The big reveal for Destiny 2: Renegades, Bungie's Star Wars-flavored expansion, has left me a little gun-shy. I'm very neutral on Star Wars, and the sudden influx of lightsabers and bot walkers looks a little bolted on to my cynical and live service crossover-weary eye, so I'm not over the moon with the shift in aesthetic. But I'm not melting down either. The systemic changes accompanying and preceding the expansion, however, sound like a step in the right direction for an MMO suffering an identity crisis.
"We know Destiny's feeling lonely right because all you do is spend time in the mines," Destiny assistant game director Robbie Stevens bluntly said on the reveal stream.
This is pretty clear acknowledgement from Bungie that Destiny 2's new Portal activity hub, which compartmentalizes and scores missions in a way that makes playing solo the optimal way to engage with the now-enormous Power level grind, has hurt the social aspect of the game.
To that end, Stevens says "a lot of what we're doing is gonna be about bringing the baseline of the reward experience with Renegades closer to that Solo Ops experience and really incentivize playing in Fireteams more."
Bungie previously considered nerfing the optimal loot farms that the community has worked out, but in response to the least surprising backlash of 2025, swiftly un-considered those nerfs and instead pivoted to buffing rewards elsewhere to raise the average.
"[For] a social game like Destiny, it is a problem where you feel like you should be playing alone," says principal communications manager Dylan 'dmg04' Gafner. "Sorry friends, you wanna play a raid, you wanna play something else, sorry, I'm gonna go into Caldera and play alone. We want to address that."
This raises another strange problem for an MMO to have, which Destiny 2 has also been grappling with: raids and dungeons don't really matter after the Edge of Fate expansion. Bungie has addressed some of the underwhelming rewards for the newest raid, but the activity is still a long slog compared to shorter Portal activities, and legacy endgame content has been all but deleted from the game's progression arc.
Here again, Bungie is looking to bring back some of the incentives and motivations previously associated with this content.
"A thing we talk about a lot is clan night, raid night," Stevens continues. "We've gotta get that feeling of, hey, I log in on Tuesday and there's just a bunch of stuff to look forward to. A few ways we're gonna do that is, one, with a new system that we're calling Vanguard Orders that comes out in Renegades."
Vanguard Orders will provide new objectives, automatically added to the weekly targets, that will channel "some of that Destiny 1 bounty vibe," Stevens says, with challenges like getting kills with set weapons or finishing specific activities.
More pertinently, Stevens says "the other big thing we've been listening to feedback on, and we're moving really, really fast on, is getting weekly legacy raid and dungeon content as a tunnel from the Portal to that."
Stevens says this will start in Renegades with "reasons to play this content, to do weekly challenges and earn powerful rewards."
He stresses that Bungie can't snap its fingers and instantly reprise all the raid and dungeon gear to suit the game's new 5-tier system, and says this is just the opening salvo for ongoing endgame improvements. But when the current state of affairs has 15-minute solo activities outpacing your MMO's premier aspirational group content, anything is welcome.
Today, Destiny 2 is adding "Dungeon Lairs" which make use of specific encounters from old dungeons. "You can get Power bumps from those," Gafner affirms. "You can get Portal gear from those. But we hear the feedback on general rewards."
"We're going to be looking to add more to what this weekly ritual feels like," Stevens concludes as the stream moves onto sandbox changes.
Here's the abridged version of that section:
- All Exotics will count as featured gear
- Featured gear will no longer affect reward or gear score in activities ("We are sunsetting that idea," Stevens said)
- More vault space is coming in Renegades, and so is a better filtering tool
- "Non-critical nerfs and balance changes" will be paused, with Bungie walking back yet more planned nerfs – confusingly, still in today's patch notes but apparently not in the patch – and instead diverting energy elsewhere
- After post-Renegades update Shadow & Order, you'll be able to enhance Legendary weapons up to Tier 5
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