This hasn't been the strongest year for Bungie. On the back of ending updates for Destiny 2, the studio released Marathon to a more muted and mixed response than anyone would've liked. Layoffs followed, and an ex-lead from the FPS has given some insight into what it was like behind the scenes.

In an interview with PCGamer, Joe Zeigler, former game director on Marathon, discussed the challenges in getting the project over the line. "I found this project was - it had some areas where there were definitely some ideas about where we were going, but there were a lot of disagreements across the place," he says.

"So part of where I was advising was trying to bring those all together and be like, 'Hey, what is the cohesive place you want to go to? And how do we get there?'," he continues. "And then when we landed on that, I could help them drive that."

Zeigler initially joined the company in an advisory role before a leadership position at Marathon opened up. Coming from years directing League of Legends, he knows a thing or three about keeping a live-service game on track. As a big fan of the studio, dating back to Myst, he was eager to step into the infrastructure, and he notes that the company operates in two distinct lanes.

"I'll say this about Bungie, which I really like, and it's still very true about Bungie: it lives in two worlds," he states. "One is this world where there's a lot of legacy to live up to, which is a lot of pressure. But there's also this other side of it, which is that it's a very egoless company."

The team "are always looking for some way to improve, and the way they do that is, oftentimes, by bringing in people who are new to help them figure out what they are missing," he adds. Which is how he wound up working there for almost four years, exiting after Marathon came out.

Sadly, things are murky for Bungie at present. Marathon's not doing the expected business and Destiny 2's purely on support. Given the state of Xbox's restructuring right now, it's a case of seeing what happens in the years ahead. For now, Zeigler's working on an unannounced new project.

Bungie admits Marathon "did not reach as many players as we had hoped," shares plans to evolve the game for "a sustainable future" while committing to Destiny

Destiny preservationists have managed to bring the original game to PC with plentiful bells and whistles, and it's caught the attention of Bungie boss Josh Deane.

YouTube user Flummoxed posted a 4K, 105 FOV, 60+ FPS demonstration of Destiny 1 running on PC with mostly correct behaviors. When it was picked up on Twitter by DestinyNostalgia, Deane shared the post, writing, "Seems like a pretty game, wonder if it will do well…"

With new Bungie leadership promising to stay committed to Destiny as they work to restore cut Destiny 2 content (but not, crucially, make any new content for it), some fans have interpreted Deane's words as a potential sign of things to come, or are at least willing to pin their hopes on it. The usual hype merchants, like YouTuber Aztecross, have unsurprisingly taken this inch for a mile.

Will Bungie revisit Destiny 1 in some form? With the studio down hundreds of developers, racing to prop up Marathon, and barely keeping the lights on in Destiny 2, I very much doubt it, and it would take more than a pithy tweet to convince me otherwise.

On Bluesky, aknumbers, lead developer of this D1 project, reacted to Deane's response, calling it "post 2 in my series 'is the funniest possible thing about to happen.'" Bungie reviving D1 while D2 dies would, indeed, be something to see.

What's undeniably significant is that Deane, head of product at Bungie as well as Marathon general manager, shared this D1 project at all without a cease and desist in tow.

The GitLab hub for this project – specifically, its Claude explainer – notes that it is "a preservation project on owned media. The goal is to keep a game that depended on retired online services playable, by writing a server that answers what the client asks for. The work is: observe what the client needs, build it, serve it, verify it."

"No game, patch or firmware assets are included or redistributed; the repository contains only original code and clean-room protocol documentation, kept deliberately separate from copyrighted content," the GitLab hub adds, distinguishing this D1 from some of the projects in today's vibe-coded recomp boom that have ended up in the iron sights of legal teams or other developers. This is hitched to the emulator shadPS4, but it is not a readily distributable copy of Destiny, which actually works in its favor.

Bloodborne PC port with full multiplayer can't get FromSoftware fans to vibe with vibe coding: "I will just use the emulator made by humans."

After laying off "most" of the Destiny team, Bungie is coming to players, hat in hand, with open acknowledgements of Marathon's failures and new plans to keep Destiny 2's legacy alive.

Studio head Poria Torkan and head of product Josh Deane have penned a contrite message about the studio's future while asking players to hold Bungie "accountable" to its goals.

"This is an important time for Bungie," Torkan and Deane say in a joint blog post. "Our future depends on making clear choices about where we focus, delivering what we say we will, and being honest about our successes and failures. Stability doesn’t mean shrinking our ambition. It just means that we have to focus on the things you want to see from us, and making sure our vision matches our reality.

"How we bring this new Bungie to life has to be through the spirit of putting players at the forefront of what we do. We have to find a way back to making games that we want to play, but with you at the center."

What does that mean in concrete terms? Well, they want to "build a stronger long-term future for Destiny, while honoring and restoring its past," "evolve Marathon to grow our community and build a sustainable future," "increase transparency around development priorities," and "communicate more consistently, especially when plans change."

For Destiny 2, Bungie is undoing its controversial content vaulting. Plans for Marathon are less specific, but the team is acknowledging the game's failure to gain a strong playerbase while they tease a plan to expand it to "a deeper survival experience." More details on Marathon's future are coming "later this week," while information on Destiny 2 is set for "the months ahead."

Judging by the early responses from the communities of both games, the message is resonating with the fan base – though some are certainly cynical about "another blog post from Bungo on listening and trust." Still, concrete plans to undo Destiny 2's controversial content vaulting go a long way. The question now is simply how the studio's going to do that with so many developers recently laid off.

Torkan and Deane also say the studio has made "several" changes to its internal operations, "by simplifying our priorities, reducing competing initiatives, moving decisions closer to the teams building our games, and changing how we measure success to place greater emphasis on player satisfaction."

The pair acknowledge that "none of those changes earn trust on their own," but they hope that players will "keep holding us accountable" in the future.

"Please keep fighting for what you believe in. Please keep us accountable. And we'll definitely chat more soon," Dean reiterates in the video.

Bungie's mantra was "I love playing Destiny. I hate that it’s not better" in the MMO's early years, says former lead.

Bungie has now issued a studio update after Destiny 2 shut down this summer and triggered a massive wave of layoffs, and it requires help from Marathon. The sci-fi shooter saw a middling reception despite heart-eyed reviews when it launched in March, but Bungie thinks the game deserves another chance – both for Bungie's sake, and for the reputation of its live-service games.

Acknowledging that Marathon "did not reach as many players as we had hoped," Bungie insists it will push the extraction shooter through an "evolution" in a new blog post and matching YouTube video you can watch below. Mainly, the developer wants to break down some of Marathon's genre walls and give it wider appeal as a survival experience.

"We aren't just listening to feedback, we understand your disappointment," Bungie studio head Poria Torkan and Marathon GM Josh Deane write in their joint blog while addressing layoffs at Bungie. Part of what's brought the studio to such tragic lows this year, the Bungie leads say, is the fact that "we lost sight of what we should be prioritizing most, our players."

Marathon's current Mixed Steam rating summarizes some players' sense of alienation. GamesRadar+ features editor Andrew Brown writes in his four-and-a-half-star Marathon review that the FPS "has consumed me entirely. The depth of Marathon's maps, set against the simplicity of its violence, make for intoxicating bursts of dopamine" – and even Marathon's biggest haters share these opinions.

Marathon's most helpfully-rated English review on Steam, for example, agrees that Marathon is a stunner, "but it is an extraction shooter. [...] Extraction shooters are being released at a rate not seen before and some people are beginning to realize something. People ruin games."

Earlier this year, Marathon's former game director Joe Ziegler – he stepped down not long after Bungie's last bout of layoffs – told GamesRadar+ that the most valuable part of PvP is that it "pushes you to adapt to the whim and unexpected thoughts of other players." But if most players don't like the process of shoving each other into lockers, then you see the kind of decline Marathon is currently facing; according to SteamDB, the game's all-time Steam player peak of 88,337 has crumbled to about 2,000 concurrent players a day.

"So, we're going to anchor on what makes Marathon special but evolve it beyond the genre constraints we placed on it," Torkan and Deane say. "We're going to expand Marathon to a deeper survival experience, that gives players more ways to take on this dangerous alien world."

Marathon devs plan on "strengthening its combat, world, and competitive tension while giving players more agency in how they engage with the game" through the end of 2026, the studio leads say. "That means creating meaningful experiences whether you prefer cooperative PvE, competitive PvP, or the unpredictable tension of Marathon PvPvE.

"It's important to us that no matter your playstyle, or your skill level.... we find better ways to hear from you as we get back to where we need to be: making games you want to play."

The developers promise more details "on our future vision for Marathon" later this week, and they remind players the game "was never intended to replace Destiny."

To that point, Bungie is unvaulting the Destiny 2 content it dropped in the trash over the past few years as part of a separate, but related, attempt to restore its live-service games' luster. Marathon's revamp is more of an extra layer of protection, then, bubble-wrapping Bungie at the end of what looks to be another tough year for video games.

Bungie shuts down leak claiming Destiny will be revived through a merger with Marathon.

After ending development and laying off most of the Destiny 2 team, Bungie says Destiny still has a future, and it starts with undoing the game's biggest mistake.

In a new video and blog post explaining "the next chapter for Bungie," studio head Poria Torkan joins product head and Marathon GM Josh Deane to address an understandably worried fan base.

"We are not done with Destiny," the post reads, calling the now-calcified MMO "foundational to our future."

"We want to return Destiny to its original promise, to recapture the qualities that have always made it special," the post continues. "The awe-inspiring mystery, meaningful discovery, and a community of Guardians coming together against impossible odds. That begins with restoring important parts of Destiny 2's history that players can no longer experience today."

Deane expands on this point in the video, calling the vaulted content, including paid content that was removed from the game for opaque technical reasons, "what's rightfully yours."

"It's going to take some time. I wish we could just flip a freakin' switch," he says. "But we're going to commit to unvaulting the Destiny 2 campaigns, the destinations, the raids that never should have been ripped away to begin with."

Unvaulted content will be brought up to "the stability and gameplay standards of Destiny 2 today," Bungie says, from lighting to combatant AI.

Bungie owns up to the massive misstep of the DCV in its blog post: "We cannot change the decision we made, but we can acknowledge its impact and do the work to make it right by restoring these important parts of Destiny's history."

"That restoration will hopefully lay the foundation for how we reforge into new Destiny stories and games that you all deserve and that we want to create," Deane adds.

This is reiterated in the blog post: "We have to find a way back to making games that we want to play, but with you at the center." Bungie says it wants to "build a stronger long-term future for Destiny," offering a glimmer of hope for fans mourning the series.

Bungie shuts down leak claiming Destiny will be revived through a merger with Marathon.

Destiny is not being merged with Marathon in a bid to revive the series after the end of development on Destiny 2, Bungie has confirmed as rumors make the rounds.

Bungie veteran Julia Nardin, now Marathon creative director but also known for myriad Destiny releases, addressed this rumor on Twitter in a post shared by principal community manager Cozmo.

"As someone who’s worked on both Destiny and Marathon, I can confirm that the 'leak' about us merging the two IPs is fake," she says. "They share a lot of the same Bungie DNA, but like siblings they’re also their own independent entities. Please don’t believe everything you read online."

Nardin seems to be shutting down a detail pulled from a lengthy post (shared to the Marathon subreddit) from a user or group claiming to have insider knowledge of upcoming Marathon plans.

"There has been some vague testing the waters internally to rework Marathon and Destiny into a single IP with Marathon representing the beginning of Mankinds Golden Age and to foreshadow more threats to be used in a future Destiny project," it reads.

"Expect many ideas in Marathon that were planned for the many Destiny 3 preprod vertical slices [former CEO Pete Parsons] kiboshed and shut down," the post adds.

The problem with this purported leak, of course, is that a majority of the people who made Destiny have been laid off. Never mind just how ridiculous the Golden Age tie-in would be, and the fact that this post is originally from famous knowledge bastion 4chan.

The far-reaching post also claims that Marathon "is going F2P in December," adding a PvE mode called Investigations with "Destiny raid style bosses," introducing Destiny-themed cosmetics, getting a new runner called Shrike, dividing stored loot between PvE and PvP modes, and at this point, let's give everyone a free car too.

Bungie ends Marathon's seasonal schedule, delays a September update to December, and makes it more like Destiny 2.

Destiny's Taken King expansion is officially 11 years old, and former Bungie studio vice president Mark Noseworthy marked the occasion by saying what many Destiny players have thought a million times: this game is so good, but it could be so much better.

In a post on Twitter, Noseworthy, who left Bungie in 2024 along with some other senior staff amidst layoffs, describes The Taken King as his personal pinnacle.

"Of all the parts of Destiny I’ve worked on, this remains my personal favorite as a player and the one I’m most proud of," he reflects. "We knew Destiny 1 was so close to great; it was just missing some ingredients and a different preparation. 'I love playing Destiny. I hate that it’s not better' was our mantra while making [The Taken King]."

The early days of Destiny were some of the series' messiest, with players and Bungie both unsure of what the game was meant to be. The Vault of Glass, the first raid, helped crystallize the vision and, frankly, resuscitate the game, but it was The Taken King – a blast of new content, an immeasurably stronger story, added buildcrafting options, and improved progression and endgame pursuits – that really pushed the game over the top. This is what Destiny can be.

The Taken King is still remembered as one of the best expansions in Destiny's history – to some, the best, though I personally put it behind The Witch Queen and, at the top, The Final Shape. (It's no coincidence that most of the best expansions are Hive-themed, as the Hive have the best lore.) It also cemented a pattern that would come to define much of Destiny's life, and a slightly meaner mantra that many players adopted: I hate Destiny, it's my favorite game.

Throughout its life, Destiny has often felt like it's about to turn the corner, with only its finest expansions actually delivering on everything expected or imagined, and avoiding systemic missteps that another expansion would have to fix.

Looking back, a lot of Destiny expansions really were fixers. Destiny 2's Forsaken, for example, was a near shot-for-shot replay of The Taken King: after a troubled launch, Bungie stepped in to correct a bunch of errors. That became my acid test for expansions: how much of this is fixing Destiny, and how much of this is celebrating or expanding it? Is the game great now, or could it be great later?

The final update for Destiny 2, stuck in stasis after Bungie ended active development and began to really prioritize digging Marathon out of its rut, left it in arguably the best place it's ever been, with FOMO removed, loot updated, and many events available. But with the end of development, the game also stopped chasing those new horizons. We'll never turn the corner now.

Bungie ends Marathon's seasonal schedule, delays a September update to December, and makes it more like Destiny 2.

Bungie has delayed a September 22 Marathon update to December 8 as part of a larger live service overhaul that will end the game's "strict seasonal schedule" in the hopes of delivering more significant content drops – on the surface, not unlike the strategy Arc Raiders has pivoted toward.

In a blog post, Bungie agrees that "Marathon needs more depth, more variety, stronger progression, and better reasons to keep playing over the long term." Destiny 2 players may feel a strange sense of deja vu toward this line: "Addressing that feedback requires us to change both what we're building and how we deliver it."

"The content originally planned for September will now arrive as part of our Symbiosis update on December 8," Bungie writes. "Alongside the new Runner shell, permanent PvE experience, and refreshed Perimeter zone, the update will also include a social space/firing range, an experimental TDM mode, and improvements to new player onboarding."

That December update, Symbiosis, is called "the first major step in Marathon’s next chapter." I have to wonder if it will ultimately be positioned as a relaunch of sorts.

"Symbiosis is an important milestone for Marathon and the beginning of a broader evolution through March and beyond, shaped by what we learn from players along the way," Bungie says. This timeline is roughly in line with Marathon's original season roadmap, but content drops will now move more freely as a way of "giving the team the time needed to deliver the larger experiences."

In addition to the above Symbiosis features and additions, players can expect an updated Perimeter map that, hopefully, makes the dang thing worth playing past the opening hours of Marathon. Bungie is also looking to add "the first of several improvements to the new-player experience."

Between the PvE, social space, and team deathmatch PvP, Marathon is looking more like Destiny 2 by the day. It's even got the new-player struggles down. Bungie's flagship MMO ended development just months ago, but it still averages upwards of 8x Marathon's daily peak Steam concurrent player count, reflecting the struggles the studio's new game has faced post-launch, despite delivering a genuinely compelling shooter experience. In our Marathon review, Andy calls it "my favorite multiplayer shooter in years."

A smaller update is now planned for October 6 to help refresh the game. It very literally "refreshes rewards," Bungie says, and it also resets progression and the in-game economy much like a seasonal wipe.

Additionally, the October update will bring a tuning and balance sweep, a new rewards pass, and miscellaneous quality-of-life improvements. Marathon's recent PvE experiment, Vault Breaker, will also be revived, albeit only for another "limited time" run. Between this and Symbiosis, Bungie is seriously looking for a way to ensure "PvE fits into progression," seemingly in response to Marathon's intimidating PvP.

Shrugging off concerns about Marathon's health and its own – the studio has listed enormous chunks of its floor plan for sublease, which isn't a good sign at the least – Bungie reiterates that this is "only the beginning of what we’re working toward. As players spend time with these updates and share their feedback, we’ll continue refining and expanding Marathon."

Bungie reportedly had "5 or 6 games" in development, including Marathon and Destiny 2 – but most fell apart after Sony's $3.6 billion acquisition.

Destiny 2 and Marathon maker Bungie is "exploring options" to lease out most of its Bellevue, Washington studio following heavy layoffs and a shift to a "digital-first" employment model.

Bungie confirmed that it's looking to "sublease its campus" in a statement to The Game Post, which spotted a listing for 210,984 rentable square footage at the studio's building. The lease offer runs through 2035.

You should not read this news as a sign that Bungie is imminently closing its doors. In many ways, it's no surprise. It more accurately reflects the physical and financial needs of the studio's dramatically smaller team. But it certainly is bad news.

"The studio transitioned to a digital-first model several years ago, and this move reflects the team’s evolving workplace needs and the effectiveness of its remote collaboration," as Bungie puts it.

There are fewer people employed at the studio and more of those people are remote, in other words, so they don't need as much space.

Bungie expanded into this building years ago as part of a Pete Parsons-backed plan to become a multi-franchise studio. In the years since, Parsons has left, his replacement has left, multiple incubation projects have been culled, Destiny 2 has been canceled, and Marathon – the only other game Bungie has actually made and released in a decade – has struggled to maintain an audience.

Counting Marathon and Destiny 2, Bungie reportedly had five or six games in development at one point, apparently including a Genshin Impact-like fantasy game. These projects seemingly evaporated not long after Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion, and studio executives have been criticized for allegedly juicing incubation to pump up the company's perceived value.

I've spent a lot more time inside Bungie HQ than your average person who doesn't work there, and as ever, game studios are less exciting than they may sound. Mostly, I remember seeing pretty standard office space workstations, production and meeting rooms, a cafeteria, a gym, lockers, and other expected facilities – just, you know, dotted with life-size Destiny statues. A buyer likely wouldn't need to make dramatic changes to the space.

This lease offer represents a supermajority of Bungie's footprint, but as it pokes at Marathon and spins up new ideas, Bungie says it "will continue to maintain a physical office presence in Bellevue."

After the end of Destiny 2's development, it was announced that "most" of the game's team was being laid off. Some developers on Marathon, whose team had grown into the hundreds over its development and absorbed many Destiny 2 devs at various points, were also impacted.

The Destiny 2 team has been pruned to the point that, apart from keeping the servers on, Bungie "can't promise" responses to in-game issues like bugs, at least not in the way it used to.

Meanwhile, Marathon is limping toward its third season, with player numbers down significantly since release. It remains a fun game, but it has struggled to find a foothold and its season 2 content didn't move the needle.

People don't understand Steam player numbers, Palworld lead says: "Poor Marathon and stuff are getting dragged through the mud ... I'm sure our day's coming."

Oh, what could've been. It's been a rough year for Bungie, what with updates stopping on Destiny 2. the muted response to Marathon, and now the whole outfit essentially reduced to a skeleton crew. Turns out, we could've been seeing a lot more of the developer, since the teams therein had around a half-dozen games in the works before, during, and after the Sony acquisition, according to a new report.

No, really - that many releases were purportedly in various stages on the slate for the original home of Halo prior to Sony buying the outfit for $3.6 billion. This comes from Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, who spoke about the studio in a new YouTube video.

"As part of that acquisition, Bungie also had a whole bunch of other live service games in the works that Sony wanted to see come out in the subsequent years in addition to, of course, Destiny 2, which is Bungie’s big ongoing project," he says. There were "five or six" in total, and this portfolio was integral to Sony's interest in the company.

But "for a variety of reasons," he explains, "most of those projects fell apart." He doesn't provide any further clues on what these games were, but we can piece together the likely candidates.

There's the aforementioned Marathon, for a start, then the mobile game Destiny: Rising, that came out in 2025. Another game, known as Project Gummy Bears, was taken in-house at Sony and is still in development, though to what degree is unknown.

From there, we know of Project Sunspot, another Destiny spin-off, that was canceled in 2023, and Project Payback, a game inspired by Warframe, which was shuttered in 2024. We could speculate all day on the circumstances behind these decisions - Sony paid a lot of money for Bungie and clearly wanted a return on investment.

Whatever state these games were in, they probably just didn't seem promising enough to do that kind of business. But if at least one was moved to another team, the potential must be there to some degree.

It's all a pity, because now Bungie's a shell of what it once was. Whatever the future holds, we can only imagine how these games would've looked had they come out.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney suggests AI could've saved Destiny 2 and will "enable games like Destiny to thrive!"

I didn't realize I'd stopped playing new releases until my wife pointed it out one day. "You've been playing a lot of super old games lately," she remarked to me, and I didn't think much of it at first. But her words echoed long enough to make me stop and ponder exactly why I'd been snubbing new games in favor of old. I've come to the conclusion that I'm using them as a security blanket of sorts.

Writing about video games for a living in 2026 means generative AI and mass layoffs consume up to 100% of my headspace on any given working day. Whether it's another big company like Xbox announcing hundreds of redundancies or a C-suite executive extolling the dubious virtues of artificial intelligence, I log on for work each morning fully expecting to learn about something terrible to research and communicate to you, dear reader.

Don't get me wrong, the gravity of a story about corporate restructuring is usually offset by something fun, like a Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Balatro crossover. But as upsetting stories continue to take up a greater share of my workload with every passing week, it's no wonder that I'm escaping the horrors of gaming's present by losing myself in its past.

Take the pain away

My recent retro gaming phase came about organically. I hurt my back the other week and spent several days faced with a very physical dilemma. I could stay lying down, or exist in a state of perpetual agony. There's not much you can do in that situation besides watch TV and play video games, and I found myself doing a lot of both.

But what surprised me was my instinct to exclusively play very old games. As in, games that launched at least 15 years ago. In a mild state of sedation from over-the-counter painkillers, I reached for what was most comfortable: games from my childhood, like Pokemon Leaf Green, Diablo 2, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

It feels markedly different from the casual, inconsistent relationship I've had with the best retro games up until recently, fueled by an impulse to comb through my Switch Online subscription a few times a year and play something from the N64 collection. I'm sure many people resort to the same thing out of convenience, boredom, or lazy curiosity. But my current fixation on retro games is borne from something much more intentional, decided by whatever subconscious part of my brain is in charge of protecting my inner peace.

I can't be the only one whose sense of inner peace feels constantly threatened by games news headlines. The industry has always had its ups and downs, but 2026 is proving a uniquely challenging year.

Universally-acclaimed releases like Crimson Desert are weighed down by varying degrees of controversy. Marathon, Bungie's genuinely great new extraction shooter, has been saddled with responsibility for the death of Destiny 2. I had a lot of fun playing Highguard for the 90 minutes it existed before being permanently shut down, and then I just felt bad for the dozens of developers who worked on it that were suddenly out of a job. I was excited about Subnautica 2 for years, but after extensively covering the legal drama between the original developers and publisher Krafton, it became harder and harder to immerse myself in its world.

Old games let me detach from that misery. When I'm playing Dragon Quest 8, I'm not worried about whether that Dancing devil or Fencing fox was conceptualized using AI-generated art. My friends and I can go a few rounds in Halo 2 without worrying about the livelihoods of everyone who made the game. I can save the world as Tidus in Final Fantasy 10 and not even once think about phrases like shareholder value or operating margins.

What's even better is finding old games I'd never played or revisiting those I bounced off years ago, which I'm ashamed to admit was the case with Skyward Sword – a game I now regret ever saying anything bad about when I was young and stupid.

A link to the past

A lot of what bums me out about today's games also existed 10, 20, even 30 years ago (EA has been shutting down beloved studios long before Microsoft) but it wasn't at the forefront of the zeitgeist like today. Circumstances appear so exacerbated right now because seemingly very little has been done to address the industry's fundamental issues.

There are fewer and fewer places for laid-off developers to safely land. Startup studios consistently struggle to establish a footing due to the increasing scale of development. Meanwhile, billion-dollar companies appear slow to learn from their mistakes, buying companies and IP only to cut staff and shutter studios when sales don't measure up to investor expectations.

The games industry feels less sustainable than ever. I don't know how we're going to fix it, but playing older games in 2026 has had the ironic effect of sparking optimism for the future that I haven't felt in a while by reminding me how far we've come.

Real progress has been made for better representation in games. Investigations into workplace toxicity have resulted in high-profile departures and institutional changes. Workers are successfully unionizing at an encouraging scale, and the impact of crunch culture has been put under a spotlight like never before. We've a long way to go in each one of those aspects, but I'm choosing to believe the same collective drive for a better industry will fuel worthwhile movement in areas causing so much strife today.

In the meantime, I'll dutifully continue keeping y'all informed of the latest atrocities in the hopes that one day I'll find myself writing more about BOGO indie RPGs and less about people losing their jobs. But in my free time, you'll find me curled up under a warm, fuzzy mountain of retro games, whisked away to a simpler time.

Check out all the best N64 games to re-explore if you also want to lose yourself in the good old days.

Marathon game director Joe Ziegler has stepped down and left Bungie a short two months after the developer announced its final update for fellow FPS Destiny 2. His last day at the company was July 17.

Former Destiny 2 design lead Del Chafe III will take over as game director with help from Marathon's current creative director Julia Nardin. Ziegler writes in a Twitter announcement, "Both of them have been operating in a strong leadership capacity for the team and are ready to guide Marathon into the next chapter with an even better and brighter future." Marathon launched in March with a peak concurrent player count of 88,337, according to Steam DB, and its current player count as of writing is 6,775.

Nardin told GamesRadar+ earlier this summer that Marathon's team already knew "where we want to take the story over the next few years," so, at least publicly, Bungie looks ready to invest in Marathon as it leaves Destiny 2 in a sad, comatose state. But the fact that the shooter has gone from nearly 90,000 simultaneous players to under 10,000 is a foreboding one.

"I just want to say a deeply heartfelt thank you to all of you for supporting me and Marathon in our windy mission to bring a dark and terrifying space survival frontier to your screen," Ziegler says. "The mission will continue in new and surprising ways so stay tuned for what this team has in store for you!" The developer says he will "be heading to something new, somewhere else" with updates to come "soon."

"Hopefully as I move onto new things, you'll join me for those adventures as well," he adds.

Bungie has recently been shedding employees like cat hair – it laid off "most" of its Destiny 2 team in a massive sweep, and while PlayStation CEO Herman Hulst swore to staff at the time that Marathon "remains an important part of our portfolio, and we will continue to support the team," some of its devs were also impacted by layoffs. Following those layoffs, Bundie studio head Justin Truman reportedly stepped down from his position after less than a year.

"Working at Bungie was the most toxic, dysfunctional experience of my professional life," former narrative lead Michael Zenke, who left Bungie in 2017, remarked after Destiny 2's death knell update was announced. Ziegler's sudden departure from Marathon after a now seems like evidence of this. You can't enjoy a home with a crumbling foundation.

As Destiny 2 ends, what's next for Bungie?

Former Marathon and Destiny 2 director Christopher Barrett has reached an agreement with both Bungie and Sony following his $200 million lawsuit against the companies.

As per his LinkedIn, Barrett spent over two decades at Bungie, starting his career there as an art director back in 1999. Most recently (for well over 10 years, mind you), the developer was a game director leading projects like Marathon and the now-dying Destiny 2. He left Bungie unexpectedly in the spring of 2024 – and that's where things get a bit messy.

Reports following his departure alleged inappropriate behavior toward female colleagues.

Barrett said he was actually fired so his employers could avoid paying him about $45 million under his employment contract, stating that they were trying to "deflect attention from their massive business failures."

Then, he sued both Bungie and Sony for $200 million, citing a "premeditated scheme to terminate" him and "avoid paying him the tens of millions of dollars he was owed." It's all… a lot.

Sony did respond, sharing supposed examples of Barrett's allegedly inappropriate behavior and a rundown of his financial earnings.

There hasn't been much to say about the case since then, but Barrett's most recent post on LinkedIn confirms that moves have been made – and that a settlement has been reached.

"I am pleased to share that Sony, Bungie, and I have reached an agreement to resolve the lawsuit," it reads.

"The outcome is one I am very satisfied with, and I am grateful to everyone who stood by me. Closing this chapter allows me to focus my attention on what's next in my gaming journey, and I look forward to what lies ahead."

At the end, Barrett includes "the parties' joint statement," which reasserts that they've settled the case and the dev's name has been added to the credits of Marathon "to reflect" his work on the shooter as game director.

Like I said earlier, it's all certainly a lot. Here's hoping that this truly is in the past now, and that every party involved can move forward.

In the ashes of Destiny 2, furious developer creates playable Pete Parsons-themed parody raid where the former Bungie CEO attacks "the entire playerbase" with cars

One Destiny 2 player, an apparent game developer, has made their own raid to throw one last tomato at former Bungie CEO Pete Parsons, who departed the struggling company amid controversy over the small fortune he'd seemingly recently spent on exotic cars.

Satire Twitter account Pete Carsons, whose operator is currently unclear, proudly revealed "The Vault of Cars" this week – a fully playable, in-browser Destiny raid which parodies the Vault of Glass and features Parsons, reborn as a Taniks-like machine hybrid with a South Park-style bucket mouth, as the final boss.

Spite absolutely drips off of this joke raid. A simulated orbit popup asks, "Do you have what it takes to face Pete Carsons in the Vault of Cars and stop him from purchasing all of the remaining cars in The Last City?"

A Twitter post adds: "Note: This experience is not affiliated with or endorsed by Bungie. It is satire only." You know, in case you weren't sure.

Once you log in to "The Final Car," you're thrown into a conversation with "Pete Carsons, Destroyer of Guardians" in a blurry Vault of Glass. Like every freaking Destiny boss, "Pete Carsons" throws up an invincible shield and starts chucking MacGuffins at you – in this case, a procession of cars with labels like "team reduction, crunch enforcer, layoff candidate, micro management, bad taste," and more.

This is a multilayered fight and a fairly impressive lo-fi recreation of the Vault of Glass final boss, Atheon. If you survive the cars – obviously, by throwing tomatoes at them – you'll be whisked to another realm beset by blinking oracles. If you fail the mechanics, you'll see a wipe screen which confirms that the Guardian in this scenario is named "The Entire Playerbase."

Clearing the raid seems to pull up a "We Want Destiny 3" page, which links to the petition calling for a sequel. The parody's creator, "a random developer," writes, "Building video games is hard. It is very hard.

"This industry is neither forgiving nor secure, and yet – we build these worlds because we know millions of people will be invited to experienced the combined efforts of tens of millions of hours it takes to build those worlds."

This sentiment hits hard as the games industry bloodbath continues amidst, most recently, thousands of layoffs and multiple studio divestments at Xbox.

Skewering "very bad and sometimes obvious decisions" made at the expense of game devs, the creator of Pete Carsons continues: "For me, Destiny was special, and although I never got to work on it, a lot of my friends did, friends who can no longer continue to build their world. This is the devastating reality of those bad decisions. The conditions that presented themselves to make Destiny a reality might not be conditions we see for a very, very long time again, if ever."

This parody comes as Bungie reels from massive layoffs, struggles to even hotfix Destiny 2 now that it's in permanent maintenance mode, and watches Marathon lose players. In May, as players prayed for a Destiny 3, a former Destiny 2 writer said, "It turns out the real Destiny killer was Pete Parsons."

Destiny 2 community manager calls out "leaders who made multiple years of poor decisions" as former Bungie VP shares post blaming industry implosion on the market.

No new content is coming to Destiny 2 following its final major update and heavy layoffs at developer Bungie, but the game is keeping the lights on with irregular hotfixes. The studio has admitted it can't guarantee fixes to all reported problems going forward, but one member of the team says some solutions may be workable.

Bungie released the patch notes for a small Destiny 2 update earlier today. It's actually not all that miserably tiny; we've seen smaller updates during livelier periods of the game. But it is basically just a bunch of fixed issues, and that's all we'll see going forward.

Every time Bungie releases a patch like this nowadays, players wonder if this is the last Destiny 2 patch, and blog post, ever. Has the game died its true death? One Twitter user put the question to the Destiny 2 Team account earlier today, and Bungie principal comms manager dmg04 responded.

"There may be moments where we break glass for highest priority issues (game crashes)," he explains. "There will indeed still be downtimes for general server maintenance/upkeep. If we have the opportunity, a small fix could sneak in here or there."

You might think that no new updates means no new crashes, but I've learned not to doubt the power of spaghetti code.

Previously, the Destiny 2 Team account told players that an incoming patch would come "when possible" and contained a "handful of fixes" from "impacted team members." It's a sad story up and down: issues being fixed by people who are no longer at the studio, as that studio tries to keep its head above water at a dire time for the industry altogether.

Id Software veteran of over 20 years absolutely rips and tears into Microsoft after devastating layoffs: "XBOX decided half the team was no longer needed."

As with most things in life, it's hard to pin down an exact singular reason for the downfall of Destiny 2, which had previously been one of the most enduring online first-person shooters in the genre, but Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has seemingly floated what he thinks was a major issue: Bungie and Sony not embracing generative AI enough.

For a player and journalist's perspective, I'll defer to GamesRadar+'s Austin Wood, who cites "unpopular systemic changes, wobbling epilogue narratives, and a severe content drought" as some of Destiny 2's biggest pain points in recent months, and of course Bungie seems to have put all of its eggs into one basket with Marathon, diverting resources that would've otherwise gone into making new Destiny 2 content. But behind closed doors there were other factors at play, according to an anonymous source familiar with the situation speaking to Forbes.

According to the insider, Destiny 2 failed simply because it was "only very rarely profitable during its entire lifespan" due to the "enormous scale of content that had to be produced nonstop, lest fans revolt against its scarcity," and because "when Destiny was profitable, those extra funds were often immediately misused by leadership at the time, funneled into way too many simultaneous incubation projects or ideas like spending tens of millions on a new, unneeded 208,000 square foot headquarters."

Reacting to this report, Sweeney seemingly suggests a solution postmortem to that first outlined problem. "If only some sort of newfangled technology could come along and make it possible to overcome bullet point #1 and enable games like Destiny to thrive!"

The famously outspoken Sweeney has long been, if not a full-blown proponent of AI in games, someone urging developers and publishers to embrace the tech as an inevitability "in nearly all future production." Sweeney has long criticized Valve's policy of displaying AI disclosures for games as "really irresponsible of Valve," arguing these disclosures make it "much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success."

With regards to Destiny 2, however, I don't want to infer too much from what is, after all, Just A Tweet, but Sweeney could be proposing generative AI as a means to accelerate game development, or, much more dubiously, as a tool to actually create content. That distinction is at the heart of the current debate around whether generative AI has any place in game development, and if so, what that role is.

As Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney blasts Valve over Steam AI disclosures, dev makes those disclosures even more noticeable and hides AI-aided games in search results

On the heels of heavy Bungie layoffs, longtime Destiny 2 community manager Dylan "dmg04" Gafner reiterated the responsibility of game studio leadership in a slightly heated discussion of how the industry got to its current state.

This began with a Game Developer opinion piece examining the many pain points in games at the moment, shared by former Square Enix executive Jacob Navok on Twitter. Navok disagreed with much of the piece and instead centered "the market" as a driving factor, from the job market to user appetite, and dismissed dreams of the Western games industry ever returning to previous growth periods.

Former Bungie studio vice president Mark Noseworthy shared, and nodded along with, Navok's take, which brings us up to speed.

"Feels somewhat disingenuous to place blame purely on the market without asking for accountability from leaders who made multiple years of poor decisions too, but nuance is hard to find on Twitter," Gafner replies.

Gafner's take is neutral and targetless, and quite tame compared to ongoing criticism of Bungie's leadership. Since Destiny 2's abrupt end and the studio's ensuing layoffs, former employees have joined players skewering Bungie's approach to just about everything that isn't a skybox or a raid.

Flip-flopping messaging, fruitless investments, baffling and repeated missteps – for all of Destiny 2 and Marathon's greatness, there's no shortage of Bungie mistakes to interrogate, and Gafner's had to play human shield for a lot of those mistakes over the years despite being responsible for exactly none of them.

Noseworthy said he's "going to assume this is not a veiled personal attack," and Gafner later clarified it is not. Rather, Gafner suggests, the topic touched a nerve.

"Been reading so many posts from former colleagues and others throughout the industry that the subject got to me," he says in a reply. "I know you did all you could for the studio and Destiny for years." And to his credit, Noseworthy's era – he was laid off from Bungie in 2024 after being promoted to VP from general manager and, before that, project lead – is pretty fondly remembered.

Former Destiny 2 boss won't say "Destiny 1 remaster" out loud, but suggests it might not be a good idea: "Studios can only afford so many bets."

To call the state of the games industry "turbulent" is a drastic understatement in July 2026, with layoffs, studio closures, and game cancelations showing no signs of slowing down, but even in that dire context, Destiny 2 and Marathon developer Bungie is having a rough go of it lately.

After seemingly putting all of its eggs into Marathon's basket, Bungie's new sci-fi FPS – although critically well-received – hasn't reached the commercial success needed to supplant the enduring popularity of Destiny 2, which ended active development last month. Meanwhile, massive layoffs at Bungie have impacted "most" of the Destiny team as well as a portion of the Marathon crew, with the studio admitting the MMO "fell short of expectations these past several years."

That said, Destiny 2 is still playable and presumably will be for the foreseeable future – and in fact experienced a post-mortem surge in players last month – which of course means players continue to report issues with performance and bugs. Although the feedback isn't falling on deaf ears, the skeleton crew at Bungie working on Destiny is scrambling to push out updates at a comparable cadence to before the mass layoffs.

Shortly after news of Bungie's downsizing broke last week, the developer took to Twitter to announce the delay of Destiny 2's new patch, originally scheduled to go live this week. "We will provide more information when we can," the studio said. The Destiny community reacted with skepticism on Reddit, with the top comment reading: "I have a rather unfortunate suspicion that this will be one of those 'delays' that last forever."

However, in a response from the official Destiny 2 Team Reddit account, Bungie assures the patch will eventually be released and asks for grace as some members of the dev team who were working on it have since been laid off.

"Not a forever delay. We will get this out when possible. Handful of fixes in this delayed patch were from impacted team members.

"When this ships, please show love to the team, past and present," the studio implores fans.

In a separate Reddit thread reporting issues with PC performance, the Destiny account responds by requesting "videos or examples" of specific problems, adding, "While we can't promise a fix, we'll see what we can do."

Cyberpunk 2 lead says "some days I feel our industry is imploding" as Destiny 2 studio Bungie is hit with mass layoffs: "Teams and game projects are getting slaughtered"

Everyone who has played Destiny will tell you a story about it. They'll probably have a few, actually, but ask them to pick their most memorable and it will likely be the tale of how they got their first Gjallarhorn, the all-conquering rocket launcher that made mincemeat of just about everything during Destiny's first year. We doubt many can beat the story of the member of our raid team who got theirs by stopping on the approach to a loot chest deep in the Vault Of Glass, and firing their entire supply of rockets at it. Stepping up to open it, out popped Gjallarhorn. For weeks afterwards, the other five raiders would unleash rocket after rocket at the luckily impervious chest in the hope of seeing it spit out Destiny's most prized reward.

Such were the lengths we went to, in those early days, to tip the odds in our favour. Destiny launched in September 2014, and within days it had become starkly apparent that this was not the game we had dreamed of, or the one Bungie had promised it would be. Its story, if you could call it that, was over in a flash. Our character hit the level cap of 20 within days, and it seemed there was nothing left to do. A pop-up window that appeared after we hit level 20 hinted at a new purpose – the pursuit of Light, the true measure of a Destiny Guardian's power – but the only way to raise it was to play, again and again, levels and missions that we felt we had already picked clean.

In the absence of anything new to do, Bungie gave us punishing difficulty and a miserly random loot system. The weekly Nightfall Strike, for instance – a ramped-up version of an existing mission with tougher enemies and a selection of cruel gameplay modifiers – offered up one of the best loot tables in the game, with a reasonable chance of dropping legendary and exotic gear upon completion. Yet enemies would frequently appear at a level or two higher than you could ever reach, and if all three team members died, they'd be kicked to orbit, and would have to start over from scratch.

Faced with those odds, it's little surprise that players did what they could to cheat the system. One Nightfall boss could be killed by hiding beneath a raised platform, shooting through a small gap that enemy ordnance couldn't fit through, using Ice Breaker, a sniper rifle whose ammo replenished automatically over time. It worked, but playing Destiny this way was slow, boring, and not in the spirit of the game, so Bungie patched it. It did likewise for the infamous loot cave, a small opening in a rockface in Old Russia's Skywatch zone from which enemies constantly spawned, and into which players would empty clip after clip, standing stock still until their supplies ran dry.

Destiny was the first game in Bungie's 10-year deal with Activision, but the game would likely have died, and the contract been ripped up, within weeks of launch were it not for the Vault Of Glass. VOG, to use the Destiny community's affectionate shorthand for the game's first raid, launched a week after the base game – just long enough for the committed player to reach the recommended level 26. Even now, four expansions and three more raids later, VOG is held up as the best Destiny – and co-op console gaming in general – has to offer.

Vault of Glass

It was clear from the start that this was different to everything else in Destiny, whose missions until now had been linear excursions between objective markers, with variously sized gunfights building to a battle against a bullet-sponge boss. Yet VOG opened by asking a six-strong team to split up and hold three capture points from incessantly spawning enemies. Inside there were boss fights, yes, but they were no mere shootouts. Each had a set of exacting mechanics to learn, to devise a solution to, and to conquer.

In between there was light relief – a frequently hilarious platforming puzzle with disappearing scenery, which even now is all too easy to mess up – and a marvellously fraught stealth maze whose patrolling Gorgon enemies would instakill anyone they laid eyes on. VOG was difficult, yes: the first team in the world to clear it took over 10 hours. But it was the most rewarding activity Destiny had to offer, both figuratively – the sense of satisfaction after you and five friends finally clear a difficult section is part of what makes Destiny so special – and literally, as some of the best loot in the game flooded into your inventory after each boss was vanquished.

And what loot it was. The armour on offer was, at the time, the only route to the true level cap of 30. And the guns were, aside from the more widely available Gjallarhorn, the best available. There's never been a hand cannon like Fatebringer: it had the Firefly perk, which caused enemies killed by headshots to explode, dealing heavy damage to those around it, and Outlaw, which greatly increased reload speed after a precision kill. It was more than a gun: it was a game in itself, training you to pick your shots, and rewarding you for doing so by killing four other enemies in the vicinity, then refilling your clip in a split second. It's simply one of those guns – Doom 2's super shotgun, Titanfall's smart pistol, and so on – that will be talked about for years.

Yet for all that VOG was a masterclass in design, and the gear that dropped from it a delight, it also exposed two of Destiny's greatest problems. The first is that a handful of guns were overpowered, to the extent that anything else was considered a waste. When the hard-mode version of Crota's End, the second Destiny raid, launched, it was widely accepted that the final boss fight was as good as impossible without a full team of Gjallarhorn owners. Matchmaking websites, created to help players assemble raid teams – there was no such facility in the game itself – hosted listings with strict team requirements, almost all of which insisted on applicants being max-level and with Gjallarhorn in their inventory.

The second problem was, inevitably, RNG. Since VOG was, for a spell, the gatekeeper to the level cap, you were reliant on the game granting you a full set of raid armour. Many were left looking for just one piece (for most, weirdly, it was a pair of boots). The hunt spawned a meme, 'Forever 29' – one drop short of the maximum level of 30. A wounded Bungie has been working to make amends ever since.

Indeed, the studio has worked tirelessly on these two distinct problems, struggling to balance a set of weapons that must fulfil two very different needs – in PVE, being overpowered is fun, but in PVP, it's ruinous – while reducing Destiny's reliance on a random-number generator. It's been largely successful: in its final form, Destiny is the fairest it's ever been. Guns are finely balanced. Loot still drops randomly, but the most powerful gear is available through fixed, clearly explained (though typically long-winded) means. Everyone can reach the level cap by simply playing what is now a very generous, accommodating game. There's little to complain about in Destiny today. But it's missing something, too.

Randomness is a powerful thing. And for the first 12 months Destiny was defined by RNG – powered by it, propped up by it, the reason we loved it and hated it and kept on playing it anyway, going into work the next day bleary-eyed, disappointed and itching to get back to it. The weeks or months of waiting for your raid boots, or Gjallarhorn, made the eventual payoff all the sweeter.

Better Together

The pain may have stopped, but we didn't. Once you'd got all the gear you really needed you carried on anyway, playing and replaying the same old missions. Routes and enemy patterns had long been committed to memory, your god-tier weapons making mincemeat of them all. Luke Smith – the Bungie staffer who designed VOG, Destiny's first and best raid, directed The Taken King, its best expansion, and went on to lead development of Destiny 2 – once described Destiny as "the bar I can go to in my pyjamas", and it remains the most succinct explanation of the game's appeal.

A few sphincter-clenching raid sections aside, it's the most laid-back game about shooting alien monsters you could possibly imagine. The advantage to having so little content was that, if you played it enough times, you could do it without thinking about it. It's a highly social game, with a largely friendly community – the kind that forms when players come together to see off some of the toughest challenges in video games, then spend a couple of hours popping Cabal heads, farming upgrade materials and talking about their days to wind down.

None of this would have happened had Destiny not been one of the best FPS games around. Not even the magic of VOG would've saved Destiny had there not, beneath the miserly loot system, the wet fart of a story and the content drought, been a rock-solid FPS. We expected great gunplay from the maker of Halo, but Destiny's true mechanical magic lies in the way it borrows from the best MMOs – with its cooldowns and super moves, its deeply customisable subclasses – and uses them to create something that subverts, and elevates, our expectations of the FPS.

That foundation carried the game through three years of peaks and troughs. And as we finally close the book on Destiny, the lingering impression is not one of a shooter, or even an RPG – but a game that somehow managed to be the best when it was, by any objective standard, its absolute worst.

This article was first published in 2017, in issue 308 of Edge Magazine. If you're interested in receiving more stories just like this one, subscribe to Edge Magazine.

Looking for something excellent to read this weekend? We published over 400 articles on GamesRadar+ this week, but here's our pick of the five stories that you absolutely need to read.

1. A match made in heaven: Star Wars, racing, and roguelikes combine in Galactic Racer

Star Wars has been in desperate need of something a little different ever since the Skywalker Saga collapsed. Perhaps it'll be Galactic Racer that reignites some energy into the franchise, a fast-paced racing game while blurs a development studio's expertise with Burnout and Need for Speed with the sort of lush, cinematic storytelling that Star Wars is known for delivering. We played the game ahead of its October 6, 2026, release date and the early signs are exceptionally promising.

2. Epic Games' CEO has a lot of opinions on Steam AI disclosures. None of them are good.

The use of generative artificial intelligence in video games continues to be exceptionally divisive, if not actively volatile. Recent comments from Epic Games' longtime CEO Tim Sweeney have only inflamed the conversation, as he simultaneously comes to the defense of Gen AI in certain cases and attacks Valve over its requirement that developers publicly flag when the tech has been used on Steam. This story has sparked a lot of discussion, so don't be afraid of adding your voice to the conversation.

3. "It's huge for us": Why Obsidian is finally ready to take Grounded 2 to PlayStation 5

If there's one thing that's clear from Xbox's somewhat messy approach to console exclusivity, it's that live service games will continue to be widely available – all in an effort to help build better, larger communities of players. Grounded 2 is a perfect example of this strategy in action. Obsidian legend Chris Parker walks you through all of it, the promise of the new Into the Abyss update coming this August, and the potential for the studio's survival game to grow to new heights on PS5.

4. What did we learn from the Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-order campaign starting? Rockstar is ready to change open-world games forever

The silence surrounding Grand Theft Auto 6 has been deafening. It's been over a year since the last trailer released, leaving nothing but space for rampant speculation. That's why it was so damn refreshing to see Rockstar come out this week ready to celebrate GTA 6 pre-orders going live. We got some controversial launch details, we got over 60 new screenshots, and even a bunch of new gameplay details. If anything, this is a time to remember that GTA 6 is not only real, but that it's actually coming November 19, 2026.

5. "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations": Understanding the crisis enveloping Bungie

It's been a difficult year for Bungie. The studio has enjoyed the highs of bringing Marathon online and the lows of having to abandon Destiny 2. This week, the crisis at the famed studio behind the creation of Halo hit another bump in the road, as PlayStation CEO Herman Hulst announced a restructure of the organization that has caused widespread layoffs and a massive shift in priorities. It's been disappointing to see the studio (responsible for revolutionizing the FPS genre twice over) impacted in this way, and it's difficult to see where it will go from here.

6. Shigeru Miyamoto created The Legend of Zelda. He has some things to say about the quality of its dungeon design

Shigeru Miyamoto is responsible for bringing some of the most iconic characters and worlds in the video game industry to life. It's rare for him to do interviews, which is why GR+ staff writer Dustin Bailey had to go all the way back to 1999 to find the legend commenting on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Miyamoto had a revelation during the development of this iconic adventure game, and it's one that clearly reshaped all of the games that followed.

So, to recap, Destiny 2 studio Bungie was just smashed over the head with mass layoffs, certain Xbox Game Studios teams are reportedly moving toward the same fate, EA disposed of many Battlefield 6 devs despite selling over 20 million copies, and these are just some of the apocalyptic changes the video game industry has endured since spring. Naturally, even developers unaffected by layoffs are feeling the effects of all the carnage.

One such developer is Cyberpunk 2 associate game director and CD Projekt Red designer Paweł Sasko, who writes in a harrowing Twitter post, "Some days I feel our industry is imploding.

"Teams and game projects are getting slaughtered every second day," Sasko continues, "to the point it's hard to keep up. We are blessed to be still hiring, for all our games." The developer encourages others to browse CD Projekt Red's open job listings, which span multiple departments for titles like The Witcher 4 and the secretive, new IP Hadar.

CD Projekt Red began laying off about 9% of its staff in 2023, so it itself isn't impervious to the destructive past few years that gaming legend Brenda Romero described as "crashier" than the infamous video game crash of 1983. All the more reason, then, for CD Projekt Red developers to be as outspoken about the industry layoff trend as they have been; the studio's localization QA analyst Paula Mackiewicz-Armstrong also urged other devs this April to unionize in response to the "over 1,000" positions at Epic Games impacted by its recent, ruthless batch of layoffs.

Mackiewicz-Armstrong said at the time, "I've seen some hard times and some remarkable changes and improvements that make CDPR a great place to be right now. I just wish others in the industry could have the same." I'm sure many share that sentiment.

Bungie studio head reportedly leaves after 16 years with the company following mass layoffs and Destiny 2 death spiral.

And so it goes: Bungie is currently undergoing a large round of layoffs. Though expected after the final Destiny 2 update, it's still a gut punch that leaves many talented developers without work. Numerous people affected by the decision and previously associated with Bungie have commented on the situation on social media, as fans rally around the legendary studio.

"Despite everything it has been an honor to work on Destiny 2," Blaise Markley, now former activity designer at Bungie, says on Twitter. "Please know with deep sincerity that we wanted more than anything to make you smile. See you starside, Guardians."

Lyndon Willoughby was a senior artist at the company, and he calls the position "a dream" on Twitter. Mikey "TehMidge" Perfected, an activity, events and social QA at Bungie, tweets that "it was an honor" to work on his favorite game over an extended period.

According to Artem Sorokin, a now former senior VFX artist, "essentially the entire Destiny VFX team, leads and all," have been let go. As the news travels of the job losses at Bungie, there are calls for Sony to impact more of the leadership positions, a stance echoed by other former employees.

"Disastrous leadership continues to be rewarded, protected, and paid out with their golden toilets," Liana Ruppert, an ex-community manager at Bungie who was laid off from the company in 2023, posts on Twitter. "I hope they get everything they truly deserve, and that's guilt, shame, and hopefully some actual fucking reflection."

The layoffs run through the whole structure of Bungie. Studio head Justin Truman is also stepping down, according to reports. The belief was that once development on Destiny 2 wrapped, Sony intended to make substantial changes across the entire team. These job losses follow a disappointing reception to Marathon back in March, Bungie's first non-Destiny related game in over a decade.

At the moment, the future of the studio seems uncertain. Marathon "remains an important part of our portfolio," according to Sony in a statement made on the cuts, but only time will tell how true that winds up being.

Destiny 2 fans shouldn't "blame yourselves" as Bungie closes the door on its 9-year-old MMO, says community lead: "This is just the way it goes sometimes."

Bungie studio head Justin Truman is reportedly leaving the company after nearly 17 total years across positions, including Destiny 2 design director and general manager.

Bloomberg News reporter Jason Schreier shares in a Bluesky post that "people familiar with the situation" say Truman is stepping down as studio lead after, according to his LinkedIn, 11 months. Truman took the position over from controversial ex-lead Pete Parsons, who a former Bungie writer Robert Brookes credited earlier this year with being "the real Destiny killer."

GamesRadar+ has reached out to Bungie for comment on Truman's current role at the company, but we did not receive an immediate response. At the moment, the studio has only made generalizations clear, in that it's undergoing huge layoffs. "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations," according to Bungie's statement posted on Bluesky, and "we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size."

Bungie claims it has "future projects still in early incubation," but Destiny 2 received its final live-service content update earlier this month, and since then, former devs been happy to share that their laboring on the MMO and other Bungie properties was "the most toxic, dysfunctional experience of my professional life," as Destiny 2 narrative lead Michael Zenke put it.

Destiny struggled throughout the 10 years Pete Parsons served as Bungie CEO, and though he'd once hoped "to transform the Destiny business" by 2025 – ultimately, the year he left Bungie – the former executive also lost fans' confidence after he apparently spent $2.3 million on old school cars around the same time Bungie laid off 220 people.

Sony initially purchased Bungie for $3.6 billion in 2022, while studio execs built Hollywood signs in their hearts and dreamed of making a Destiny 2 TV show. But dreams can either come true or dissolve into embarrassment, and, well – there aren't currently any production studios with plans to make a Destiny 2 TV show.

Ex-writer Brookes quipped in a Bluesky post this spring about Bungie leadership ahead of Destiny 2's last update, "Don't worry they're suffering in their *checks note on hand* multi-million dollar payouts."

As I wait on an official response regarding Justin Truman's job status, I'm choosing to find the silver lining anyway: at least someone can afford the $599 Xbox Series S 1TB.

Destiny 2 fans shouldn't "blame yourselves" as Bungie closes the door on its 9-year-old MMO, says community lead: "This is just the way it goes sometimes."

Two weeks after releasing the final update for Destiny 2, Marathon developer Bungie has announced that it will be going through layoffs.

In a post on Bluesky, the Bungie account publishes a statement saying, "With great sadness, we are announcing a reduction in force as we reorganize Bungie." It adds, "As the leaders of Bungie, past and present, we recognize Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years. Following our final content update to Destiny 2, and with our future projects still in early incubation, we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size."

Destiny 2 had its final update just over two weeks ago after a few years of struggles and a dwindling playerbase, compounded with the difficult development and underwhelming release of Marathon earlier this year. Earlier this year Sony announced it had an impairment loss of $765 million on the studio over the last financial year. And while the final update brought in Destiny 2's highest player count in years, it is sadly too late for the game.

The statement continues, "We know this decision has a profound impact on the people affected, their families, friends, and teammates. While these changes are necessary to best position the studio now and for the future, that does not lessen the difficulty of this moment or the impact it has on those affected. Later, we will share more about that future with you all but today is not that day. Today, we wish to extend our gratitude and compassion to every member of the Bungie team who has been impacted and to those who remain."

PlayStation CEO Herman Hulst sent an internal email to staff which was published on the Sony website, saying: "We have made the decision to reduce Bungie's workforce, affecting a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members. There are also reductions across SIE teams that support Bungie's operations. Those impacted at Bungie and within SIE are being informed today." The exact number of affected employees was not confirmed.

Hulst's memo continues, "Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio's long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy. We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio's resources with its current priorities and long-term goals."

As for Marathon, Hulst says it "remains an important part of our portfolio, and we will continue to support the team as they build on the strong foundation established in Season 1 and 2, and as they work on incubation efforts for future projects. While it's too early to discuss, we are encouraged by the creativity and opportunities that lie ahead."

This comes a day after the game's community lead said Destiny 2 fans shouldn't "blame yourselves," and a week after comments emerged from former Destiny 2 devs who claimed working at Bungie was a "toxic, dysfunctional experience."

Unfortunately, the studio's troubled few years have ended up at this point, and Bungie ends its statement by addressing fans over their "gratitude and compassion": "We hope you will do the same."

Now that Destiny 2 is receiving its final update as Bungie ends the sci-fi MMO's nine-year reign, some fans can't help but wonder whether they could've somehow supported the game more and "save" it – but one Bungie lead says no.

It's not the fault of players that Destiny 2 is coming to its end, after all. Dylan "dmg04" Gafner, the principal communications manager at Bungie, confirms as much while responding to a content creator worried they could've done "more" to contribute to the game's success.

"'Could I do more?' You all have done more for this game and our studio than could ever be imagined, and no words can accurately depict how lucky we are to have shared these worlds with you," says Gafner.

The community lead continues, reassuring fans that the MMO reaching the end of its line has nothing to do with them or their supposed lack of support. "Don't blame yourselves or think you could have / should have done more," he writes. "This is just the way it goes sometimes. No matter the future, we will always have these memories. Thank you. For everything."

It's a bittersweet, heartfelt reply – and others seem to agree.

"It's gonna be a weird world without Destiny," one comment reads. Another adds, "Destiny will always have a very special place in my heart. Thank you for all the memories I made in the many years I have played this game for. I hope to see you back with [a] new project soon."

I'll stop there because I'll tear up otherwise, but it's evident that the community feels two things: sad about Destiny 2's end and grateful the MMO was around as long as it was. The game will remain playable for now, at least, but it won't be getting any further major updates.

There's no telling what the future holds, though. Bungie is still working on Marathon, its recent extraction shooter – and it appears to be going well enough, even if its popularity hasn't been immense.

It's disappointing to know Destiny 3 likely isn't happening any time soon, but I suppose anything is possible.

Destiny 2 devs repeatedly pitched a dating sim, Bungie veterans say, "but leadership was very Hard No that nobody wanted romance or silliness."

With news of Destiny 2 receiving its final update and coming to an end still circulating on the web, some folks are looking to what could've been – including a, erm, dating sim…?

Yes, you read that right – and you honestly probably aren't all that surprised if you've been in the community for a while yourself. Folks have made jokes (or are they?) about a Destiny dating sim before, as they do in every online game's community, but now, Bungie veterans are actually responding to them.

Following one fan's thread requesting "the dating sim we deserve," former community lead Liana Ruppert replies that the developers have indeed considered it.

"Fun fact, the team actually made one, but leadership was very Hard No that nobody wanted romance or silliness," she writes. "Very Dream Daddy inspired lmao. It was fun getting to be a small part of it." Dream Daddy inspired, you say? If only this came to fruition.

Ruppert isn't alone in revealing what could've been, either. Veteran senior narrative designer Robert Brookes, who now works at CD Projekt Red, chimes in, too.

"To be fair, the dating sim that was made was a part of the 'Carnival' event Bungie used to do, where devs had a week to make fun prototypes," Brookes clarifies. "So, it was never a full-fledged project. That said, we did pitch that as a full-fledged project every year."

I mean, I'm still interested – and besides, it does still sound like there was quite a bit of substance to it, even if it wasn't a "full" game, so to speak.

As Brookes goes on to say, "Myself and two other narrative team members (who both CAME from romance game design) had an entire pitch deck for one, complete with costs and real hard metrics on returns. Never got anywhere."

That's… sad, to say the least. In other words, it could've gone somewhere, but it didn't. It's not too difficult to pick out why that's the case, though – even Brookes himself admits as much.

"There's a *very* specific audience for romance content, and a substantial part of that does not play FPS games," put simply. But it could've bridged that gap. "You grow a brand by finding new ways to introduce people to your world, and this would've done that (and also deeply interested some already-existing players)."

I can certainly see it. Comments prove so, too, with somebody exclaiming, "I would've paid real money for this."

Others don't feel like a dating sim would fit well within the world of Destiny and Destiny 2 – but if you ask me, it's worth a shot. Are you listening, Bungie?

Destiny 2's end is "earth-shattering," Warframe dev says, despite the competition between the 2 shooters: "To live in a reality where they're gone isn't a positive one."

Despite its status as a Destiny competitor, the devs behind Warframe are lamenting the news of Destiny 2's final update.

While speculation over Bungie's performance has been rampant for years, the seemingly out-of-nowhere announcement that development on Destiny 2 would be coming to an end was a massive shocker when it dropped a month ago. While the game had definitely seen better days, many expected it to remain a priority at Bungie, especially when Marathon isn't exactly lighting the world on fire in a way I'm sure Sony hoped it would. However, given Sony announced earlier that same month that it had reported a $765 million impairment loss on the studio in the last financial year, drastic moves felt inevitable.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Warframe community director and live ops lead Megan Everett talks about the end of Destiny 2, saying, "Truthfully, it's heartbreaking. It's earth-shattering. I never thought I'd ever see the day where I'd read an article from Bungie about Destiny 2 essentially shutting down."

Despite Warframe being somewhat of a competitor to Destiny, Everett stresses: "I'm speaking personally, but I know people would echo it as well. No one is celebrating the fact that this has happened to Destiny, and its players and that story."

She adds, "I know that people have obviously compared us in terms of being 'direct competitors' and stuff like that. But I think a game is healthy when you have competitors, and [Destiny's developers] have done such an amazing job at trying to grow that story regardless of whatever situation they were in." Furthermore, Everett says, "To live in a reality where they're gone isn't a positive one."

Everett also acknowledges the outpouring of support Destiny 2 received following the announcement of its end of development, saying, "I think what's unfortunate and sad is they announced this was happening, and suddenly people are showing all this support for them. They've been getting a lot of negativity for all this time, and it's like, where was all this love!" She adds, "People need to put the hate away and show the love, because they could have really used that. I know it was there, but it wasn't as vocal as maybe some of the negativity."

Former Destiny 2 devs say working at Bungie was a "toxic, dysfunctional experience," describe leaders who "forgot that people play games for fun."

When darkness falls in a big-budget game, it's typically to set the mood. You're rarely at risk of getting lost or bumping into furniture. Instead you might wander beneath a full moon, its glow diffusing across the clouds, casting the land below in an atmospheric blue tint. Or you might follow a series of helpful light sources placed just so, like will o' the wisps, to ensure you don't stray from the main objective. In these games, nighttime is not a threat, nor a cloak, but a vibe.

Marathon, as always, has taken the tougher route. The centerpiece of its second season is Night Marsh – a familiar map plunged into blackness. There, Bungie treats the nighttime not simply as an aesthetic but as what it really is: a daunting reconfiguration of how you navigate the world.

Running in the dark

Every player is handed a flashlight with an unlimited battery, but frankly, they'd be foolish to use it. PvP in Marathon is a positional puzzle – one in which the teams who can track their opponents tend to come out on top – and a parade of bobbing white torches is a temptingly easy target for any opponents in the area.

That reality is doubly true in Solos, the game's de facto stealth mode, where I haven't seen a single player use a flashlight since Season 2 went live early last week. Instead, my peers and I are relying on spatial memory to get around. It's the first-person shooter equivalent of getting up at 3am for a wee, and trusting that you can remember the obstacles along the way: the corners of the bed, the next door handle, a flight of stairs you'd rather not tumble down sideways.

Except in the Marsh, the obstacles are spread over a far larger exploration space, and are made up of abandoned agricultural infrastructure – left behind when the colonists of Tau Ceti IV vanished decades ago. You do your best to remember: wasn't there a ladder on the north side of this Maintenance bay? And beyond that, an open window leading to the roof? Fortune favors those with a rough mental map of the buildings they're stumbling through. It's that knowledge which allows you to circumnavigate patrolling bots without making a racket.

Since launch, this has been a game defined by sound. But now that's often all you have: the footsteps of nearby players, the buzz of the bots they've awoken, the smash-and-tinkle of a window cracked with the butt of a rifle. And there are new noises here too. The echoing residue of moans on the wind. The splash of brackish water, disturbed by the memory of workers' waders. During Marathon's first season, some missions suggested that the anomaly at the heart of the Marsh warped not only space but time too. That phenomenon appears to be worsening, as the anomaly widens like an untreated wound.

The agricultural AI that still watches over the Marsh seems to be unravelling as well. "Time fertilises all things," it gabbles joyously. "And we have so much here." Then, in tones of despair: "Let them know they are… searching… in the wrong place." As Tannoy announcements go, it doesn't get more unnerving than: "Dr Song to sublevel… Dr Song. Who will remember you?" The soundscape of Marathon used to be a known quantity, but now it's haunted. That fact isn't just unnerving, but dangerous - exposing players to risks they haven't yet grasped.

The potential rewards are higher, too, though. Defeated bots now drop UESC Certs - a currency that can be used to unlock crates and caches, culminating in the looting of the command center which stands high above the map. Certs are also needed to activate most of the Marsh's exfil points - an act which turns on the floodlights and reveals your position to observant squads. More than once I've fallen foul of teams who've moved like commandos through the swamp, picking off the players who blow up bots in search of the Certs they need to get out.

Yet there's a little more wiggle room to survive a messy teamfight in the dark, even if you're on the losing side. Finding a cubbyhole and waiting for the battle to blow over is a viable if frightening option – and even a downed ally won't necessarily be looted for their best stuff if their body is overlooked in the night.

It's in moments of heightened horror like these that I'm reminded of Amnesia: The Bunker and Thief: The Dark Project – the latter of which is getting a remaster, announced during this week's PC Gaming Show. In these games, the nighttime is both a tool and an impediment, and its potential to both assist and betray is forgotten at your peril.

"There is a quiet beauty in the silence of the night," says Marathon's AI narrator, ONI. "Do not allow it to placate you."

I'm playing Marathon like a single-player stealth sim, and after 70 hours of sneaking I'm begging you to try a solo run

Bungie knows that Destiny 2 players have worked their magic once more to deal a lot of damage in ways they shouldn't, but is happy to let it ride for one week before fixing it.

Having played Destiny and its sequel for many, many years, there are a few things you get used to. One is players breaking things to make farming a gun or armor piece easier, and the other is breaking things to make beating an enemy easier – which sometimes leads to getting a gun or an armor piece, coincidentally.

That in mind, it feels somewhat fated that Destiny 2's final update has led to players breaking stuff. This time around, a bug has been discovered that allows players to stack multiples of the same seasonal Artifact perks to achieve near-infinite damage.

Something like this was always going to happen in an update as large as Destiny 2's final one, but Bungie is stepping in regardless – someone has to think of the many monsters in the space MMO that have been turned into mere punching bags.

Like a teacher dealing with class in the last week of the term, Bungie says to enjoy it while it lasts because things will go back to normal soon.

"So, we've been seeing some interesting videos where Guardians are doing near infinite damage to bosses thanks in part to unintended Artifact perk stacking," the developer writes on Twitter. "Quite hilarious to watch, to be honest!

"While we're planning a fix (next week likely), we think this is a bit fun. Go ahead. Get out there, beat up on Atheon. Destroy some bosses. Do your thing."

Bungie goes on to note that Artifacts are being disabled in Crucible and Gambit to protect other players from, well, other players. But otherwise, developers are amused by the situation.

"All in all, it's Monument of Triumph," the post ends. "Do some crazy stuff. Send us your videos. Have some fun. Be Brave."

Funnily enough, speaking of Destiny 2 players doing what they do best, they have also managed to find a way to push bosses off a cliff, which means they're ending their time with the game exactly as they started it. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Destiny 2 and Bungie as a whole were "very close" to closing before Sony buyout, according to ex-community lead: "It was an emergency acquisition."

As part of its final update, Destiny 2 rolled out an updated version of the Pantheon raid challenge, which drops players into a gauntlet of souped-up boss fights. Like poetry in motion, players quickly set about cheesing the new Pantheon with a time-honored tradition: hurling raid bosses into the void.

As trusted Destiny 2 grinder Esoterickk shows, the Pantheon version of the Last Wish raid boss Morgeth can easily be ejected from the world like a cassette tape. Hilariously enough, this is probably one of the simplest and most consistent exploits in Destiny history.

All you need is the updated Ward of Dawn Titan Super and one of the newly released heavy crossbows. Summon the Ward of Dawn orb, embed a few crossbow bolts into it, then pick it up and melee attack Morgeth to send him soaring like a fly ball. I guess something about this setup just confounds the physics of the game engine.

"It sends them flying, and the encounter will complete. Can be farmed on 5 feats for loot and spoils," Esoterickk explains.

On Twitter, longtime Destiny 2 community manager dmg04 says, "It wouldn't be a Destiny release if you couldn’t bump a boss off a ledge."

From the moment Bungie introduced Destiny players to raids with the Vault of Glass, those players have had but one goal: optimize the encounters out of the encounters. Like a fictional rogue AI deducing that humans are the problem, Guardians looked at all the mechanics thoughtfully prepared by Bungie and thought, "What if we ignored all of those?"

So began a long history of cheese strategies, many of which have reduced some of the most powerful beings in the universe to wet blankets, punching bags, or more pertinently, ping pong balls. For the noble cause of effortless loot, I have trimmed the nails of dream dragons, smuggled six extra Guardians into lobbies, terrified bosses with vortex grenades, and even tricked the game into forgetting my very existence like it's a Skyrim guard who just received his second arrow to the head this afternoon. And until Bungie patches this one out, which it probably will because this kind of destroys the raid loot economy, I support any and all Morgeth space exploration.

Inspired by Dark Souls, former Destiny lead fought to add super tough enemies to the start of the game.

If you're not having the best week, spare a thought for the devs on Marathon, who're dealing with yet another problem. Bungie's had to disable an entire facet of the futuristic shooter, due to an exploit where players couldn't be brought back after getting knocked out.

The issue stems from the Cryo Archive, a Destiny-like raid built as part of Marathon's endgame for a more intense PvP challenge and extra valuable rewards. Players have found they can't be revived when downed, creating what I can only imagine is a whole lot of frustration, but the devs are aware of the problem and working on a fix.

"As a precaution while we investigate why some players can't be revived, we have disabled access to Cryo Archive," a tweet from the official Marathon Twitter account reads. "We'll do our best to restore access as soon as we can figure out the issue and push out a fix."

Marathon season 2 kicked off just last week, and it's been hard going. Several bugs and glitches emerged soon after players began accessing the latest wave of additions, prompting more hotfixes from Bungie as the developers worked to put out all the fires.

Now, we have this, right in the middle of a central attraction in the neon FPS, amid a free week to tempt new players into the fray. In reaction, players are commiserating the state of the game. "It's impressive how dysfunctional this game has been for season 2," says a commenter on Reddit. "Good lord. This season has been a pre nerf wstr to the foot over and over again," another adds.

Let it not be forgotten, Bungie is juggling this with the demise of Destiny 2, as Monument of Triumph, the final update for the beloved MMO, came out this week. As reports circulate that substantial layoffs are coming for the studio, it appears the former home of Halo is struggling to catch a break right now.

Marathon Season 2 takes Bungie's brutal new shooter one step closer to PvE with a "Sponsored Survival" mode that's "more PVP-lite" and a "low-risk way to play"

Destiny world design lead Niles Sankey recalls that one of the game's early challenges was inspired by Dark Souls.

Maybe not as much in the modern era where we all know what a Souls game is, but the first Dark Souls was a magical moment. After the introduction boss area, you arrive in the Firelink Shrine, and I'd wager a lot of us didn't realize we had to go into the aqueduct behind us first thing, and instead ventured straight into the graveyard in front of us. In said graveyard, you'll inevitably have gotten rocked by a group of skeletons and pondered if the game was really this hard. But this was an important lesson in where not to go in this vast world.

Sankey recalls working on Destiny's Cosmodrome area and hiding mysterious areas behind high level enemies. After a fan mentioned the "skull health bar knights" (the Hollowed Knight enemy from the Destiny beta), Sankey reveals: "I specifically placed the 'skull health bar knights' in Cosmodrome for this reason. It was inspired from my experiences playing Dark Souls."

However, Sankey also says that he had to fight a lot to make sure these enemies stayed in the game. "There were situations where other devs would say 'These knights are too high level, this must be a bug. Delete them.' and I would say 'Nooo!!! Please leave them please, it's by design.'" But over ten years later, Sankey is "happy to know players still have fond memories of these guys."

He also teases a "really tragic but also funny development story about these Knights," but says it'll be saved for "another time."

Personally, I do have an appreciation for games that will let you get your ass kicked as a learning experience, but I am also ashamed to admit that those Dark Souls skeletons I mentioned earlier got around an hour or so of battering me before I realized what the game was trying to tell me.

Destiny 2 and Bungie as a whole were "very close" to closing before Sony buyout, according to ex-community lead: "It was an emergency acquisition."

Major updates for Destiny 2 are now officially over, but the game and Bungie in its entirety were allegedly close to shutting down for good years earlier. According to a former community lead who used to work at the storied Destiny developer, Sony's $3.6 billion buyout was the corporate equivalent of deploying a parachute seconds before hitting the ground.

"Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition," ex-community manager, Liana Ruppert, claims on social media. "If it wasn't acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition."

The Destiny and Marathon maker had split from its ex-publishing partner Activision a few years before its eventual 2022 acquisition, and I imagine self-publishing an MMO that grand and expansive wasn't a cheap undertaking. However, Bungie being in such scorching hot water at the time is somewhat surprising.

Destiny 2: Beyond Light, the expansion that preceded Sony's acquisition, was seemingly a huge boon for the game, and pre-orders for its next expansion, The Witch Queen, hit record highs. Player counts were also more or less consistent at the time, as well – or, at least, they were in comparison to how the game's been performing recently – according to SteamDB.

"Big shakeups are happening in the tech and gaming space – I'm not going to say what I think is going to happen because it really doesn't matter what I think to be honest, but I still see the community from the CM lens and the Marathon community is eating good," Ruppert adds. "Just remember how everything caught you by surprise, it's a humble reminder that the public really does have no idea what's going on (this applies to all studios).

"As somebody that knows exactly how that struggle can be the best thing you can do is support the studio in a way that feels good for you and learn tools to help you catch yourself when you feel like you're getting a little in the heavy side of thinking about things that you can't see or control so you don't kill the player passion inside of you. We have a lot of players that the passion died and they kept only going because it was feasible to do so, but passionless discourse is just noise."

Sony gave the iconic hit maker independence for a while post-acquisition, seemingly in the hopes that Bungie could help the publisher push out more live-service success stories. The company seemed a bit cooler on Bungie a couple of years after, and has more recently reported a $765 million impairment loss on the studio in the last financial year following its Marathon launch.

Bungie is now apparently in the process of pitching a new game with no Destiny 3 in sight and layoffs planned, according to a Bloomberg report. Here's hoping the affected staff can land on their feet – especially since Destiny 2's final update has been a home run.

"I am utterly livid": Destiny 2 lore master says secret scene reveals "the potential that was ahead" before the game abruptly ended.

Destiny 2's sendoff update, the Monument of Triumph, includes a hidden scene that seems to tee up what would have been the next big narrative saga had Bungie not ended development on the game. Resident lore scholar My Name is Byf, a near-household name who's spent years collating and explaining the main stories and deeper lore of Destiny, argues this plot thread indicates just how compelling Destiny 2 could have been if the game had been allowed to continue.

Destiny 2 spoilers ahead. But also, the game is dead, so does it really count?

In a moment shared online by Destiny Bulletin, our Guardian approaches Edge of Fate keystone character Lodi, now the speaker of the nebulous Nine, and finds a very different being puppeting him. This is credibly believed to be our first proper interaction with the Winnower, the granddaddy cosmic threat of Destiny 2's Darkness, which is the primal force opposite to the Light gifted by the Traveler. I'm simplifying a little but, I kind of have to.

The unknown voice insists that the Nine need us, the Guardians, "because I exist," and threatens a conflict to come. "Don't worry. When it's over, I won't abandon you," the voice concludes.

Some players have also been reading into the voice's final lines with hopes of future Destiny releases in their hearts – whether we are just getting glimpses of now-dead ideas once thought up by Bungie, or if this could be the seed of an experience that may one day exist outside of Destiny 2, if that's how it has to be.

"Take a breather," it says. "Take your libations. Let that vigor seep back into your bones. Get hungry." Given the tone of the Monument of Triumph, and the many mixed emotions in the air amid this bittersweet finale, it's perhaps dangerously easy to favorably read this as a bit of a fourth wall break: enjoy your rest after defeating the Witness, but know that the Winnower is still out there. However, Bungie has made it abundantly clear that Destiny 2 is done.

Byf, who's spent more time poring over Destiny lore than almost anyone, says, "I have seen the cutscene in question. No spoilers in this thread. I am utterly livid.

"The devs who worked so hard on Destiny for years, who knew where things were going and the potential that was ahead," he continues. "They all deserved so much better."

The type and shape of the content in the Monument of Triumph makes it clear that a lot of this stuff was not originally planned as a sendoff for the game, to say nothing of the Nine plotline kindled in the last big expansion and now abruptly severed. We can only speculate as to when Bungie shifted from "get this stuff ready" to "get this stuff into the game before we turn the lights off," but it does feel like we've gotten a preview of what at least the next year or two might have covered.

Byf adds: "I love that the story has been told at all, but there were clearly greater plans. Magnificent, majestic plans. But all that potential has been squandered. The devs all deserved better than this. They deserved to tell this story."

Echoing hundreds of thousands of players calling for Destiny 3 online, he concludes, "Greenlight D3 already."

BioShock 2 team nearly made "Destiny before Destiny existed" with one canceled 2K game, ex-dev says: "I wanted to make that game so badly".

Warframe is commemorating Destiny 2 with an upcoming in-game reward made in honor of the MMO as Bungie releases its final big update.

Destiny 2 waved goodbye with its final update that dropped earlier this week. Although it'll remain playable, Monument of Triumph marks the long-running game's supposedly last piece of new content, and with no current plans for Destiny 3 at the studio, the update could potentially be the entire series' last hurrah for years to come.

But Warframe's not letting Destiny 2 sail into the Undying Lands without throwing it some figurative flowers. In response to one fan asking for a commemorative player title, Warframe director Rebb Ford tweeted that the team would "figure something out as fast as we can" a few days ago.

Alas, a few days later, Ford has made good on her promise: "On June 17, players can play an Alert on Telesto to Make Their Own Fate in Warframe. More details to follow," she writes alongside a screenshot of a new Honoria, Make Your Own Fate.

Fans also celebrate the fact that the new alert would take place on Telesto, which is also a pivotal location in Destiny lore and is the Saturn moon the game's iconic fusion rifle is named after, making this an extra sweet tribute to Bungie's MMO FPS.

"Shout out to Warframe folks sending kind words and love to Guardians," Destiny's principal communications manager, Dylan 'dmg04' Gafner, also writes. "Love seeing communities sharing stories and love for their games."

This isn't the first time Warframe devs have honored Destiny 2 – the looter shooter developers themselves previously noted how Bungie's shooter had an outsized impact on their work. "There is no Warframe without the legacy of Bungie games," Ford wrote in response to the game's final update. "Destiny was and is a force of nature, loved and held in the hands of so many people who, for a moment, were part of the biggest thing in gaming."

While Destiny 2's sudden end is sad, at least the game is going out on top. Players turned up to say goodbye in numbers not seen since Destiny 2's The Final Shape expansion, and the shooter even managed to top Steam's top-sellers chart for a while.

For now, Bungie's working on seasonal updates for Marathon and is reportedly pitching new projects. Layoffs are also planned, it's claimed.

Destiny 2 finally has the all-in-one collection Bungie should've released years ago, and it's just $25 right now.

Alongside Destiny 2's final update, Bungie has released an all-in-one bundle collecting every last piece of premium content for the MMO, and with a hefty discount, it's among the best ways you can spend $25 right now.

Destiny 2: The Collection is now available on all platforms (on Steam here, for easy browsing). Even at $70, it offers reasonable savings and a ton of fantastic experiences. At $25, it's a steal – nearly a decade of fun for less than what I've paid for individual expansions. It's still confusing, with activities like dungeons and raids piecemealed out, but at least you can buy everything in one go. Here's what you get:

• Forsaken pack (20 Exotic weapons, some Exotic armor, Shattered Throne dungeon, Last Wish raid)
• Shadowkeep pack (15 Exotic weapons, Scarlet Keep Nightfall Strike, Pit of Heresy dungeon, Garden of Salvation raid – Shadowkeep campaign not included as it's open to all players)
• Beyond Light pack (over 15 Exotics, two Nightfalls, Deep Stone Crypt raid - campaign not included as it's likewise available to everyone)
• Bungie 30th Anniversary Pack (Gjallarhorn Exotic rocket launcher, suite of cosmetics, Grasp of Avarice dungeon)
• The Witch Queen expansion
• Lightfall expansion
• The Final Shape expansion
• The Edge of Fate expansion
• Star Wars-themed Renegades mini-expansion
• Dungeon Key pack (lets you play the other dungeons in the game)

This collection does come with caveats for new players, many of them at the root of the game's death. Also, that's the big one: development of Destiny 2 has ended, so the game is frozen in time.

Additionally, Destiny 2's original campaigns, up to and including the beloved Forsaken expansion, are no longer in the game. This obviously makes it more difficult to get into the story, all but requiring some help from YouTube summaries.

Bungie deleted this paid content outright, or replaced it with those trimmed-down "packs" that basically just preserve some gear and activities, and shuffled it into the Destiny Content Vault, a technical half-measure so damning that it's a wonder the game survived it.

The DCV's release was a decision that frustrated everyone, including Bungie: hack off parts of the game, or run into enormous technical problems that seemingly could've killed the whole thing – and, arguably, did in the long run. Over the years, I spoke to several Destiny developers who expressed hopes that they'd find ways around the DCV through tech and engine upgrades made under the hood, but those never materialized and the game has been forever left with huge holes. I realize that every game and engine is unique, but it remains baffling to see Destiny 2 unable to stay content-complete in a world where the likes of Warframe and World of Warcraft exist.

The thin silver lining is that Destiny 2's Light and Darkness saga, which is basically just the story of the game now, was only truly codified in the Beyond Light expansion onward, so those are the key bits.

You may have deduced that I have my misgivings with how Destiny 2 was handled despite being a thousands-of-hours fan. Let's just rip the band-aid off: Destiny 2 may have the single worst new-player experience in the history of MMOs, and it's never going to get better now that the game is dead.

A big part of that is just how expensive and confusing it has been to buy the game, with high and unintuitive costs putting a big wall in front of would-be Kinderguardians. I was able to jump into Final Fantasy 14 without issue because all I had to do was press the "buy everything" button. Destiny 2 has never really had that – until now, of course.

"Better late than never" doesn't even begin to cover it, but Destiny 2 is too good to rot in perpetuity. Most of the campaigns and end-game activities are so fun that everyone with a passing interest in the history and future of shooters should give them a go, and frankly it still has the best gunplay ever crafted. Not bad for $25.

Destiny 2 shoots to the top of Steam's top sellers as fans of the MMO jump in for the final update, hoping Sony and Bungie might change course.

Players are making sure Destiny 2 goes out with a bang. As the final update rolls out on the shooter, it's had a sudden surge through the ranks of Steam, with fans hoping to send Sony a message about the first-person shooter's popularity.

Monument of Triumph, the last major patch for Destiny 2, is now out, capping off almost nine years of work for Bungie on the cosmic FPS. Intended as a swansong, it's drawn in lapsed members of the community as well the diehards, pushing the game through the charts of Valve's marketplace.

At time of writing, Destiny 2 is the number one top seller on Steam, usurping the almighty Counter-Strike 2. Not only that, it has two other spots in the top five as well, as the expansions Renegades and The Edge of Fate are in places third and fifth, respectively.

Even with heavy discounts on everything Destiny-related, those are some decent numbers, to say the least. The concurrent player count has shot up as well, at 167,867 on Steam, which is over half of the MMO's all-time record. And, as fans were quick to point out, that's more than double Marathon's peak concurrent player count on Steam since launch.

So many are trying to get in for one more go, there are reports of server problems. Again, these numbers are just for PC, too; include PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S players and you've another stratosphere entirely. This kind of excitement does tend to be a double-edged sword for the infrastructure, as servers are stretched to capacity, and beyond.

There are sides of the fandom who're hoping this will all reverberate from Bungie up to Sony, and convince the corporation to invest more in the studio and Destiny as a whole. "The big thing is Sony is seeing that Destiny can still make money, something Marathon has failed to do," writes one player on Reddit.

"This whole situation is extra baffling today seeing these numbers," another commenter says. "Absolute buffoons for ceasing Destiny support," a third Redditor comments.

I wouldn't hold my breath on any of this bringing us closer to Destiny 3. But for now, it's clear the people who love Destiny 2 aren't going down quietly.

Destiny 2 bug that destroys bosses in "a few well-placed shots" disabled by Bungie ahead of the MMO's last update: "We want to ensure your experiences aren't trivialized."

Destiny 2 is really ending, huh. Bungie's recently announced Monument of Triumph update, a caution-to-the-wind blowout marking the end of active development on one of the most influential games of the past decade, is out today, June 9. Destiny 2 players have answered the call, turning out in numbers not seen since the beloved Final Shape expansion.

SteamDB shows that Destiny 2's concurrent Steam player count has jumped to 165,856 at the time of writing (up 9,000 from when I started writing this article) following characteristic queue issues. This makes the Monument of Triumph the most active Destiny 2 update since summer 2024, which nearly matched the all-time player peak of 316,750.

Bear in mind, Destiny 2 was in such dire shape that, for nearly all of 2026, it's averaged well under 20,000 concurrent players on Steam. On May 4, it was sitting at roughly 12,851. The big sendoff – packed with balance changes, updated loot, new abilities, reprised activities, and a festive farewell – has clearly resonated.

This is, of course, bittersweet. To get Destiny 2 players to actually come back, all Bungie had to do was kill the game. That's a little harsh, but it's just plain true. The Monument of Triumph is packed with excellent changes and outright corrections that many players wanted well over a year ago, but it's demonstrably too late.

The Destiny 2 servers will stay on for the foreseeable future – heck, even Destiny 1 is still playable – but there are no more updates coming barring minor technical hotfixes. The aspirational element, the excitement and anticipation of summiting the next mountain, is gone. This is it.

In the background, Marathon, now Bungie's only active game, is once again in a slow decline following the start of Season 2, which peaked at under half of the game's launch boom (itself already smaller than the crowd that the free beta drew). Some fun new content, improved progression, and a free-to-play week have boosted the game, but increasingly it feels like Marathon just doesn't have the legs of an evergreen hit. It remains unmatched as a game for sickos, though.

Meanwhile, mourning Destiny 2 players are desperately asking Bungie and owner Sony to greenlight development of Destiny 3, which, to be completely and utterly clear, is not in the works. Bungie has not announced any new projects. All it has said is that it's begun incubating potential ideas. A related Destiny 3 petition has over 373,000 signees, which is a solid turnout for this kind of movement, but given Bungie's position, we may as well ask the stars in the sky.

Destiny 2 bug that destroys bosses in "a few well-placed shots" disabled by Bungie ahead of the MMO's last update: "We want to ensure your experiences aren't trivialized."

Just because Destiny 2 is ending its updates doesn't mean Bungie is going to let game-breaking exploits slide. A powerful combo that lets players decimate any bosses in the cosmic FPS is being dismantled as the dev team prepares for the game's final bow.

Members of the community have realized that using Howl of the Storm, a Titan Aspect, in conjunction with a Hunter's Golden Gun can take apart more or less every big encounter available in the shooter. "A few well-placed shots" is all it takes, according to Bungie, and the studio's putting an end to it.

"With Monument of Triumph launching" today, Bungie is "disabling Howl of the Storm," the studio says on Twitter. "Even if we're not shipping a new raid, MoT invites you to visit a large slate of endgame content, the new Pantheon lineup, and even Gambit!"

As the swan song for Destiny 2, Monument of Triumph is a huge moment for the game and its fanbase. Even without a raid, it sounds like there's going to be plenty to explore – the patch notes alone will take half a day to go through – and the fun would be deflated if you can turn most of the enemies into Swiss cheese.

"We generally want to avoid disabling abilities or weapons," Bungie says, and "especially for days" like this, "but we want to ensure your experiences aren't trivialized by the bug.

"We'll get this fixed up as soon as possible," the company continues. "If anything comes up during testing or validation leading to a delay, or we're able to move the fix up to an earlier release date, we'll let you know."

Monument of Triumph goes live today, June 9. If you want a final hurrah with Destiny 2, now is the time, and then you can join the chorus hoping for Destiny 3.

Destiny 2 lead says the final update won't just fade out: "Yes, there's story, yes, we get to say goodbye."

Destiny 2's final update, the Monument of Triumph, will send the game off in style with new narrative content.

Narrative director Alison Lührs shared a new trailer for Monument of Triumph on Bluesky earlier today. "The Traveler has returned, the Earth may yet begin to heal, and we take one moment to look where we are, where we’ve been, and what could be," she says.

But I'm most interested in her assurances regarding the shape of the sendoff: "Yes, there's story, yes, we get to say goodbye."

It's become increasingly clear that a lot of the content in Monument of Triumph was not originally planned as part of the last update for Destiny 2, which will end active development as Bungie moves on to new projects. Rather, at some point a decision was made that the game cannot continue, so a whole lot of cool stuff had to be packed into one final blowout or cut.

A concern among the player base, then, is that a hasty end to Destiny 2 would leave a lot of story threads unresolved. And that is inevitable to some degree; the Nine storyline that was just getting off the ground post-Edge of Fate will be cut quite short, for example, and I can think of a Hive god or two still waiting in the wings. But Lührs suggests there's a real goodbye coming, and I don't think I'm ready.

That new trailer is as bittersweet as they come – at once a triumphant celebration and a gutting memorial, not to mention a stylish showcase of the new abilities coming in the update.

"Thank you, Guardian," begins Warlock Vanguard Ikora, whose voice actor Mara Junot said it was "heartbreaking" to see Destiny 2 ending like this. "Because of you, what was unraveling is suddenly stabilizing. Earth may yet heal, and that's something worth celebrating. May this time be a moment of reflection, remembering what came before. Reassessing our present, and readying ourselves for the future. The Traveler has nestled above the Last City once again."

Destiny 2's final update has 71 pages of patch notes as Bungie says "our teams have worked tirelessly" to address bugs and are "still hunting down stragglers."

Sony has updated the Marathon Deluxe Edition store page after players bought a heavily discounted version of the game during its free-to-play week.

The Marathon free week kicked off alongside the release of Marathon Season 2, and fans playing the game – presumably getting a taste for Bungie's shooter and wanting to continue once the week is over – noticed a huge discount on the game's Deluxe Edition, listed for $14 on the PlayStation Store. Per the PlayStation Store listing, this includes "Marathon, 6 Runner Shells, 1 Premium Rewards Pass Voucher," and so on. But the important part is that it says it includes Marathon.

Except, Sony itself didn't quite have that in mind, as it's now included a statement on the page saying that for those who "already downloaded Marathon during the Open Play Week but have not purchased Marathon," then "purchasing this product will grant access to the Deluxe Edition content only for the duration of the Open Play Week, after which accessing this content will require the purchase of the Marathon base edition."

As a user on ResetEra points out, Sony doesn't offer a traditional "Deluxe Edition Upgrade" to players who own the game, instead they are offered the discounted rate on the Marathon Deluxe Edition, effectively meaning you are buying the game again, just at an updated rate. However, this discounted upgrade wasn't disabled for players who owned the game via its new free trial.

While users of ResetEra note that this would've obviously been seen as a price error by anyone who decided to buy it, given that Marathon is somewhat struggling, they argue Sony would've been better off taking this one on the chin and honoring the purchase for those who bought the mistakenly priced version. Or, at the very least do a mass refund for anyone who purchased it during the free trial period, so that anyone who doesn't see this new PSA doesn't get a rude awakening come next week. As one user puts it: "Users should automatically get a refund rather than having to deal with PlayStation's horrific customer support."

Deus Ex and Marathon actor wants to quit Twitter because he's tired of hearing Destiny 2 fans hate on Bungie's new FPS.

If you know you're making your last patch for a game, you might as well make it a big one. Bungie's teased a little bit of what's coming in Destiny 2's last major update, and honestly, I've read shorter novellas.

The official Destiny 2 Twitter gives us a peek behind the cosmic curtain. "71 pages of patch notes. 17k words - and we're still hunting down stragglers," reads the tweet.

"This is a big patch," the team adds. "Our teams have worked tirelessly to hit the highest priority/impacting bugs before launch, but there may be a few rough edges."

There are big patches, and then there are ones that'd take you a solid weekend to read through fully. For comparison, these notes are now longer than Stephen King's short stories The Monkey, 1408, and Children of the Corn. They're over twice as long as the average American comic book.

They're just shy of the famously long and in-depth manual for the original StarCraft. But when it's the last hurrah for a hugely popular and era-defining game, it's only right.

"We hope you find Monument of Triumph to be packed to the brim with fun. If you encounter any issues on launch day or beyond, never hesitate to send us the info," finishes the post.

That launch day is right around the corner, on June 9. There's been a lot of commiserating following the announcement of Destiny 2 being sunsetted. Including from voice actors, who've gotten behind growing calls for Destiny 3.

Current reports point toward dark days at Bungie once this horizon passes, with layoffs expected as the studio enters a new era under Sony's ownership. The company released Marathon a couple of months ago, but according to analysts, the response so far hasn't been the strongest.

We'll see what arrives in the coming weeks and months. At least we know Monument of Triumph will give us plenty to pore over in the meantime.

Valve veteran worries for Bungie's future following Destiny 2's final update: "I don't think Sony cares anymore"

Bungie has detailed a new mode for Marathon that should hopefully scratch the PvE itch, even if there's a bit of PVP involved.

Season 2 of Marathon is launching today, and Bungie has detailed some of the changes you can expect from it in its Open Play Week blog post. Earlier this month, Marathon game director Joe Ziegler detailed some modes coming to Season 2, with one being PvE with "a touch of PvP," while a full-blown PvE mode will be launching later down the line. And now we finally know what "a touch of PvP" actually means, as Bungie has revealed the new experimental game mode, the "more PVP-lite and low-risk way to play": Sponsored Survival - which will be available alongside the Marathon free week.

In Sponsored Survival, the game will start with a single crew in the Night Marsh completely free to do what they like on the map and loot everything in sight without any issues from other players, although it's not going to be a cakewalk as the UESC will still be stationed around the map alongside "some new enemies that lurk in the shadows." So for that squad, the game starts out as a PvE mode.

However, "after a certain period of time," the map will begin to populate with Rooks (which are solo players focused on scavenging) who are backfilling the lobby. And while these Rooks are going to pose a potential threat to the main squad, in a three versus one situation, I don't fancy their chances.

Bungie explains, as far as the balance goes, "This asymmetrical mode changes the dynamics of a run, taking the heat off of the lone crew for the first few minutes of the match, while also keeping some of the fun, social unpredictability that Rooks bring to runs. Crews are required to bring a Sponsored Kit loadout to play, which keeps the stakes low for the crew, while also giving Rooks the peace of mind of knowing there’s no fully kitted-out teams on the map."

As for full PvE and PvP modes, Bungie promises "We’ll also be testing a PvE mode in the latter half of Season 2, with more experiments to come later, such as perhaps a more purely PvP-focused mode."

Deus Ex and Marathon actor wants to quit Twitter because he's tired of hearing Destiny 2 fans hate on Bungie's new FPS

Destiny 2 fans are convinced that Bungie's community lead is trying to encourage them not to give up on the game, the idea of Destiny 3, or perhaps both as a series of cryptic posts fuel hopium about… something.

After almost nine years with Destiny 2, it's understandable that fans aren't taking the news of the game's final update well. That update arrives next week, and although the game will remain playable after then, it's been reported that Destiny 3 isn't in development, making for an understandably pessimistic community.

In the face of adversity, however, others are choosing to believe. Believe in what, exactly, is up to interpretation, but something good. As highlighted across Reddit and ResetEra, Bungie's principal communications manager Dylan "dmg04" Gafner has been turning heads on Twitter over the last day, first taking to the platform to write: "Guardians make their own fate."

This already had enough folks in his replies asking, "IS THIS A SIGN," but things were then taken to the next level by his following posts.

"Do not go gentle into that good night," dmg04 says, quoting the famous Dylan Thomas poem, before adding: "Wife walked down the aisle to Interstellar music. Top 3 movies of all time in this household."

There are a few ways that fans are interpreting all this – the first is that dmg04 is quietly encouraging the fanbase to keep fighting back against Destiny 2's impending death. One Reddit user suggests: "Dmg's posts are a battle cry. They hear us. Keep going. [...] A reference to one of the most famous poems ever about fighting death. It's from Dylan Thomas published in 1951. The poem follows: 'Rage rage against the dying of the light.'

"It's not cryptic and it's not cope. This is a message to the Destiny community that this movement is not falling on deaf ears. Save the Light. They are hearing us. [...] This is a clear signal from the people actually making and representing Destiny who love it as much as us. They want us to know that the movement over the past week is leading somewhere."

The alternative interpretation is a little more… creative. Though dmg04's explanation of him sharing the poem, which features in Interstellar, could well shut down any idea that he's hinting at anything to do with Destiny, others have been drawn to his apparently bold decision to include the number 3 in his tweet.

"Top 3 movies? That three seems very specific. Why not just, 'One of my favourite movies,' you're too smart for that to not be specific!" one fan responds. "This screams, 'how can I hint D3 without hinting D3.' Hahaha I don't even care if this is copium or hopium. Please let there be D3."

"WHY 3 HUH? WHY 3???? THE NUMBER DYLAN WHAT DOES IT MEANNNN," another questions. "WAIT a minute .... Interstellar ? Top 3 ? You posted those posts 3 hours after you tweet that guardians make their own fate .... Destiny 3 will happen and we will leave Sol !!!!!!!" speculates another.

Obviously, the million-dollar question is, will any of this end up meaning anything at all? Perhaps not, but at least it's giving everyone something to rally around in the meantime. Notably, he also shared someone else's post urging fans to log onto Destiny 2 on June 9, the day of its final update, which makes me wonder if he could be quietly encouraging the idea folks had about overwhelming the game's servers one last time.

As for the Destiny 3 theory, as one ResetEra user writes, it feels like it's up there with Stranger Things Conformity Gate as a theory that'd be really cool if it came true, but it's so off the wall that it's highly unlikely. Is that going to stop any believers from going all in on this idea, though? Of course not.

Valve veteran worries for Bungie's future following Destiny 2's final update: "I don't think Sony cares anymore."

How deeply shall we read into recent comments from former Destiny 2 lead and Bungie vice president Mark Noseworthy regarding "a certain remaster" which absolutely shall not be named? I probably should've asked this before I got up to my collarbone in Destiny 1 musings, but, well, here we go.

Twitter user Mikie, clearly a Destiny fan mourning the end of the game, asked Noseworthy whether he thinks "a certain remaster could be helpful in the same way during these trying times." This was in response to Noseworthy's remarks on The Witcher 3 getting a surprise DLC ahead of The Witcher 4, but it's not too hard to read between the lines here. We sure ain't talking about Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, for which Noseworthy was project lead back in the 2000s, or Halo Reach, which he also worked on but which is already part of the Master Chief Collection.

"I'm not going to comment on 'a certain remaster' but I'll share some general thoughts that I think apply when execs and teams consider the merits of remasters from a business perspective," Noseworthy says in response.

The body of his post is a screenshot of notes which he's dubbed "Generic Video Game Remake Calculus." Again, you will notice that Noseworthy does not call out Destiny by name, but the target of this discussion seems about as well hidden as a horse behind a telephone pole.

Noseworthy examines three "core questions," starting with how costly remakes and remasters actually are. He reckons, "Remakes are often more expensive than you might imagine. Especially if the content and tech needs major updates."

This is a big reason that a Destiny 1 re-release has always sounded impractical to me. Bungie is already wrestling with a complex engine and a live service game. Digging up a generations-old project and fitting it for modern tech and player expectations, just to gussy up a deeply flawed game, simply ain't worth the squeeze in my mind. We're getting into remake versus remaster a bit, but I think some dogs should just stay sleeping. WoW Classic and Old School RuneScape are great, I agree, but I think that's because old WoW and RuneScape 2 are great and distinct in a way that Destiny 1 just is not. But I digress.

Noseworthy also looks at the "opportunity cost" of this kind of project. "If remastered, does that effort take away resources from a different project?" he wonders. In this purely hypothetical situation, those different projects would be Marathon and Bungie's incubation projects, which the studio will have to balance after sunsetting its longtime breadwinner as it looks to get something else off the ground.

"Opportunity costs are high if you are people or cash constrained," Noseworthy adds. "Studios can only afford so many bets at once. Outsourcing is not a silver bullet either (even less so for complex projects)." We obviously don't have exact numbers outside of Sony's $765 million write-down on Bungie, but even the most generous napkin math suggests the studio is, indeed, cash-strapped after Marathon's apparent underperformance and Destiny 2's decline. Which is to say nothing of its manpower after multiple layoff waves and reported plans for additional cuts.

Finally, Noseworthy interrogates whether there's even "a big enough market to justify those expenses and make a suitable return". Do people actually want that dreamed-up remaster? Would they stick to it long-term? Would they pay for it? Or are they, perhaps, flailing their way through the stages of grief and treating anything they collide with as a life preserver?

"Intelligent people can disagree here," Noseworthy concludes. "Case by case basis. Obviously lots of good examples exist like [the] Resident Evil series. But opportunity cost could be a big loser depending on situation."

"We want Destiny 3": Fans respond to Sony sunsetting Destiny 2 with a sequel petition that quickly gets 220k signatures in 4 days, and the MMO's actors are on board.

Bungie has released new details on Destiny 2's final update, Monument of Triumph, ahead of its June 9 launch, and boy, I would have been excited about these changes before the end of the game was announced.

Per a fresh blog post, on June 9, Destiny 2's Director, the entire view of the universe, will be reinstated as the "center of your gameplay" following the disastrous rollout of the Portal activity hub, which has been partially sunset.

"It's your guide to the Destiny universe and the place to plan your adventures," Bungie seems to have realized. "It creates that feeling of wonder we all love. You see the Sol system before you, ready to be explored."

As Destiny 2 is frozen in time, with no more updates coming, the Director has also been updated for the last time. The Lawless Frontier and Kepler areas have been added, giving us our final view of Sol.

The many destinations on the Director have been updated as well. "Pre-Edge of Fate" areas have gotten "loot with new perks, tiered weapons for non-craftable pools, and set bonuses that reflect their themes and stories," mostly earned through public events. Some of that loot will come with the new perk Eyes Up, a nod to one of Destiny's most iconic lines, which reads: "This weapon gains reload speed, range, and increased damage against combatants for a short time when combat begins. Final blows extend and enhance this bonus."

Destinations will also receive a new event of sorts called Distortions. This will appear on a new destination every hour, empowering enemies and unlocking a new event. "You'll also discover some familiar challenges in new places and some strange signals leading to hidden rewards," Bungie says.

The Portal will technically still be here, but "Portal, the tab, is gone." Bungie says "we've heard your feedback on the Portal loud and clear," so it's been reduced to a quick-access menu for playlists and activities. Reward and modifier scoring has been simplified, Gambit has been added as a category to go with its reward overhaul, and dungeons and raids will have quick-start nodes as well. "Dungeon Ops will be retired, and this space will simply be a space to quickly find and play full raid and dungeon content," Bungie clarifies.

"The overarching theme is less math, more playing Destiny," Bungie says of the revised Portal.

Loot is a focus throughout the update, with "exclusive weapon reward pools and an armor collection with a unique set bonus" coming to Crucible and competitive playlists, Trials of Osiris, Iron Banner, Gambit, and the now-permanent Sparrow Racing League.

Onslaught, perhaps the best grind mode Destiny 2 ever received, has also been punched up: expect a new difficulty curve, more defense resources, and no revive tokens. The Contest of Elders has gotten similar changes along with The Coil, one of the best seasonal modes in Destiny 2's history, to essentially make them more rewarding and easier to get into.

This is, of course, a whole bunch of good, highly requested stuff. The Director! Universal tiered loot! Less Portal cruft! Gambit, I guess, sure, why not, bring it in! But it's hard to get too excited about the update knowing this is the end. A selfish part of me almost wishes the Monument of Triumph was weaker just so uninstalling Destiny 2 would be less painful. This game has always been about aspirational content, and now there's nothing left to aspire to. The final update perfectly encapsulates the game's history of extreme ups and downs: simultaneously, we are so back and it is so over.

Destiny 2 community manager thanks "everyone who has reached out" as Bungie ends the game after 9 years: "Your stories mean the world to all of us."

The Destiny 2 team is confident that the servers won't crash as players flock to mourn the game's final update on June 9.

Bungie confirmed last week that Destiny 2's active development is officially coming to a close after nine years, and that the game's final update will be released on June 9. That update is the Monument of Triumph, which will introduce one final batch of content before the game enters a static event rotation for those who want to keep playing.

Naturally, Destiny fans aren't too happy, with a petition for Destiny 3 already amassing over 280,000 signatures. However, reports have emerged that Destiny 3 isn't in active development, that Bungie has no greenlit projects, and that the studio is facing layoffs. On top of that, fans are planning to flood the game with a massive player rally on the day of its final update to show Sony that its shooter still has a loyal community.

Over on Twitter, the Destiny 2 team responded to an account saying they look forward to the final update and explained: "Many of us on the team will be on the Tower on June 9 to visit Monument of Triumph with you." And while Destiny 2's major updates have tended to cause the servers to crash in the past, the team adds, "While we're confident the servers won't crash, we've seen some posts floating around. Our Operations Center is prepared for the challenge."

Some, however, have taken this as a challenge, with one user responding, "So you are telling us to make your servers cry for mercy because so many people want on the game? Noted." While another says, "We MUST crash the servers. One last time. I better be stuck on the title screen for like an hour." Although some are hoping it happens "not out of spite, but because that has happened with every DLC. One last time."

Warframe leads join fans mourning Destiny 2: "There is no Warframe without the legacy of Bungie games."

Destiny 2's "death" is arguably the biggest gaming news of the month. With Sony spending lots of money and resources on chasing (and failing to capture) the live-service dragon this generation, we all thought Bungie would be safe – yet the enduring MMO shooter is on its way out.

If a former behemoth like Destiny 2 won't get any more support, what are the chances of new live-service shooters being afforded the space and time to soar? Pretty low, I'd say, and I'd wager the next generation of consoles will be defined by a return to basics from both Sony and Microsoft. Regardless, Bungie's $3.6 billion price tag – Sony's flashiest acquisition in years – should give everyone pause before deeming it "dead" or "doomed" in the near future.

I'm no oracle, but having lived through bigger live-service debacles and being close to Destiny 2 and Marathon's communities, I've collected some thoughts below.

Destiny isn't going the way of the dodo

Destiny 2 may be "dying", but it's not going away. As hard as Bungie's leadership – blamed time and again by former employees for the studio's struggles – has tried to make things difficult for both the developers and players, it's abundantly clear people who actually played Destiny 2 and its predecessor are fond of the universe and the lives they've lived there.

Warframe might be cool as hell, but there's nothing out there like Destiny 2's approach to kooky but enchanting space opera. Whether you engage with its endgame content or not, the game has survived through its ups and downs – always related to the structure of its seasonal model and the awful onboarding – thanks to its unique universe, mostly relaxed vibes in spite of all the ongoing drama, and awesome-feeling gunplay. When you sit down and actually play Destiny 2, you're instantly reminded why Bungie is one of the best studios in the business and why closing the door on more space romps with Zavala, Ikora, and other Guardians is such a tragedy.

At the end of the day, Destiny 2 is hard to replace, which is why I'm not expecting its Light to vanish as soon as Bungie is done updating the game on June 9. Even the much derided Destiny 1 has retained a community over the years, so it's hard to see Guardians and curious new players moving on anytime soon. In fact, it might be the perfect time to jump in and experience a "finished" version of a game that had a longer journey in mind (vaulted content sadly excluded).

Marathon deserves to grow

With Destiny 2 out of the way, all eyes are turning to Marathon, which is now seen as the only thing separating Bungie from oblivion. There are big things on the horizon... provided the developers can reach it.

As many veterans have pointed out already, killing Marathon would be self-sabotage for everyone involved. That scenario is far less likely now, unless Bungie as a whole is shut down. Instead, layoffs are (unfortunately) expected to happen once Destiny 2's final big content update is done. Beyond that, Sony is reportedly doubling down on Marathon as the game tries to entice PvE-first players with new modes and a heavier focus on "live" narratives as seen in Destiny 2.

Considering the rumored production budget for Marathon was over $200 million and the game reportedly sold over 2.2 million copies during its debut month, it could be some time before Sony sees a return on its investment. Microtransactions spending is unclear, and such a game isn't easy to run, develop, and maintain over time, so expect aggressive marketing and discounts in the coming months in an attempt to attract and retain new players, especially those who were initially scared of the game's ruthless PvPvE extraction shooter pitch.

Needless to say, blaming Marathon for Destiny 2's struggles and leadership failures won't help anyone, and if you care about Bungie's future, my first recommendation would be to give the extraction shooter a try, especially now that Arc Raiders will be slowing down and adopting a more traditional approach to updates and that Marathon Season 2 is approaching. Tau Ceti IV is a scary place, but we Runners don't bite... as long as we're in the same party. Join the bloodshed fun!

Destiny 3 or not, Bungie needs a new project fast

Regardless of Marathon performing better or worse in the long run, Bungie not having another project going is a worrying sign. Destiny 3 isn't a thing at the time of writing even if a full refresh is exactly what fans have been wanting for quite some time, but other projects could take form in the near future. After all, the studio was promising "a new beginning" with its farewell to Destiny 2...

Money talks, of course, and we're expecting PlayStation's live-service push to dwindle even further now that even Bungie is downsizing its operations, but having all its talent focus exclusively on Marathon is a losing bet. While I believe in the extraction shooter if given enough time and resources to blossom, online games eventually die out. All things considered, Destiny 2 had a solid run of more than eight years which paid off the initial investment. We don't need forever games out of every online release.

As fans demand a third Destiny, I'm of the opinion it might be time for Bungie to return to its Xbox era and work on a traditional premium package with a strong campaign and Halo-like multiplayer modes, something that's cheaper and faster to produce. New IP or old (what about a Bungie-developed Killzone?), now feels like the time to play things a bit safe for everyone's sake. I'll be there day one – no matter what.

As someone who was all-in on Destiny from day one, I'm gutted to see where we are now

With the end of Destiny 2's development, Marathon, already struggling to hold onto players outside a small but loyal base, has suddenly been promoted to Bungie's main and only live game. Unenviable expectations, and a Steam review bomb from disgruntled Destiny 2 fans, loom over the newly released developer deep dive for its new season, which tragically shares a name with one of Destiny 2's most iconic activities – Nightfall, known to Guardians as a difficult type of dungeon-lite Strike.

To put it mildly, Bungie faces a tough crowd. To put it less mildly, Bungie would have an easier time convincing the French to retire at 70. But evaluated purely as Season 2 of a game that reviewed well, and which I really enjoyed for over 100 hours, Marathon Season 2, known as Nightfall, does look pretty cool. (You can read our Marathon review for more.)

Some of Bungie's fresh "developer insights" video repeats old news, but there are some interesting details in here. The first new Runner shell, Sentinel, is probably the headliner. It's a defense-focused shell equipped with a deployable mine that slows enemies, a turret-like device that shoots down incoming grenades, and a short-range radar that reveals enemy movements (a little more Aliens "inside the room", a little less like the wall hacks of fellow shell Recon). Taking explosive damage also jacks up Sentinel's defenses temporarily, making it a durable pick that's good for locking down areas.

Nightfall's name is surely no coincidence, but it's really a nod to the new night version of the Dire Marsh map. Night Marsh is pitch-black outside dangerous lit areas, and Bungie says it's really leaned into night vision tools this season, even giving us proper flashlights and signal flares. In a blog post, the studio stresses a "survival horror experience" for Night Marsh, with fewer players and added environmental challenges.

"Dire Marsh and Night Marsh will both be available at all times for at least the first week of the season. After that, the maps will rotate availability with one another every 90 minutes," Bungie explains.

The UESC robots will escalate PvE this season, Bungie says, and Night Marsh is crowned by a UESC vault that seems to echo the coveted storage rooms of the popular Outpost map. If you can shake off other players and survive the bots, you'll walk away with some of the best loot around.

And Bungie has spiced up the loot this season. A new SMG looks capable of melting anything at close range in well under one second, whereas our new burst-fire battle pistol functions as more of a strafing weapon. Additionally, virtually every mod and implant has been retouched, with Bungie promising a "holistic" look at power and rarity. Implants, in particular, will now be "perk first, stats second," which sounds more interesting and readable.

Finally, we get a good look at the Cradle progression system, which lets you break down gear to earn points spent on bonus runner stats like agility and melee power. This will raise the average power of your runner builds, for one, and bring more permanent progression (barring seasonal wipes) to a game where most everything feels ephemeral.

Honestly, I'm more excited by the incoming changes to material and XP costs for traditional faction progression, as that's ultimately what made me drop the game – a sense that I wouldn't get anywhere without investing a lot more time. We'll need fewer materials for unlocks, contracts won't have as many "in one run" requirements, and priority contracts are no longer level-gated and "will be more focused on granting loot rewards."

Still to come is the experimental PvE mode Bungie promised, not to mention a slightly more confusing PvP-lite offering set for Season 2. With Destiny 2 dead, PvE in Marathon is now a very different proposition, but I wouldn't expect any dungeon or raid-style activities from what's inextricably a PvP shooter. And if you've been on the fence about buying the game at all, there's at least a Marathon free week coming up for Season 2's launch as well.

Warframe leads join fans mourning Destiny 2: "There is no Warframe without the legacy of Bungie games."

Warframe creative director Rebb Ford and design director Pablo Alonso joined Destiny 2 fans mourning the game following the end of development announced last week by Bungie.

Though Warframe actually predates Destiny, the two games have long been compared as giants of the loosely defined, live-service, looter-shooter space, and they have shared many players. Ford and Alonso, like many others at developer Digital Extremes, were clearly big fans of Destiny and are sad to see it go.

Rebb relates her history with Bungie's work, going back to playing Halo 3 at 16. "There is no Warframe without the legacy of Bungie games," she says.

"Destiny was and is a force of nature, loved and held in the hands of so many people who, for a moment, were part of the biggest thing in gaming," she adds. "Then comes the words, summarized crudely: 'The End.'"

Destiny 2 will remain playable going forward, and Bungie and studio owner Sony have not openly killed off the IP, but the game will not get any additional updates and the franchise has no known new entries in the works. Bungie's only other release is Marathon, which is quite shy of a smash-hit, so the studio's waters are choppy.

Ford adds: "What a tempest! I am 16 again - I am 35. I am making Warframe, I am saying goodbye to the only lasting pillar I had to look up to. I am responsible for my own destiny. This is misery for so many people - and people are the only reason for the good and the bad of this."

Alonso likewise focuses on how losing a game like this can feel as a player. In an indirect tip of his hat, he says, "When Heroes of the Storm ended development I was very sad, I loved that game. People kept saying 'play league or dota' most were trying to be helpful but they were just annoying. I was sad the game I liked was ending and didn’t need people telling me how their moba was better."

This is the quandary Destiny 2 players will face in the months and years ahead: there is no other game like Destiny. Many tried to make one and none succeeded, and many more were told not to even try because it would be impossible. There are games with guns and loot and space drama, but none of them look or feel or sound quite like this.

For me, the greatest losses lie in Destiny's unresolved narrative threads, and in knowing that we'll never get any more of those raids or dungeons. Destiny 2's pinnacle PvE encounters were peerless – an ingenious distillation of everything the sandbox could produce spliced with think-on-your-feet puzzles that pushed the entire FPS genre forward and turned fireteams into orchestras conducted by whoever actually learned the mechanics (usually with a Datto video playing in another window).

As someone who was all-in on Destiny from day one, I'm gutted to see where we are now.