A massive change to Destiny 2's annual release model, shifting in 2025 to six-month expansions and free three-month major updates, spearheads a slew of announcements from Bungie marking the Destiny series' 10th anniversary. As a day one player, I was equally intrigued by the nitty-gritty details of how Bungie hopes to simultaneously diversify Destiny 2 releases and make the MMO's core gameplay more approachable, and then Bungie said the words Metroidvania and roguelike and I was really intrigued.
"Destiny is too complex," says game director Tyson Green in one of many chunky Bungie blog posts. "With literally hundreds of activities, you practically need a PhD to decide what to play and how to get rewards you're looking for."
To address this, Bungie's planning an overhaul for Destiny 2's activity UI "to make it easier for everyone to find and launch into great activities." We get a work-in-progress preview of this new UI, dubbed the Portal, in a separate post. The Portal seeks to group activities through quick-access categories ranging from solo (1-3 players) to fireteam (3 players) to flashpoint (6 players).
"The Portal screen will also host consolidated and streamlined side objectives, like bounties or Seasonal Challenges," Bungie says. "That aspect of the redesign is still a work in progress, but the primary goal is to greatly reduce the “chores” that need to be done before diving into an activity."
Crucible gets its own Portal category but Gambit is notably absent from this list. Bungie says no older activities are going away, though "it is our intention to clean up and retire some older activity offerings that are well served by the Portal," but Gambit alone "will remain available from the Destination map but will not be rolled into the Portal Categories at the start of next year." Raids will also continue to live in the Destinations page due "the long clear times combined with the wide variation in experiences," but Bungie's working to "get this content into the Portal offering in the future."
The reward model for those activities is also being reworked to better reward greater challenges, which leads to Green's next point: "Gear and challenge should matter." This is, indeed, a fair stance for a game about gear and challenge to take.
"In past Destiny Seasons, only a narrow range of activities received updated rewards, leading to a narrow selection of activities worth playing," Bungie says. "These reward pools tended to not be very deep either, with most chases bottoming out with weapon perk rolls (or crafting recipes), and armor not mattering much at all. These problems have resulted in shallow, unsatisfying grinds in a tiny subset of the activities actually available to play, with their best rewards being a matter of luck rather than skill or mastery."
With that in mind, Legendary weapons and armor are getting a new tier system that will "layer on properties like stat bonuses, enhanced perks, and other benefits." You'll earn high-tier gear from more challenging versions of PvE activities (PvP will have its own rules), which are due for a new system of their own: Challenge Customization.
By stacking difficulty modifiers ranging from new enemy abilities, combat challenges, buildcrafting incentives, and Power level, you can increase the overall difficulty of an activity and, by also playing skillfully, boost your "reward rating."
"Reward rating is used to determine things like the quality tier of the weapons and armor that drop, or the quantity of useful consumables like Enhancement Prisms or Ascendant Shards," Bungie says in one of the increasingly worrying explainers for these supposedly less complex systems. "In this way, you can select any Core Game activity, use your skill and build to take on more and more challenging versions of it, and earn higher and higher tier rewards."
Better loot from harder challenges presented in a clearer way sounds good, but so much of this stuff is unfinished that it's hard to get excited about right now. What does excite me right now is Green's comment on how Bungie wants to "challenge your idea of what a Destiny experience can be." Green is focusing on the new annual expansions here, but the direction feels relevant in the context of new and diverse activities leveraging overhauled systems.
"We are actively prototyping non-linear campaigns, exploration experiences similar to the Dreaming City or Metroidvanias, and even more unusual formats like roguelikes or survival shooters," Green says. "Each expansion will present a new opportunity to try something different. Departing from one-shot campaigns doesn’t mean we are turning away from great story telling. Going forward, we want to return the mystery and wonder that was woven into the fabric of early Destiny, when the story felt ripe with possibilities and an epic sense of exploration and discovery."
Bungie's integration of roguelike RNG and drafting has led to some of Destiny 2's best and most-loved activities, like the iconic Coil, and Metroidvania progression is an excellent fit for the game's universe and environments (when not hamstrung by time gating). The idea of a survival game mode, perhaps doubling down on the waves and resources seen in Into the Light's Onslaught mode, raises an eyebrow too. I'm not over the moon about the second coming of Nightfall cards, but cranking up the difficulty and "reward rating" on a survival roguelike gauntlet? We might be onto something there.
