Paving the Way for New Frontiers
Sep 9, 2024 - Destiny 2 Dev Team
Today marks the 10-year anniversary of Destiny. We set out in 2014 to do something new and different for our studio. We’ve conquered the Witness, looted Dungeons, ascended to the Lighthouse, and more. Now, we look to the future.
We’re plotting our course to the stars through Codename: Frontiers. We closed a door with The Final Shape, but we are opening a new one, a weird one, an exciting one, that takes Destiny to places it has never been before. We're building this future now and are excited to share with you a first glimpse of it today.
This roadmap lays out our plan for Year 11 and beyond, with some exciting changes to our annual model:
- Two Expansions per year
- Four Major Updates of FREE content every year
Over the next few months, we will be sharing more info with you on Codename: Frontiers, which is how we are describing major innovations coming to Destiny over the next few years starting with our next expansion, Codename: Apollo. We have several Dev Insight deep dives going live today and will continue to add more to this list over the weeks and months to come.
Today, we also have Tyson Green, the Game Director for Destiny 2 and Alison Lührs, the Destiny 2 Narrative Director, diving through some of our future plans for Destiny 2. Our goal is to be more transparent in our communications with you. This means sharing our work more frequently, even if you see our mistakes and false starts along the way. So, please remember that our roadmap and plans are subject to change as we get deeper into development.
Ultimately, this is your game too. We want you to see more of how it is made, and why.
If you take away nothing else, it should be this:
We’re excited for Destiny to change and improve in ways that allow it to keep evolving in the future.
Dev Insight Deep Dives
Below you will find a list of Dev Insight deep dives for various innovations coming with Codename: Frontiers. We’ll be building upon this section over the next few months with breakdowns of features and changes coming to Destiny.
Our Vision for the Future of Destiny 2
Tyson Green: My name is Tyson and I’m the Game Director for Destiny 2, and I'm excited to speak today about our team’s vision for Destiny.
First and foremost, we all still love Destiny. It is a unique and challenging game, both for you and for us. I’ve personally been working on Destiny for 15 years and it still excites me creatively. There are not many games I could say that about.
But at the same time, we recognize that it has become too rigid. Expansions have started to feel too formulaic and are over too quickly with little replay value. Seasons and Episodes keep getting bigger but can still feel like you are just going through the motions.
We believe it’s time for Destiny to change and evolve, and that our community wants this game to grow and innovate too. And to do that, we need to start breaking some of the molds.
Annual Expansions
So, we’re going to start with annual Expansions.
We’ve loved creating annual Expansions and are especially proud of The Final Shape. But the truth is that they dominate almost all our development effort. We need to free ourselves up to explore and innovate with how we deliver Destiny 2 content so we can invest in areas of the game that will feel more impactful to players.
Starting next year, instead of one big Expansion, we are going to deliver two medium-sized Expansions, one every six months. Each of these will depart from the one-shot campaign structure we’ve been using essentially unchanged since Shadowkeep, and each will be an opportunity to explore exciting new formats instead.
We are excited to try new things that challenge your idea of what a Destiny experience can be. We are actively prototyping non-linear campaigns, exploration experiences similar to the Dreaming City or Metroidvanias, and even more unusual formats like roguelikes or survival shooters. Each expansion will present a new opportunity to try something different.
Departing from one-shot campaigns doesn’t mean we are turning away from great story telling. Going forward, we want to return the mystery and wonder that was woven into the fabric of early Destiny, when the story felt ripe with possibilities and an epic sense of exploration and discovery. Great stories are as important as ever in our creative vision and Alison will touch more on that below.
Seasons
With the change to two Expansions per year, our Seasonal model will be changing as well.
Instead of three Episodes, we will be building four Major Updates per year, one every three months. Each Expansion will launch alongside a Major Update at the start of a Season, and then a second Major Update will follow three months later to refresh the Core Game with new and reprised content including:
- Activities: Strikes, Exotic missions, or entirely new modes like Onslaught
- Rewards: weapons, armor, Artifact Mods, Exotics, and more
- New weekly events
- New features
- Combat meta and balance updates
The big Seasonal resets will still happen, but now twice a year, alongside the Expansions.
Each update will be a substantial refresh of the core game, bringing new activities and reward content. We are also excited to announce that, like Destiny 2: Into the Light, these updates and their content will be free to all players.
We want Destiny to be easier for anyone to play or recommend, so we want to remove that major barrier to the experience.
Which means we need to talk about the Core Game itself.
Core Game
The Core Game is Destiny’s always available, evergreen activity experience. And we need to fix two key things with it:
Approachability
First, Destiny is too complex. With literally hundreds of activities, you practically need a PhD to decide what to play and how to get rewards you're looking for.
We’re going to start to fix this by modernizing our activity UI, the Director, to make it easier for everyone to find and launch into great activities. And we’re reworking our reward model to make sure that all of those activities offer meaningful rewards. Our Deep Dives on Activities and Rewards go into more detail on these changes in particular.
Gear and Challenge Should Matter
Even great activities stop mattering if the challenge dries up and the rewards aren’t worth it. So, we’re investing in a greatly improved Challenge Customization system to let players of any skill range find the right challenge level for them, with rewards that improve based on the challenge level you take on.
These won’t just be simple incoming damage increases either—the team is cooking up some great gameplay modifiers that give enemies some exciting tools to mix things up on every run. We will have a deep dive coming soon to show off some of these new threats.
As for the rewards, there will be higher tiers of the Legendary gear—think Adept weapons and Artifice armor—that will be available from these higher challenge ranges in a much wider variety of activities, across both PVE and PVP.
These two changes will help the core game experience be easier to drop into, and much deeper in terms of variety and pursuit of personal mastery. And they are a starting point for ongoing changes aimed to continuing to improve Destiny in these regards.
The Next Multiyear Saga Starts with Codename: Apollo
Alison Lührs: Hello! I’m Alison, and I’m the D2 Narrative Director. I’m a fresh face at Bungie; I started doing narrative direction for seasons in Fall 2022, and my first D2 expansion was The Final Shape.
We’re proud of The Final Shape and the ending we created for the Light and Darkness Saga. And we knew that the episodes that follow would act as an epilogue, tying up Light and Dark’s hanging threads… but also setting us up for what’s next. The Episodes close doors and open new ones, purposeful ones, storylines that are set in place to prepare us for what comes next.
And what is next is our new saga.
You’ll see teases of it in the later two Episodes, and then fully kick off with Codename: Apollo. This next saga is also based around a core theme, much like Light and Darkness did. It will introduce plenty of new characters, factions, twists, and more. There’s a lot more here we will say eventually, but we don’t want to spoil the journey for you. This will be a multiyear journey, one we can’t wait to take you on.
Our first expansion, Codename: Apollo, is a nonlinear character-driven adventure.
What Do We Mean by 'Codename: Apollo is Nonlinear’?
Previously, in stories like The Final Shape, you experienced the story as A to B to C to D in a nice straight line. In Codename: Apollo, our story takes place over dozens of threads you’ll explore and discover. So, when you land on our brand new location, the story starts at A, and then you can choose if you want to explore C first, or try and get into B, or maybe investigate D.
And the options you didn’t choose? Don’t worry, those other options are still open for you to go back and play through. You’ll need to!
Because the more you play and discover, the more the story progresses, so experiencing a certain number of threads opens up the next part of the story. The order in which you explore will be something you choose, but we have built Codename: Apollo in a way the story always makes sense and flows from beginning to middle to end. There’s no time gating, no waiting for the next drop, Codename: Apollo’s story unfolds based on player progression.
Destiny is at its best when it's mysterious, weird, and not afraid to try new things. This shift to nonlinear stories isn’t something we’re locking ourselves into, but it is the structure that fits Codename: Apollo best. The narrative structure of the releases that follow will be quite different, a structure to suit that game’s experience, and we want to continue to innovate with each expansion across both gameplay and narrative.
Into the Unknown
This all sounds like a big change, and it is! Because when the rhythm of our story becomes predictable, or when characters and our world fail to change — that’s how we create a situation, not a story. So how can we innovate? By telling a story that keeps up with our innovation, not one that slows it down.
That means an evolving world; giving space for new characters, growing and evolving factions, making sure the story we tell is in a world we have nurtured, and with characters who grow in turn. We believe in rewarding the player for paying attention without punishing someone for not knowing something, that way everyone gets to come along for the ride no matter how deep in the lore they are. You’ll see that approach starting with Episodes and continuing into the new multiyear story.
So when we think about a multiyear arc, what does that look like? Think of it as a constellation of stories united by a single theme. We will show you what that theme is later but suffice to say; we believe in it. Think of this multiyear arc as a web, not a line. Each release fits into the larger saga. We can’t wait to take you on that journey.
Story is easy to spoil so I won’t ruin the details for what the theme in Codename: Apollo is or what it’s about, but I will give you something to look forward to:
Apollo ends with the narrative gasoline that will propel us into the next few years with a clear theme, goal, and a destination that won’t come at you as a straight line but will be well-worth the trip. It’ll reward you, it’ll surprise you, and it’ll take us places Destiny has never seen before.
See you when the time is right...
And with that, we come to a close. Well, a new beginning, really. Over the next few months, we’ll be dishing out more Deep Dives and engaging in more conversation. We have no doubts the above breakdown of Codename: Frontiers plans will spawn far more questions than we can answer, but we’ll be looking to keep you up to date as we take flight. Keep an eye on the Deep Dive section as we’ll be adding links to further topics.
Thank you again for joining us on the first ten-year journey in Destiny. We’ve been through so much, battling the Darkness and stopping the Witness. Now it’s time to look to the stars again. It’s time to imagine. To dream big and explore what our futures can be within this universe.
We have our heading and hope to see you join us along the way.
-Destiny 2 Dev Team
For all mentions of free content, some content on PS4/PS5 requires an active PlayStation Plus subscription to access.