Destiny 2 had a lot of new announcements during Bungie’s half-hour stream this Tuesday, announcing the release date of its next big expansion, Beyond Light, as well as its plans for the even further future.
Beyond Light is the first of a planned trilogy of expansions for Destiny 2’s next era, launching Sept. 22. The next expansion, The Witch Queen, is planned to launch in 2021, while the following expansion, Lightfall, (working title) will launch in 2022. Bungie also touched on how the game will transfer over to the next generation of hardware, and how the team is deciding to manage the huge amount of data piling onto the game.
The stream began with a silent eight minutes and 46 seconds — the time in which George Floyd was killed by a police officer holding his knee on Floyd’s neck — to spread awareness for causes surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. After that, Destiny 2 general manager Mark Noseworthy and game director Luke Smith appeared, six feet apart, to deliver news surrounding Destiny 2’s upcoming content.
At the forefront was Beyond Light, which Bungie promises to explore the relationship between “Light and Dark.” You can watch the gameplay trailer here:
Bungie then showcased its newest season, “Season of Arrivals,” which begins today and runs to Sept. 21. The trailer shows a new dungeon, new public event and a new exotic quest:
Noseworthy and Smith also took time to discuss the growing problem of Destiny 2’s “legacy content,” which seems to be code for stuff in the game not many people play anymore, but which still takes up a lot of the game’s data. As the game has gotten more and more content since its launch in 2017, its download size has grown too, creating problems for players managing internal storage space and for developers trying to manage it all and ship out bug-free updates.
As the two explained, the only solutions seemed to be either to start from scratch with a hypothetical Destiny 3, something Noseworthy and Smith seemed very opposed to, or to cycle out some of the older content that was taking up space. Bungie decided to go with the second option, labeling the cycled-out content as being in the “Destiny Content Vault.” This “Disney Vault”-inspired solution will apparently allow Bungie to continue making new content for Destiny 2 while cycling out old content and intermittently cycling that content, and content from the original Destiny, back into the game each year. Bungie has an even more detailed explanation on its blog.
They also explained how the game would function on the upcoming generation of hardware, promising that all purchased content would carry over from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5, and from Xbox One to Xbox Series X, with intergenerational play also available.
For more on Destiny 2 read our review, as well as some tips for getting back into the game if you’ve been away from it for a while.