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.

It's the end of an era as Bungie is now sunsetting Destiny 2 after seven years. As players prepare for the FPS to finish, there's a growing campaign within the fanbase to get a third installment, and voice actors are now getting involved.

On June 9, the Monument of Triumph update will be the last significant patch released for Destiny 2. This has stirred up all sorts of mixed feelings across the community, including a push for Destiny 3 that's got Brandon O'Neill, the voice of Crow, Brian Villalobos, the performer behind Lodi, and more on the frontlines.

"If you're posting about Destiny, Destiny 2 in any way, how about a little #WeWantDestiny3," O'Neill says at the end of a Cameo message to the broader player-base. "I wouldn't mind the employment. I hope to see you star side. All the best, Guardians."

He confirmed to The Game Post that, although the Cameo was organized by a fan, he'd be "very happy to be involved" in a third Destiny. Villalobos is slightly more lowkey, retweeting a post about how a petition for Destiny 3 was then at 150,000 people, simply adding, "I mean." That petition has now accrued over 220,000 signatures in just four days of being live.

I imagine his feelings are much the same as O'Neill and many of the cast-members, in that they'd happily remain a part of this era-defining series and community. Sadly, these efforts may not yield much fruit for the time-being. According to reports, Bungie's planning a hefty round of layoffs following the launch of Monument of Triumph, and as now, no further continuation of Destiny is planned.

But miraculous turnarounds can and do happen. Whatever comes, Joshua David King, who voiced Oryx, sums up his feelings in a way I think many can understand. "I didn't know much about Destiny, but when I learned about the Hive, and I learned about how story-rich and lore-rich and amazing the world of this was, I fell in love," he says in a video posted on social media.

"Instantly, Oryx became a role that I knew I always knew I would hold very near and dear to my heart," he adds. "So thank you all for accepting me."

As Destiny 2 prepares for one final update, a former Bungie legal chief says the studio is "now becoming what I feared after the Sony acquisition"

Bungie has announced that Destiny 2's final live-service update arrives next month, and fans are taking out their frustrations… on poor Marathon.

Obviously, the news isn't good. After the final update, while Destiny 2 will remain playable, it won't be getting any new content or expansions, and that news is only made worse by a report that Destiny 3 apparently isn't in development, nor is Bungie currently planning on it in the immediate sense. With reportedly no other projects greenlit right now, attention is shifting to its latest FPS game, Marathon, which hasn't been a massive success for the studio since its March launch, and the studio's situation sounds shaky.

Sony recently reported "impairment losses" of around $765 million against Bungie's "intangible and other assets" over its last financial year, and it's now been alleged that significant layoffs are planned at Bungie after the final Destiny 2 update. Needless to say, it sounds like the studio needs a win, so some players are being very understanding by… review bombing Marathon on Steam.

Looking at the game's recent negative reviews, you can see a wave of complaints that, well, aren't really complaints about Marathon at all. "Destiny died for this lol," one reads, as another writes: "Slopathon. rip destiny 2 u were the realest."

One review – posted after only 0.3 hours on record (from a copy of the game that's since been refunded) – simply states, "D2 didn't die for this garbage," while another demands: "Make Destiny 3."

Now, the upset at the demise of Destiny 2 is – obviously – understandable. Many people have spent the best part of a decade playing the game, and its abrupt end was never going to go down well. But is taking out those frustrations on Marathon going to achieve anything positive? No.

Some fans are already pointing this out. "Love the D2 players review bombing rn," one Reddit user sarcastically writes. "Great look guys! Blame Marathon for a game reaching its natural end of life, makes complete sense to me!"

Others are calling for others to counterbalance the wave of complaints, asking: "Positive or negative, leave a genuine review please. Not some parasocial comment."

Right now, it appears that those trying to give Marathon a positive boost are winning – while today is still the game's worst day for negative reviews in the last month (with 93 posted so far), it also has way more positive ones, with 179 shared today. Interestingly, the exact same thing is happening on Destiny 2's Steam reviews, too, with the positive reviews coming out on top.

With both games, it helps that the review bomb hasn't become too widespread at the time of writing. Hopefully, it'll just fizzle out, as once again, it's really not going to achieve anything other than add some salt to the wounds of the already struggling devs. Perhaps Marathon Season 2 can turn things around at least a little too.

Former Destiny 2 writer says "it turns out the real Destiny killer" was CEO Pete Parsons as players pray for Destiny 3.

Destiny 2's active development is officially coming to a close, and the news just gets worse as it's reported that Destiny 3 isn't in development, and layoffs are planned at Bungie after the game's final update next month.

That's according to a Bloomberg report, via individuals allegedly familiar with Bungie's plans. It's claimed that – aside from the ongoing support for its latest FPS game Marathon – Bungie doesn't have another new project currently lined up, with no plans to immediately start production on Destiny 3 (which, clearly, isn't already ongoing). It's claimed that Bungie devs are looking to both pitch and start developing new projects (apparently, projects in the Destiny franchise are included in this), but as of now, none have actually been approved, nor is it a certain thing that any will.

What's worse is the alleged layoffs being planned at Bungie as Destiny 2's development comes to an end. While it's reported that the number of layoffs planned isn't known, the number is described as significant.

Things haven't been looking fantastic for Bungie for a while now. Earlier this month, Sony's results for the last financial year (ended at the end of March) revealed that it had taken "impairment losses" of around $765 million against Bungie's "intangible and other assets" over the course of the year. Obviously, that's not good, especially when Sony spent $3.6 billion to acquire it in 2022. At the time, Destiny 2 fans were seriously worried about the future of the game, and it's sad to see that their fears weren't unfounded.

It's fair to say that Bungie's latest game, Marathon, hasn't been an immediate hit, either. While it'd be unfair to call it a Concord or Highguard situation, Bloomberg now reports that it hasn't met sales expectations, but claims that Bungie is looking to invest more into it, so the devs aren't giving up on it. Some Destiny 2 staffers have apparently already recently been shifted over to work on Marathon with Marathon Season 2 just around the corner as well.

For now, we'll just have to see how the situation unfolds, but there's no way to dress it up – it's pretty grim.

Former Destiny 2 writer says "it turns out the real Destiny killer" was CEO Pete Parsons as players pray for Destiny 3.

There's only one breed of bird on Tau Ceti IV: the Skrac. They keep a squawking vigil, watching over dying runners as they bleed out, marking the moment with disinterest. Once everybody's dead or exfilled, theirs are the only organic eyes to look out over the ruined colony.

Perhaps it's fitting, then, that whenever I check the discourse around Marathon, I can still hear the flap of vultures' wings. Everywhere I look, punters predict the death of Bungie's latest shooter. Armchair analysts point to diminishing player numbers on Steam, and Sony's own reports appear to back up the gloom. In a recent roundup of its financial year, the publisher reported impairment losses of roughly $765 million against Bungie's assets.

Given the eye-watering $3.6 billion that Sony spent on the studio in 2022, it's fair to say that Bungie is testing the truth of the statement it made while the ink dried on the acquisition agreement: "We have found a partner who unconditionally supports us in all we are". Over the years since, the developer has suffered multiple rounds of mass layoffs – diminishing its headcount to the point where fans have begun to question the studio's ability to breathe life into a deflated Destiny 2 while also telling Marathon's evolving story.

Most of all, though, the gaming audience remembers Concord: the Sony shooter that was pronounced dead inside of two weeks. It's a debacle that has come to symbolize the Japanese giant's stumbling pivot to live-service projects. And make no mistake, it has left a scar. Players have long understood – somewhat reluctantly – that online games can close down within a year or two of launch. But Concord made tangible the idea that a heavily-marketed AAA release might not even survive as long as the milk in your fridge. Why invest your time figuring out the combat mechanics and progression systems of a game that might be rendered unplayable at any moment? If there's a hesitance and cynicism in the air when it comes to Sony's server-based ventures, then the publisher only has itself to blame.

But Marathon is not Concord. It differs from Firewalk Studios' effort in one crucial respect: it is beloved. In our Marathon review, Features Editor Andy Brown wrote that it "captures the highest highs of extraction shooters, trims the finickiness that has kept casual players from engaging with the genre, and ties everything together with striking sci-fi flair."

I would agree, and have noticed my peers in both the mainstream and independent games press covering Marathon with a rare fervour. The game has inspired a zine decorated with in-game photography, an entire series of essays, and precisely one comparative analysis written by an actual marathon runner. I, personally, cannot stop writing and thinking about it.

A hit is a hit

Juxtaposing Marathon's Steam response with that of Destiny 2 is instructive. While Marathon may have a tenth the number of user reviews, it is also more highly rated: sitting at 'Very Positive', compared to its predecessor's 'Mostly Positive'.

"Marathon is fun when you ignore people telling you it is not," reads one user review. "Great game with excellent gun play and a dev that is clearly listening to their community," says another, adding: "I haven't had great things to say about Bungie in years but this game made me a fan again."

A third devotee, with 270 hours on the clock, lists the stages of suffering in Marathon – from joy and fear through to apathy, anger and despair. "You realize you will never be good," they write. "And after all that you still want to play one more match."

Why does any of this matter? Think back to Concord again. Keeping its servers online would have been a negligible cost to Sony - one it has shouldered for numerous other games long after their playerbases have dwindled. But Concord was worth more to Sony dead than it was alive. Its very existence was a cudgel which detractors took pleasure in swinging at PlayStation day after day, damaging its reputation for first-party quality in the process. Fairly or not, Concord had become a PR disaster – and the faster Sony could memory hole it, the better.

Marathon, by contrast, is a critical darling. A much-needed counterpoint to the otherwise very convincing argument that Sony's live-service investments have come up short.

In recent years, streaming services have acclimatized us to the idea that conversation is currency. Saturday Night Live UK might appear to be an expensive risk for Sky TV, for instance, with its army of comedians, cue card writers and set designers building bespoke sketches every week. But the show gets people talking, and that conversation opens the door to more subscribers.

You might not think of Sony as a subscription business. But with tens of millions buying PlayStation Plus every month, it very much is. And if you're anything like me, when you choose to buy a new console in the company's ecosystem, you're factoring in the conversation around its first-party games. By the time the PS6 comes along, most of us are going to need more than a second God of War sequel and a re-re-remake of The Last of Us to buy in. The promise of more genre-leading games on the level of Marathon will likely go a long way toward sealing the deal.

The mainstream success of Arc Raiders is an anomaly in the extraction shooter genre. Marathon has proved that. But it's also proved that bold and original first-party games are still emerging from PlayStation – and that message is one that Sony would do well to keep broadcasting.

Marathon risks watering down its best feature if it keeps listening to FPS fans

Marathon game director Joe Ziegler just published the kind of 'state of the game' letter that Destiny 2 players would actually kill for right now. Three months in, the silver bullet has officially been chambered: a PvE-only mode is coming to Marathon, and so is a lot more.

Season 2 of Marathon will introduce two more experimental game modes. One, coming at the start of the season, has "a touch of PvP" but focuses on PvE. The other is "a PvE-only mode that's focused on crews being tasked with completing objectives together and making some progress across matches."

Some Marathon players might call this heresy. Marathon avoiders might call it salvation – a way into the game's incredible gunplay, art, and audio that doesn't involve the stress and frustration of PvP.

Ziegler calls it an experiment, and says Bungie will continue experimental queues in the future, "such as perhaps a more purely PvP-focused mode," with "potential for these to become part of the core game loop or permanent new ways to play."

As a response to an intimidating game whose active population quickly shrank after launch – Ziegler focuses on the "strong core community" Marathon's developed – it's about as silver as bullets get.

Oh, and the max size of our vault will be increased in Season 2, letting us store more stuff. That's nice, too.

Ziegler examines three months of feedback in his lengthy post – the highlights, the pain points, and the lessons to bring forward. I'll let our Marathon review tell you what the game does well. Let's focus on what, as Ziegler says, didn't go so well, and what Bungie wants to improve.

First, a Bungie classic: "Marathon is overwhelming to learn." Ziegler recognizes that the onboarding experience is heady, and from there it's "easy to hit a wall if you're not spending lots of time, don't have a consistent crew, or are not super skilled."

"Matches can feel like a death spiral for some players," he continues. "You kit up, you go in, you die to a spawn rush, or someone gets the jump on you as you're looting. Faction progress can feel like a slog, and you struggle to get mats and credits out to upgrade." Playing solo, of course, makes it all worse.

Endgame fights are often flooded with "bubbles, ‘nade spam, and snipers," Ziegler adds, and "sometimes you don't want to sweat." And in this mix, "matchmaking can be a blessing or a curse."

Season 2 of Marathon will start to tackle these problems, and Bungie's also got plans all the way up to at least Season 5, from new runners and weapons to new-player improvements and world-building ambitions. Bungie is working on new ways to extract with varying risks, an updated matchmaking system with "different dimensions" to better align players, UX improvements to "help make setting goals and getting into a match smoother," and changes to the contract system that will elevate progression.

Season 4 will focus on "building more depth into the existing extraction loop," Ziegler adds, while Season 5 will look at ways to bring "the whole ecosystem of (PV(P)VE) play together and evolving our weird sci-fi world in new ways."

Season 2 starts June 2, bringing the game's first wipe and the start of a Marathon free week. The farther ahead we look, the more abstract plans become, but it certainly seems like Bungie is swinging for the fences. With these future plans, Ziegler speaks over the understandable unrest circulating among Marathon (and also Destiny 2) fans following new owner Sony's latest staggering write-down on the studio. Marathon was not an Arc Raiders or Apex Legends-sized instant-hit, but it's got more in the tank.

"Big things coming down the line!" Ziegler says.

I played Marathon and its 1994 predecessor to see how Bungie has evolved over the years.

Marathon has something about it. For a while I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was that made it appeal to me where most extraction shooters didn't. The gunplay is great, but the same could be said of Escape From Tarkov. That 'new game excitement' didn't grip me when Arc Raiders arrived, so how did Marathon immediately slip a neon-green hook under my skin and pull me into its convoluted sci-fi world?

A not-insignificant part of what pulled me in is the convoluted sci-fi world, with its abstruse design language and commitment to neon green. Here, 30 years since the original game launched, Bungie doubles down on its capitalist apocalypse with a slick design ethos and the bravery to not spoon-feed the audience lore. Marathon borrows many themes from the Soulslike genre, but its commitment to diegetic storytelling may be its masterstroke. If you want to understand what's going on, you'd better pay attention to item descriptions, random barks, and even the narrative in your own inventory.

However, fans recently complained that the icons for implants were too difficult to read at a glance and made inventory management finicky. They weren't wrong. So, Bungie changed them - and I think it was a huge mistake.

Use your eyes

Instead of the slick-but-confusing designs that felt a part of this universe, we've got a bunch of icons that don't make sense within Marathon's existing design language. To make things worse, there is no discernible improvement to readability.

There are some things you should concede to players. Improving queue times, rebalancing overpowered weapons, that sort of thing. In a live-service environment, they're your biggest source of playtesters. Fans have requested other changes, such as removing the overlap between the ranked and Cryo Archive playlists. This makes sense, it ensures quicker queue times and eliminates executive dysfunction over whether to play for loot or to rise up the leaderboard. Bungie listened, changed the schedule, and everyone was happy.

But my gripe is that players aren't designers. They haven't created the mood boards, sketched out icons, and pored over every last detail. They just want to be able to loot quicker. It's disappointing that Bungie has watered down its perfectly-executed design ethos for the sake of menu navigation.

Regarding the icons, I get it. I was confused, too. As a player, you want to be able to see that this implant is Helping Hands and this one is Thick Skull while looting or setting your loadout for a mission.

I imagine that players would be happy if the Thick Skull implant was represented by a skull and Helping Hands was a hand with, say, a thumbs up. Like a Pip-Boy upgrade in Fallout 4 or something. Something readable, something they can slot into their inventory without thinking. But they forget that, in this game, they're not a player. They're a consciousness uploaded to an organic shell in order to extract maximum profit from the swamps and science facilities of Tau Ceti.

The new icons are distinct from both Marathon's existing design language and what the upgrades actually do. Now I can tell implants apart from cores at a glance, but I still can't tell what each implant does. In essence, nobody wins. Players still have to hover over the item to figure out what it does, and any immersion is lost because the new icons don't match the game's existing art direction. Marathon has sanded down its strongest asset, and for what?

That's not to catastrophize. I don't think the game is doomed because of one minor change to its design language. But, if Bungie keeps filing down the rough edges of its design in order to give players a smoother gameplay experience, Marathon becomes just another shooter. Right now, the frictional design is one of Marathon's strongest selling points. This is a Soulslike where opponents are bosses and implants are tiny fragments of storytelling.

You wouldn't tell Miyazaki to write a linear novelization of the Dark Souls' story, so why ask Bungie to water down Marathon's identity when it risks turning this bold attempt at live-service storytelling into something generic. For Marathon, I couldn't think of a worse fate.

Check out the best FPS games to play next, from Battlefield to Call of Duty.

The one-two punch of Sony reporting a further impairment loss from buying Bungie – now totaling $765 million in the last financial year, more than 21% of the $3.6 billion it spent on the studio – and Bungie itself admitting it still has nothing of note to say has sent Destiny 2 players deeper down the stages of grief.

On May 7, less than 24 hours before Sony released the earnings report revealing this staggering impairment loss, Destiny 2 communications manager dmg04 addressed the game's community on Twitter.

"Still have a few lighter TWIDs in the pipe," he says, setting expectations for the developer's weekly blog posts. For months, players have begged for updated details on Destiny 2's upcoming expansions and patches, not to mention a proper state of the game letter, but have seen very little of consequence. Clearly, such information won't be coming for at least several more weeks.

"Community focused, emblems and foundation details," dmg04 says of the coming blog posts. "Know y'all are chomping at the bit for news. Dotting i's, crossing t's. Looking to have game focused articles as soon as they're ready."

This is obviously out of the hands of people like dmg. The timing is just brutal, as the Destiny community could really use a pick-me-up, or even some clarity, in the wake of Sony's report.

Bungie has been on thin ice for a while, and with Sony very publicly quantifying its underperformance, fans of the studio's games fear the chilling depths have finally come. To be clear, the impairment loss means Bungie is now worth $765 million less than it was when Sony bought it, not that $765 million cash was lost through operational costs. But it's still very bad news, as this sort of loss wouldn't be tallied if Bungie's games were doing great.

Destiny 2's Edge of Fate expansion pushed many people away from the game with baffling systemic changes, and between Steam player counts and console analyst reports, it's clear that the MMO – Bungie's longtime breadwinner – is in the worst position it's ever been.

On top of that, Marathon finally got out the door – and ended up being really fun, per our Marathon review – only to start hemorrhaging players within a few weeks, evidently failing to maintain long-term appeal. Marathon is rapidly approaching a fork in the road with its first seasonal transition threatening to either turn off more people by wiping their progress or, just maybe, bring new and lapsed players into the fold with exciting changes.

In the wake of this news, Destiny 2 players are doing what they do best: doomposting.

"There's no way this game keeps getting DLC post 2026," reads a rising post on the main Destiny subreddit, which has also seen a falloff in user activity in the past year. A subreddit moderator sums up the discussion in another thread about the Sony news: "If this is the end, it's been an honor playing with you, ladies and gentlemen."

Even users on the more optimistic Destiny 2 subreddit have their heads in their hands: "It doesn't look good," reads today's top post, sharing The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley's aggregation of the Sony report.

With no word from Bungie and all visible numbers in the red, it's hard to dispute pessimism like this. Bungie has faced dire stakes and managed moonshot turnarounds multiple times before, but not as a Sony asset, and this situation really is something else.

What happens to Bungie going forward isn't entirely clear, but a feared shutdown, at least, does not seem imminent. There are many possibilities. Previous reports indicated the studio would face a total Sony takeover if it didn't hit financial targets. It's already been carved up to some extent, and with no turnaround in sight, it seems likely that Bungie's executive leadership will see some real musical chairs. Sony said just last year that Bungie's "independence is getting lighter," and the studio's only facing greater challenges today.

There are also understandable fears that the world-class artists, gunsmiths, audio wizards, and other developers at Bungie could face more cuts of their own, echoing multiple waves of prior layoffs that hit during hard times. And if you haven't heard, times have only gotten harder for the games industry at large.

Sony's live service ambitions, once meant to draw on Bungie's experience in the genre, have largely flamed out, so how PlayStation Studios could theoretically leverage the studio through partial reallocation is also more uncertain. Sony does seem invested in Marathon, but it's still a minor portion of Bungie's portfolio. Likewise, Sony surely wants the Destiny IP it paid for to survive, but in what shape and under what leadership? One thing seems certain: Bungie as we know it will not be allowed to continue on its current trajectory.

Bungie doesn't see Marathon going anywhere: "We know where we want to take the story over the next few years."

It appears Sony is still paying for the acquisition of Bungie a few years ago. According to the company's latest earnings report, it took "impairment losses" of around $765 million against the Destiny 2 maker's assets for the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in March 2026.

In a slide as part of a bullet-point rundown of Sony's performance over the previous financial year, it's stated the corporation lost 120.1 billion yen against Bungie's "intangible and other assets." This lands in the region of $765 million, when converted. Prior insights showed Bungie assets, including those "in connection with Destiny 2," costing Sony around $204 million in the second quarter, and things have continued to stack from there.

In March, we saw the launch of Marathon, a brand new extraction shooter from the original home of Halo. It's the first new FPS from the studio in almost a decade, and first non-Destiny release in 12 years. Despite that pedigree, there's an impairment loss tied to Bungie in the region of $565 million, or 88.6 billion yen, for the last quarter.

This only compounds previous beliefs that Marathon performed below expectations. After garnering some buzz through server slams, the sci-fi FPS shifted an estimated 1.2 million copies its first month, not quite managing to be the zeitgeist-dominating release I'm sure Bungie and Sony were hoping for given the $3.6 billion acquisition cost in 2022.

Though broadly similar to the current hotness Arc Raiders, Marathon is distinctly more punishing. The difficulty curve on PvE is higher, the UI is more obtuse, and the lore is more involved. Its first raid, the Cryo Archive, has been noted for being particularly challenging, to the point Bungie made it a little easier in an update.

These factors are likely among the contributors to the current state of affairs between Sony and Bungie. It's not all a downward spiral, mind. Sales in the games division were "essentially flat" across the board, the report adds, as software is balanced out by decreased hardware sales. Projections for the coming year are positive, too.

"The FY26 operating income forecast is essentially flat year-on-year, which is due to the incorporation of an increase in investments for the next-generation platform," Sony states. "Excluding these factors, profit generated by our current business is expected to grow steadily at a double-digit rate."

Bungie doesn't see Marathon going anywhere: "We know where we want to take the story over the next few years."

A former Square Enix exec reckons Sony's lack of marketing for Marathon suggests a lack of faith in Bungie's latest game from PlayStation.

On Twitter, Jacob Navok (former director of business at Square Enix Holdings) commented on Marathon's Steam player count, calling it "brutal." And while the numbers on PS5 and Xbox aren't available, Navok reckons Sony's marketing push behind the game isn't doing the job. "Sony owns a ton of digital real estate on the PlayStation dashboards to push Marathon," he says, adding that "Its lack of marketing push to support the numbers speaks to the lack of faith from the platform holder."

Of course, Sony has seen a few misses with live service games, but Marathon isn't quite Concord, as there is a section of players who do really seem to love its punishing gameplay loop.

As a user points out in the replies, Marathon was the most-played game on Xbox in the past month, and when it comes to the Xbox dashboard, typically puts its full weight behind whatever the new first-party tentpole launch is. That is, much like PlayStation does for its flagship single-player games, but hasn't here considering Arc Raiders has been at the forefront of the PlayStation Store for the majority of the time Marathon has been out.

That's not to say it's entirely on Sony. Clearly, there are a lot of people who don't really like Marathon, but when you cut through the tired "dead game" comments that everything faces, it does have a strong fanbase too – albeit one that's pretty small in the live-service pantheon. The issue is that you need to support that small fanbase and the game behind it if you ever want a chance at bringing it back.

Final Fantasy 14 was a failure when it first launched, but Square Enix invested in it, took a look at what wasn't working for people, and now it's extremely popular and probably the only MMO that has ever challenged World of Warcraft for the genre crown. I haven't played Marathon; I don't know if it has the sauce, but it won't matter if it gets the plug pulled pre-emptively.

Bungie makes Marathon's Cryo Archive less brutal, blocking spawn rush strats and giving free kits.

Much has been made of Marathon's cruelty. The way Bungie's extraction shooter kills you faster than your brain can register the loss. The way it tempts you into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, dragging your last loot hoard into the next match only to watch it vanish in minutes. And yet, this is a game that at least tries to look out for you.

That's most apparent after a terrible wipe, when the natural inclination is to dive straight back into another round, relieving the pain with another shot of adrenaline. It's here that Bungie steps in with a warning message to point out that, look, you're beaming down to Tau Ceti without a gun. Minus patch kits or shield charges. And might that, given the state of the colony, be a little foolhardy? It's your prompt to sheepishly return to the menus and equip a free kit (sponsored by a corporation that, unlike Bungie, doesn't have your best interests at heart).

If you begin a run without a backup weapon equipped, however, Bungie doesn't bother to mention it. That's because, as I've discovered, a second gun is surplus to requirements in Marathon, and fielding one is usually nothing but a further way to hurt yourself in a game built from sharp edges.

Dead weight

Of course, it's natural enough to fill that second gun slot when fiddling with your gear. It's there, for one thing, a gaping hole in the centre of your loadout, waiting to be occupied by something chunky and reassuring. Like the donkey in Buckaroo, every extra item you freight your avatar with allows you to feel slightly safer and better prepared.

What you're imagining as you equip that V11 Punch is an idealized situation where, facing down a fellow runner, you get in a final, decisive shot by swapping to the pistol or shotgun. It's a satisfying mental image – one that may or may not be rendered in slow-mo, depending on personal taste.

But let's be honest with each other here; emotionally naked, like a shell stripped of all its loot in the aftermath of a scrap. How often is your shotgun-flipping fantasy playing out in reality? Is it never?

There are a few key facts working against the realization of that beautiful dream. One is Marathon's infamous time-to-kill, so brutal that second weapons rarely get a look-in. Extended engagements are certainly possible, and become more likely as players get to grips with the hero-shooter-style abilities that allow teammates to bounce back even after they're spitting blue blood, but fast and nasty ambushes are the norm. In many cases, the outcome of a battle is decided almost before it begins.

Not because of high-level equipment, which typically offers only a second or two of extra breathing room to the well-armored, but because Marathon is a stealth game. Those who can read the environment for signs of passing teams – who can keep their ear to the wall for footsteps, or the telltale buzz of a disgruntled bot – are the ones who get to decide how a skirmish starts, and consequently, how it ends. Swapping to your Magnum MC as your shield bursts is not going to change that.

Know your place

Then there's the fact that mid-range weapons like the LMG can cover engagements at any realistic distance. That sniper rifle on your back? It's primarily a tool to pointlessly break a distant target's shield and alert them to your exact position.

At close range, meanwhile, the knife is the fight-winner - the desperate, last-ditch defence that might fell a tougher enemy. Wasting precious seconds reaching for a shotgun is most often a mistake, an invitation for your opponent to snatch the weapon from your crumpled corpse moments later.

Unless, of course, you're a specialist – somebody who is deeply committed to the shotgun or the sniper rifle, and has built their shell around that playstyle. In which case, fair enough: you might value a backup weapon that offsets the shortcomings of your favoured firearm. But such setups are the exception. By 20 hours in, you know who you're going to be in Marathon, and most of us are generalists. Mid-range and, in my case, mid all over. Happy to be there, used to defeat, and ecstatic in occasional victory. Grateful for an exfil under any circumstances.

If that's you as well, do yourself a favor. The next time you scroll over a small gun in your Vault, sell it. Don't fill that second slot. Leave yourself a space in your inventory to loot an extra gun on the ground, then sell that too. Stop kidding yourself that you're ever going to switch to another weapon. And please, stop gifting extra gear to the enemies rifling through your pockets. Let their disappointment at a minimal haul be your revenge.

Love Marathon? Grab your gear and head out into the other best FPS games to play in 2026

Marathon and Arc Raiders have spearheaded a wave of extraction shooters which, through their own extremes, have kindled debate about the balance of PvP and PvE in this mixed-experience genre. Marathon leans more into PvP, while Arc Raiders is famous for its friendly, PvE-focused lobbies and just rolled out a brutal PvE map event. Joe Ziegler, game director on Marathon at Bungie, says that balance of PvPvE is the whole point.

Speaking with GamesRadar+, Ziegler focuses on the secret to "a lot of great game experiences." In his view, it boils down to "the empowering feeling that you are in control to make a lot of decisions and deal with those consequences, learn from them, grow better as you encounter new decisions to make." This obviously isn't exclusive to extraction shooters or PvP games, but they can provide especially tense and unpredictable moments.

In this vein, extraction shooters wield a rare and potent mix of gameplay elements, Ziegler says. "This space between PVP and PVE is sort of the golden line that drives experiences like that. PVE provides a baseline of challenge that allows you to ground yourself in a predictable world with rules and behaviors you can understand, but the PVP layer pushes you to adapt to the whim and unexpected thoughts of other players," he continues.

Here, Ziegler expands on the vision he shared with us before Marathon was even released: a story generator with the recipe for "infinite" memorable experiences. On this point, he looks beyond video games and to classic literature – namely, The Lord of the Rings, which famously benefited immensely from PvPvE.

"I like to think of classic stories of adventure like The Lord of the Rings when thinking about games like this," Ziegler says, "where you can imagine the journey of Frodo and the Fellowship would have been way less interesting and suspenseful if all they encountered was dangerous wildlife on the way to Mount Doom and didn’t have other enemies out there unpredictably trying to steal the ring or end their journey."

Can't argue with that. Stew on this the next time you wish for a PvE mode for Arc Raiders. Would you really want a story that's nothing but Ents and Eagles?

Now for the real question: which Marathon runner shells would each member of the Fellowship play? I've got money on Destroyer for Gimli, Vandal for Legolas, and exclusively Rook for Frodo. We don't know how, but he's found a way to play Rook even in a team.

Halo lead mocks rumors that the studio is chasing Arc Raiders and Marathon with a PvE extraction shooter spin-off

Multiplayer shooters evolve slowly but surely. The sweaty arena shooters of yesteryear paved the way for big-budget franchises to thrive, and while they reigned supreme, hero shooters and once-niche battle royale games birthed today's live service formula. Now another door is opening, with Arc Raiders and Marathon successfully taking the hardcore stylings and RPG-esque progression from extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov to far broader audiences.

It's a very exciting time to enjoy multiplayer shooters, but why is so much changing? I caught up with three studios across the industry – Bungie (Marathon), Embark Studios (Arc Raiders), and Night Street Games (Last Flag) – to learn more about their priorities, creative interests, and thoughts on working within one of the industry's riskiest genres.

Collateral damage

The term 'Extraction shooter' boils the subgenre down to one facet – getting out alive. But equally important to the niche is RPG-style progression and smart blending of PvP and PvE, while time limits ensure it all works within the framework of a traditional session-based multiplayer shooter.

Over the last year, we've seen both Arc Raiders and Marathon offer their own spins on the formula. While Arc Raiders relies upon the unpredictability of player encounters, Marathon leans further into the genre's hardcore shooter roots, with PvP driven by sudden violence and exceptionally low time-to-kill (TTK). Yet both games emphasize PvE, with players forced to reckon with AI-controlled enemies as often as other players.

For Virgil Watkins, the design director for Arc Raiders, blending PvE and PvP is all about fostering unpredictability. "You’re not just designing around AI encounters or player-versus-player competition in isolation but rather creating situations where those systems interact. That’s where there’s a lot of possibility for memorable moments, because there are enough free agents to affect the situation in many ways.

"That was a big part of what drew us in that direction with Arc Raiders," he adds. The game was originally more of a "PvE co-op experience" which, despite some charm, Watkins admits "lacked any pull to keep coming back to play more than a few times". Now, Arc Raiders' robots are just one of the game's agents of chaos – PvP-minded raiders see them as proximity alarms to be avoided lest they give away their position to other players, while more trusting folk can team up with random players to take down tougher robots for better rewards. "That tension found when cooperation can shift into competition (or vice versa) is what makes each encounter feel unique [...] That flexibility has been really important in creating those player-driven stories we've seen emerge" says Watkins.

Joe Ziegler, creative director for Marathon, describes the approach as a "recipe for infinite stories and experiences," echoing Watkins' thoughts on unpredictability. "I like to think of classic stories of adventure like The Lord of the Rings when thinking about games like this," he says. "You can imagine the journey of Frodo and the Fellowship would have been way less interesting and suspenseful if all they encountered was dangerous wildlife on the way to Mount Doom and didn’t have other enemies out there, unpredictably trying to steal the ring or end their journey."

Ziegler's Lord of the Rings comparison is apt for another reason. There's been an increasing focus on storytelling in successful multiplayer shooters of late, ranging from Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2's breakout co-op campaign to Helldivers 2's emergent tales of heroism.

Like Helldivers 2, Marathon and Arc Raiders feature plenty of emergence – not always as well-intentioned – and boast exceptional worldbuilding. I fell for Marathon's corpo-dystopian vibes long before getting to grips with its brutal PvP flow, and will forever applaud Arc Raiders' commitment to immersion. Perhaps the ever-scant campaign offerings of franchise multiplayer shooters has created an appetite for substance, or maybe we just want to lean into the stakes.

Bungie spent a great deal of time ensuring Marathon's futuristic corporations – or at least, their AI representatives – felt believable. "We have a lot of teams that work very closely together to coalesce around features," says Julia Nardin, Marathon's creative director. "Once we’d aligned on what factions and contracts needed to do from a gameplay standpoint, we created cross-disciplinary groups to develop their identities and in-game presentation at the same time we were working on designing the contracts themselves. We encouraged those groups to take some pretty big swings and get as weird with it as they wanted, which led to questions like: “What if the Sekiguchi Genetics rep looked like a giant WEAVEworm?”

Shoot for the heart

It's hard to pinpoint the last time the multiplayer shooter genre felt so alive. Ziegler believes its fans "evolve and change just like the games they play," and suggests many want "immersive and dynamic" experiences akin to Marathon and Arc Raiders.

Yet finding success isn't guaranteed. Live service games are hard to launch and keep alive, and shooters are no exception. Sony's 2024 hero shooter Concord was launched and subsequently shut down within two weeks due to poor sales, with the publisher closing Firewalk Studio just one month later.

Raid shooter Highguard was revealed at The Game Awards 2025 and released in January 2026, but despite being revealed on one of the industry's biggest platforms, couldn't reach "a sustainable player base" and was shuttered in March following layoffs. Amidst it all, layoffs and downsizing continue to lash the game industry, and it's common to see hawkish discussions around multiplayer games focus not on their creative merits, but player counts.

Still, that doesn't stop studios from taking their shot. Brothers Mac and Dan Reynolds, of Imagine Dragons fame, founded Night Street Games in 2020 and have just launched their debut game: Last Flag, a 5v5 Capture the Flag shooter. Speaking just before launch, I ask Mac how the genre's latest highs and lows have affected the team's artistic vision or morale.

"It’s a slippery slope to try and build a game for an audience, and I really don’t think it’s how the best games – or art in general – are made," he says. "You absolutely want to listen to your players when you develop, but the creative core has to be what inspires you and your team, or it won’t have soul and you’ll burn out trying to force it into existence. So although we aren’t blind to what happens around us with other games, we really try to protect the team’s freedom to build without trying to think about other hits and misses when it comes to creative vision.

"But if there’s one takeaway I’d take from the shooter landscape in the last few years, it’s that players will still jump in and play something new – even a shooter in an already popular subgenre – if it brings something to the table that’s different and exciting for them," he adds, pointing to Last Flag's own playful reimagining of Capture the Flag. "It’s not like anything else out there, for better or worse. And we hope people will jump in and give it a try for that reason."

Echoing Reynolds' philosophy, Watkins says Arc Raiders wasn't an attempt to "break into a particular type of shooter or follow a trend," and points once more to its highly iterative development cycle. Similarly, Reynolds admits that "making a multiplayer shooter was never actually the goal" for Last Flag. "In our early prototypes, we tested a lot of different capture the flag concepts. We tried top down and isometric views, fog of war, and lots of other ideas that never made the final cut. Eventually we found that a third person multiplayer shooter was the right vehicle for our game loop, and that took us where we are today. But even now, we consider ourselves to be Capture the Flag first and shooter second – which dictates a lot of choices we’ve made in gameplay."

Although the image of a full-to-bursting shooter scene is daunting to some, Watkins says the Arc Raiders team "see it as a positive" for the genre.

"It raises the bar in a good way," he offers. "When there’s more variety and more high-quality experiences out there, it pushes everyone to be more thoughtful about what they’re building and why. It also brings more players into the genre, which ultimately benefits all of us. So we tend to look at it as a rising tide. If players are excited about shooters and the various experiences they can offer, that’s a good thing. It creates more space for different kinds of games to exist and find their audience."

Speaking to the developers behind Last Flag, Marathon, and Arc Raiders turns up much in common. None have shied away from dramatic iteration, nor felt beholden to meet expectations set by other games. Indeed, trend-chasing in itself seems increasingly futile. Spiralling development times all but guarantee reaching the market late, while the longevity of live service games means the audience they serve is unlikely to move on for anything too similar.

"When it comes to live service, the bar is extremely high," says Watkins. "Players already have established games they’ve invested a lot of time in, so anything new really has to earn its place [...] If you can create an experience that feels engaging, approachable, and has room for players to make it their own, then there’s space for it, even alongside long-running games."

Where will the genre go from here? Right now, it's hard to tell: mainstream extraction shooters are still in their infancy, and it remains to be seen whether their integration of PvPvE will inspire more developers to experiment with the dynamic. Perhaps we'll see a broader, stranger smorgasbord of games that let us shoot friends. Perhaps the next big thing is already here; the military sim (mil-sim) genre, for example, has a thriving audience and seems well-positioned to welcome fans who seek a grittier experience.

There's no secret ingredient to making a hit, but approaching each creative endeavor with an authentic desire to find the fun, as obvious as that may sound, is more foundational than many seem to realize. Arc Raiders continues to make big changes ahead of its first anniversary in September, while Marathon is already eyeing the long game – Bungie knows "where we want to take the story over the next few years," Nardin tells me. For Reynolds, Last Flag's success will not be measured by how many people play it.

"We’ve already achieved the most important thing we could control, which is making a game we love and are proud of as a team," he says. "I know it sounds trite, but it’s a massive blessing to be able to do something as fun as build a video game. To bring a game to completion with people you care about in a way that you have no real regrets about, that is a gift. Whatever happens next, there’s real beauty and satisfaction there."

Check out the best battle royale games to play next if you're hunting for your new FPS or third-person shooter fix

Will you kill for mommy? I beg that you do not tell me the answer to that question, but it seems Bungie has been posing it to Marathon players for some time now. Dataminers have recently taken a close look at some of the weapon skins included in the Marathon reward pass to discover a bit of subliminal messaging, and the game's community lead is having a great deal of fun with the reactions.

The big theme in the first Marathon reward pass is Achromatic Rush, a series of black-and-white cosmetics culminating in a skin for Vandal. Players have taken to calling this skin "Goth Vandal," and it appears that Bungie was out ahead of the memes. The Achromatic Rush weapon skin for the Misriah includes a message on the shell casing that reads "kill for mommy."

You're unlikely to notice the "kill for mommy" message during the course of normal gameplay, but there's no mistaking it in the texture rips provided by meloneslada on Twitter. Some users are positing the possibility that this is a reference to Friday the 13th, and, like, I guess that's a partial possibility, but come on. You can't put the word "mommy" this close to a goth girl in 2026 without understanding the thirst-trapping implications.

"Well, you heard the shell casing," Marathon community lead Andy Salisbury says on Twitter in response to the discovery.

"Look if you don't have this on your shell casings, I'm kind of worried about you," Salisbury adds. That prompted one fan to declare "Goth Vandal is mommy and I will KILL for mommy," with five saluting emojis to drive the point home. To that, Salisbury says, "See, the kids are absolutely alright."

Marathon's Runners don't have the same sort of obvious horndog appeal as, say, the casts of hotties that have powered the skin shops in Overwatch and Marvel Rivals for years. But you can never deny the internet's willingness to simp for anything even vaguely shaped like a goth girl, and I'm certain that Vandal has just earned a new army of devoted stans amid all this.

Bungie makes Marathon less vicious as players keep leaving: update adds free solo self-revives, a way to revive enemy runners, and a "stay together" option for good teammates.

Former FPS pro Shroud says Marathon is hard, and that people will eventually realize just how good it is after crossing that barrier.

Speaking on the Dropped Frames podcast, Shroud says "Marathon is good," but that "the problem right now is it's too hard." He explains, "I think it's just way too hard of a game, I think it's a very sweaty game, ranked, Destiny raids, super painful when you die, you lose your whole inventory, unlike Arc Raiders."

He continues: "I think that's a problem right now because obviously a game needs to grow and have a lot of players, and first impressions are everything." However, Shroud adds, "I actually think it will end up being a positive later on," and that as new content continues to get added to the game, "more people will realize, 'wait this game is actually really, really good." He also says the game needs a better onboarding process to help people get into it.

Obviously, Marathon is in a pretty weird spot as is. As an outsider, I've seen either unrelenting hate about the game, with constant citing of its playercount being lower than other games, and how "it's the next Concord," while on the other hand I've seen the Bungie sickos are really falling in love with its gameplay loop, and of course if there's one thing Bungie never slacks on its good feeling guns.

I don't necessarily think a high barrier of entry is a bad thing – especially as someone who plays a lot of fighting games – but Shroud is right, if you can't onboard players well, then you'll be stuck. Street Fighter 6 has some of the best training suites and alternate playstyle options available in any fighting game and it's growing bigger and better constantly – hitting a new player peak almost three years after launch recently.

Hopefully, Marathon can figure things out on that front and allow people to see what the true sickos are seeing in it. And given that the latest update has made things a bit less punishing, maybe that's on the horizon

Xbox exec who brought Bungie into Microsoft says it's "weird" to see Sony own the creators of Halo: "It was so weird to launch Marathon and see a PlayStation logo."

Sony's acquisition of Bungie in 2022 was one of the most surreal transactions to take place in the games industry in recent years, and the irony of PlayStation buying the company that created the de facto mascot of Xbox isn't lost on former Xbox executive Ed Fries, who led Microsoft's acquisition of Bungie 26 years ago.

Fries, who was VP of game publishing at Microsoft during the original Xbox's launch, appeared on a recent episode of The Expansion Pass and shared his extremely unique perspective on what it's like playing Marathon, a first-party PlayStation game developed by Bungie... on his Xbox.

"Bungie, and I'm having so much fun in Marathon, by the way ... Bungie, the premier team when I left, I couldn't imagine that they'd have a fight with the guy who took over for me after I left," says Fries, seemingly referring to Xbox leadership's alleged pressure campaign to force Bungie to release Halo 2 before it was ready, something Fries was vocally against. "They ended up leaving, and then they, you know, had funding from [NetEase] for a while, and ultimately got bought by Sony.

"To me, it was so weird to launch Marathon and see a PlayStation logo come up, even though I'm playing on my Xbox."

Fries was instrumental to Xbox buying Bungie back in 2000, and he reiterates this by saying he "made the initial call" and "left the acquisition," adding that he never would've believed Bungie's trajectory if you explained it to him way back then.

"If you would've told me, 'Oh, Bungie will be part of Sony, you know, 25 years ago, I'd be like 'What? No, I don't think so.'"

I'll be real, if you told 2015 me that 99% of what's happening in the world today would eventually happen, I would believe almost none of it, and that definitely includes the people who made Halo working for PlayStation. All of the other stuff is a little too depressing to talk about here.

Anywho: I'm in a situationship with Marathon's "worst" gun, and after 80 hours I'm not letting the meta break us up