’s sci-fi universe. “It was a cross-section of a lot of the things that I’m most interested in,” he says.

Destiny is a game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into on PlayStation 4, cultivating teams of raid buddies along the way. So why would I leave all that behind to play Destiny 2 on anything else?

Well, have you seen the PC version?

Bungie’s upcoming Destiny 2 is going to be more than just a fresh start when it comes to the game’s quests, multiplayer structure, and expansive list of guns, armor, and other collectibles. In a brutally honest interview with Kotaku’s Jason Schreier this week at E3, game director Luke Smith says the development team is effectively rebooting the core narrative pillar of the Destiny universe. It’s all starting with a complete scrubbing of any mention of The Darkness, the ominous yet vague unifying force players fought against in the first game. It turns out that not even Bungie knew what it was supposed to be or even stand for.

“So, I think that at a point, just totally candidly? We had no idea what it was. Straight up. We had no clue,” Smith says of The Darkness. It’s a surprising admission from the typically tight-lipped public-facing members of Bungie, but it shouldn’t really shock any hardcore fans of Destiny. The Darkness always felt like a lazy stand-in for evil or the bad guys — it started as the underlying reason to fight back, but it was never fully fleshed out as a narrative tool. “We didn’t know what it was, and we, for a period, we chose [that] we’re going to lump all the races [in together], and you see this in the tooltips in the game — ‘minions of the darkness.’ And we had taken all the races and said, ‘Ah, they’ll just be The Darkness.’ But that’s not what the IP deserves.”

Bungie will release Destiny 2 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 6th, two days before the official launch date Bungie announced at the game’s reveal event last month. The new release date was slipped into the very end of the newest cinematic trailer for Destiny 2, which Sony showed off here at its E3 press conference. Soon after, publisher Activision also confirmed the PC release date — almost two months later, on October 24th.

It was originally assumed that this new release date was a PlayStation exclusive, part of Sony’s ongoing deal with Bungie and publisher Activision that’s lasted since the original game’s launch in September of 2014. As part of the deal, PS4 players will get access to exclusive strikes, weapons, and armor for up to one year after Destiny 2’s release. However, game director Luke Smith was quick to clarify on Twitter that the release date is for both consoles.

At Sony’s E3 presentation, Bungie revealed more information on the PlayStation exclusive DLC that will be coming to Destiny 2.

Specifically, PlayStation 4 players will get a timed exclusive until at least fall 2018 — or roughly . That content includes the Lake of Shadows strike, exclusive armor sets, the City Apex ship, a PvP map called Retribution, and, perhaps most disappointingly to those on other platforms, a new exotic sniper rifle called Borealis.

Bungie held a big lavish reveal event for its upcoming Destiny sequel last month, but the developer teamed up with Sony here at E3 to bring yet another trailer during the PlayStation maker’s press conference. The never-before-seen footage didn’t focus on gameplay, but it did give us our first look at Dominus Ghaul, the leader of the Red Legion and the Destiny 2’s initial primary antagonist.

All the gameplay and cinematic footage Bungie released back at the reveal event referred to Ghaul as an all-powerful Cabal leader, but did not show his face or any full-body shots of the hostile alien. It’s his Red Legion that takes the near-omnipotent planet-sized Traveler hostage, robbing all Guardians of their powers and forcing you to start anew. (This is also the game’s canonized explanation for not being able to transfer all your loot and gear from the original Destiny.)

This week Bungie finally took the wraps off of Destiny 2, the long-awaited sequel to the vast, online sci-fi shooter. We learned a lot: the new Destiny will be more approachable for new players, it’ll make it easier to manage loot, and it will introduce clans and other new social features. Destiny 2 will also feature four brand new areas to explore — and like the original game, they look gorgeous.

The new game will introduce three new planets, including Titan, Io, and Nessus. They’re joined by Earth, where the action has shifted from Old Russia to an area called the European Dead Zone. Each environment looks to bring something new to the experience. The surface of Titan is completely covered in a vast ocean, for instance, so players will explore abandoned, sinking human settlements surrounded by water. Nessus, meanwhile, is a tiny planetoid completely overrun by the cybernetic Vex.

When Bungie revealed the first gameplay trailer for Destiny 2 on Thursday, fans made a lot of noise about the new superpowers available and the CGI trailers setting up the new “Red War Campaign” story mode. There was even a comically loud cheering section when Bungie execs announced that, at long last, players wouldn’t be kicked to the game’s waiting zone every time they wanted to do a new activity. But a lot of the nuts-and-bolts changes to Destiny 2 went unmentioned onstage.

Luckily, I spent time on Thursday playing a healthy amount of the new Crucible multiplayer, a full-fledged three-person strike, and the introductory story mission. It’s safe to say that Destiny 2 feels and looks a lot like its predecessor — the changes here are going to be subtle ones. But they are important tweaks that will have some drastic effects on how you play both cooperatively against the AI and against other human opponents in competitive games.

In 1996, Battle.net — Blizzard’s online gaming service — launched alongside Diablo offering players the opportunity to socialize with their friends in-game. Now, after over 20 years, and over 20 games and expansions, Battle.net will be home to its first non-Blizzard game with the launch of Destiny 2. What seems like Activision Blizzard’s first step towards making a competitor to Valve's Steam is likely anything but that. To understand why, you have to look at what Battle.net is and what that means for Destiny 2, not what Destiny 2 means for Battle.net. 

When Battle.net first launched, it was a tool to let Diablo players connect and play together online. It offered rudimentary social features, and the ability for players to join or host Diablo multiplayer servers. With each subsequent game Blizzard released, the developer continued to expand on what Battle.net was capable. Ladder ranking and copy protection (Starcraft), server-side character data storage (Diablo 2), and anonymous matchmaking for players of similar skill ranking (Warcraft 3). Battle.net 2.0, which debuted in 2009, brought all of these features under one application, giving players of World of Warcraft, or any Blizzard game, the ability to communicate with friends across games, servers, or characters.

If there’s anything Bungie wants you to know about Destiny 2 — a sequel to the addictive, ambitious, and oftentimes frustrating online-only shooter — it’s that the game will actually respect your time. During the first gameplay reveal in Los Angeles yesterday, Bungie executives took the stage to outline the substantial quality of life improvements the sequel will introduce to make this happen.

From removing the need to load in and out of one area for different activities to letting players more easily group up with strangers, Bungie is going to great lengths to paint its new installment as a more thoughtful, well-meaning, and accessible video game. “We want Destiny to not feel like work and feel like it’s taking up your life,” says M.E. Chung, a game designer at Bungie who specializes on the series’ social dynamics. “We want it to fit into your life schedule.”

There’s been a lot of fanfare around developer Bungie’s decision to bring the sequel to online-only shooter Destiny to the PC, given that the original game was a console-only release for its entire multi-year lifespan. We also found out just today that the game will be distributed exclusively through Blizzard’s Battle.net service, a huge boon for Bungie’s publishing partner Activision Blizzard. But Destiny 2 game director Luke Smith had some bad news to announce at the gameplay reveal event here in Los Angeles: the PC release won’t happen until after the console one on September 8th, 2017, according to IGN.

"We're not committed to a PC date yet, but at Bungie we're totally committed to making a PC build as great as we can," Smith said in an interview with IGN. "Our partnership with Blizzard and being on Battle.net, we want to make sure that this version of the game has the time it needs to bake in the oven so it's a delicious piece of bread when it comes out." So it’s unclear how long it will take for Bungie to get the PC version out.