It may be one of the most influential and widely played online games, but Destiny 2 has been experiencing a rough patch as of late. And developer Bungie knows it.

"For years now, Destiny has been on this steady hardening of the core [audience],” explains game director Tyson Green. “More and more core players are staying and playing the game, but relatively few [new] people come into the game. There's a tightening and contraction, and this presents problems for a game that you're trying to maintain as a live service, especially when you want to keep serving those core players with great, compelling expansions."

Following the launch of The Edge of Fate expansion in July, Destiny 2 saw a slump in player activity. Not necessary due to the vision of its new storyline, but rather in how it redesigned the flow of power progression to see the campaign through. Since then, Bungie has been steadily working to make changes to build up its audience again, and the upcoming expansion, the Star Wars-themed Renegades, will mark the developer’s next effort to lay a better path forward for its evolving universe.

For many developers working on online games with live-service elements, calcifying player numbers has been a recurring obstacle. Often this can be simply a matter of time – Destiny 2 has been running for nearly 10 years now, and it’s inevitable that only the most dedicated will stay for the entire ride. But one of Destiny’s most recent hurdles is one of its own making: Bungie wrote an end to the story.

Since the first Destiny arrived in 2014, each new expansion and update has formed chapters of the Light and Darkness saga, a decade-spanning, lore-dense story. But with the 2024 expansion, The Final Shape, Bungie brought that saga to a finish. It did, of course, set the stage for what's next – another multi-year storyline with a brand new focus. However, much like the current state of the post-Endgame Marvel Cinematic Universe, this presented an issue for Destiny 2, where many long-time and casual players saw it as a natural end-point to their journey. As you can imagine, this has made further adventures a bit of a challenge to present as must-see experiences.

"The Final Shape brought things to a crescendo, where it's like a fantastic ending that tied off a lot of the threads,” says Green. “People were pleased and satisfied with what they played, and then the big [downwards] spike in population [came after]. That happened because we ended the saga. So you get what you pay for, right?"

“That wasn't the plan from the business perspective,” Green continues. “We still want to keep making Destiny; we still have many stories to tell in this universe. There are still lots of things to do, and we have to keep building the game. Unfortunately, it was not gracefully managed, but we had to try something."

The first steps toward providing a compelling reason to return to Destiny following the end of the Light and Darkness saga arrived in July’s The Edge of Fate expansion, in which Bungie laid the groundwork for its next major storyline, titled the “Fate saga”. It transported players to a new region of space, where they came into conflict with the enigmatic Nine faction. This new campaign introduced new story threads and twists that shook up the lore of the series, and was an intriguing setup for the next phase of Destiny 2. However, the expansion received mixed responses from dedicated players – and struggled to bring in new ones. The most controversial change was the refreshed power levels and a steeper grind that made progression more daunting than intended, creating hurdles for reaching higher-end activities.

Green is frank in his assessment of The Edge of Fate. He recognises that the expansion didn't deliver a more satisfying way for players to advance their characters – a hard, but necessary lesson for the development team to take in.

"We looked at the problem that we had [after The Final Shape], and we said, 'We think there's a route here,' which is leaning into more systems of pursuit, getting new tiers of gear, armor sets, and power progression, and things like challenge customization," Green said. "These things that can allow a core audience of players to really say, like, 'I'm really gonna take this game and put it through its paces, and get good rewards for it.'

“It sounds great on paper, but it didn't work,” he admits. “I think we've been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games: those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don't. And we don't want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny. So we're listening to our players, and what our players are telling us is that they don't want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards."

Following The Final Shape's release, Bungie announced a change to its release plans for major expansions. Instead of a single annual release, the developer would deliver two mid-sized expansions per year, each with seasonal events. With the upcoming Renegades expansion, Bungie has an opportunity to showcase its realigned power progression, which has been steadily built over recent updates, while also delivering a new campaign that celebrates Star Wars and the Destiny universe.

According to Green, the new release model has allowed the team to be more flexible with adapting to feedback, which has aided the development of Renegades. This new expansion not only re-evaluates the current game flow and the controversial system changes made earlier in 2025, but also presents a new campaign that hits at the same tone of the 2018 expansion, Forsaken, and a darker-edged Star Wars story that's filled with blaster weapons and lightsabers to acquire.

"One of the advantages that the new release model gave us, which is two expansions a year, means you can experiment more within those individual expansions – you can try different things," Green said. "So we saw what we wanted to do with a 'space western' revenge story, and we figured, let's do it in that one, let's aim for this. So we took the idea of Star Wars as total inspiration and built a Destiny expansion around it; that's kind of how we always do it. In this case, I think it comes through much more richly, because it's being more deliberate with its influences and style, but it's still fundamentally a Destiny expansion."

From my hands-on time with Renegades, it’s clear that Bungie took away valuable lessons from The Edge of Fate's release and post-launch content. I found the new campaign to be more direct in its objectives and offered a fairly generous power grind that focused more on engaging with new activities than on grinding for rare gear to move power levels up by a tick. It also touches upon classic Destiny by reintroducing a more developed version of the faction system. Many thoughtful changes really invigorate the Destiny 2 experience, but the question remains whether this will bring back players in droves.

It's a type of challenge that has become very common for live-service games in 2025. And while the Destiny series has been influential on other games, it's now in a similar position to many of its imitators. Still, Bungie sees this as an opportunity to reassess what Destiny 2 can be. When reflecting on Destiny 2's current state, core creative director Ben Womack is confident in the current roadmap, and believes that, by re-thinking the rules, it will build a new future for the game going forward.

"When you're making something new, you often have a bunch of conventions and boundaries that you have to consider, especially for games that have been around for a long time like Destiny," he said. "It's tempting to stick to those conventions as being the boundaries of the rules, but the truth is that you need to re-examine all of them every single time when trying to really create something special and make a splash. This is especially true when working with Lucasfilm.

“We looked at how we made the sandbox stuff we've done, we now have blaster weapons that will stay with us going forward, seeing how the [lightsaber-like] Praxic Blade turned out, and we have the various new syndicates that turned out well. There are things that we definitely wouldn't have done, but we had to accept and push past those usual boundaries to do these things, and as long as it's still fun and people are responding to it, and the feel is there, then it's the right decision."