Bungie un-cancels Destiny: Vaulted content is coming back as new leadership promises ‘Destiny is foundational to our future’

Bungie’s new leadership duo laid out the “next chapter of Bungie” today in a blog post with an accompanying video. The big news is that Bungie has essentially uncanceled Destiny 2, or will at least go the lengths to finally undo its greatest mistake: vaulting a bunch of raids and multiple of its story campaigns. Funnily enough, that work has already begun on the community side with a mod project that makes vaulted content playable through an offline build of Destiny.

I got off the Destiny train a long time ago, but its “downward spiral,” as PCG’s Lincoln Carpenter put it in May, was a series of unforced errors that really began with the widely-hated decision to “sunset” (delete) gigantic chunks of the game in the name of “dealing with bloat.” I still remember when a friend told me that the Destiny 2 campaign, I thing I bought and enjoyed in 2017, was simply gone.

The news comes just three months after a brutal round of layoffs that affected hundreds of Bungie devs, essentially disbanding the Destiny 2 team. It’s unclear if the studio will attempt to rehire the talent it shed with the shortsighted decision to call it quits on Destiny, but at least what’s left of Bungie understands that it has lost whatever goodwill it had left, and will need to slowly rebuild trust.

On the Marathon side, Bungie reinforced that the extraction shooter is undergoing its own transformation with a permanent PvE mode and social space coming in December. To me, this also serves as a proof of life: Marathon isn’t shutting down in the immediate future.