The End Of A ‘Destiny’ Era, For Real This Time, As ‘The Edge Of Fate’ Launches

There has been a lot of talk about how Destiny has had different eras over the years, but there’s really only been one, even across two games.

That has been the Light and Darkness saga, which began in the first game when we learned (very little) about the mysterious, power-giving orb, The Traveler, and a Darkness it was running away across the galaxy from.

The ended ten years later in Destiny 2 with last year’s The Final Shape expansion. The Darkness turned out to be a guy with a lot of arms and a smoky head, and the Traveler turned out to be kind of a dick. But it was a thrilling end to a wild swing of ups and downs over the course of the next decade. They stuck the landing. Cue applause.

But to quote Dr. Manhattan, “Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends.”

That is especially true in the live-service world as Bungie now presses forward under massive pressure and expectations from Sony, plagued by poor leadership and mass layoffs. The Destiny 2 team is doing what they can with a studio half the size it was a few years ago with large chunks now working on non-Destiny projects. In the Forsaken years, this was once a company of 1300+ almost wholly devoted to a single game with even two support studios in tow. Now, they’re down to hundreds, and whatever the opposite of support is, that’s what they’re being given.

Destiny 2 is changing with The Edge of Fate, live today. It’s shrinking. There is a lot of wishy-washing about how much exactly it’s shrinking, but it’s going to be significant. The game has completely transformed from its large expansion/four seasons model into two smaller expansions and things called “Major Updates” in between, smaller than a season and described more like an Into the Light bonus round-type addition.

But in practice, the facts are that The Edge of Fate launches with:

• A new planetary zone that’s apparently too condensed to require a sparrow
• No new strikes, no new Crucible maps, no new Gambit maps
• A smaller-scale campaign (though there are two of them, given Renegades in the winter)
• No new traditional seasonal/expansion activity, but rather a playlist of campaign missions and then two on-map activities.
• Fewer exotics than past expansions, far fewer, in many instances. Overall weapon and armor totals remain to be seen.

The goal now is to release expansion content, but moment-to-moment, herd players into a series of “portal” playlists that range from the extremely basic, Lost Sectors for solo players, to a hodgepodge of Destiny’s past in Fireteam Ops, strikes, battlegrounds, empire hunts, seasonal activities and all other manner of things. A final portal offers tougher missions, right now, just past exotic missions. All of this, all things we’ve played already, is meant to be juiced up using a new modifier system to make things more challenging (or fun) as you pursue a higher score for greater rewards.

Gear is getting streamlined into a simple Tier 1-5 system where it’s pretty clear what that means, and it’s pretty clear where you get those gear levels, something Destiny has been missing for a while. But we’re going to be in an awkward transition phase as “soft sunsetting” slowly makes all gear not originally acquired under this system slowly worse (nothing you already own can or will be tier 4 or 5). Armor is being torn down and rebuilt altogether for the first time since the entire mod system was introduced in the first place. I can agree it was probably long past time for that.

The story is…well, we barely know anything. We thought we did, but none of it is going as planned. My theory, which mirrored many others, was that the Heresy episode would end with us taking the Dreadnaught out of our solar system, as promised, and heading to new worlds in the galaxy, possibly the homeworlds of some of our enemies.

Rather, we’re not doing that. We’re stopping at the edge of the system at a made-up planet called Kepler, and this new era will put us into conflict/servitude with The Nine, the mysterious entity that has been with us since the first day Xur sold us exotics in Destiny 1. Since then, they’ve given us some seasonal activities, a dungeon and a game show hosted by a sparkling horse. Now, Bungie is coloring them in, each member getting their own personality and set of goals. On Kepler? We have little idea how this is all starting on this micro-planet that has somehow been pulling pieces of Earth’s past through time. I mean it’s all weird enough where I’m interested, certainly.

This is a new, quieter era for Destiny. The player peaks of The Final Shape, the grand finale, are not coming back, and The Edge of Fate will be lucky to get a third as many players at launch. The question now is whether this new content has enough to retain the core players that make up the remaining base, but if Destiny can also simplify itself in its new post-Light and Darkness era to attract new players or at the very least, bring back some who got lost. Some aspects of this feel like they can do that. But the overall sense of “it’s just too late,” tends to pervade.

I’ll be there, as ever. Until the sun dies, it seems.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy