// PC GAMER — GAMING
Bungie unvaulting Destiny 2 content was a studio-saving emergency decision, because Marathon updates were never going to be enough
At the last possible moment, Bungie takes a surprising and vital first step to winning back player trust.
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Over the past couple of months, my Destiny 2 Fireteam has given me a tour of the Destiny 2 content I missed when I hopped off the train following the pandemic. When you play all the dungeons back-to-back, it's a buffet of delights—a concentrated dose of amazing and frequently obtuse FPS level design that you simply can't find anywhere else. A reminder that Bungie, pre-layoffs, was the very best at what it did.
And yet, no game has had more caveats in its lifespan. There was always an amazing experience inside Destiny 2 somewhere, but recommending it to any normal person was out of the question. The onboarding for rookies was rough. Hoovering up all the expansions and dungeons was pricey and confusing. And after the release of The Final Shape, Bungie pissed off its player base repeatedly until the game was no longer sustainable. At what point would you ever advise a new player to jump in?
Still, none of those issues compared to the content vault, first introduced in 2020. In removing entire campaigns from the game, not only did Bungie break players' ability to understand the complete story of Destiny 2, it also raised questions about the ethics of deleting content that you thought you'd paid for. It cast a shadow over the game for the rest of its lifespan.
Now, three months after its supposedly final update, Bungie's decision to unvault Destiny 2's oldest content may have been the only move left on the board to keep the studio going. While this is only really a first step to winning players back, it's a savvy decision that has reignited a sensible amount of hope in the game's community. It also means the developer isn't solely dependent on the dicey fortunes of Marathon to keep going.
When the content vaulting began, I sympathised with Bungie's effort to keep the Destiny 2 file size reasonable and the experience streamlined. The thought of having 200GB of storage dedicated to one game I'd never delete was not appealing.
But it quickly created many more problems for Bungie than it solved: if you wanted the complete Destiny 2 story, which was already pretty confusing to follow, tough luck. The original Red War campaign from 2017 has now been unavailable for well over half the game's lifespan, and the whole point of that experience was to give players a solid entry point to the wider universe of the game. If you came to Destiny after playing the highly scripted Call of Duty single-player campaigns, it made you feel at home.
Unfortunately, much of the content that defined the game's early years and cemented its appeal was gone by 2022, including its signature raids that showed Bungie's masterful level designers at their best. And that permanently broke trust in the studio.
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