With Destiny 2’s expansion lead gone, will we continue to get expansions?

Following the wildly successful launch of The Final Shape in Destiny 2, one of the key people who helped make it happen has announced that she’s leaving the company. That’s Catarina Macedo, the expansion project lead, a frequent guest on video docs, and a driving force behind the quality of The Final Shape.

She says she’s taking some time off before moving to another location, but she’s going to build something completely new, which indicates she’s not going to work on an existing franchise. We don’t know if she’s staying under the Sony umbrella.

It may be too early to announce a new expansion manager, but the question is: will there be one? And the big question that fans have been asking for a long time is: Will Destiny 2 continue to benefit from real expansions like it has had over the past seven years?

Bungie previously announced that they would talk about the future of Destiny 2 after The Final Shape launches. And they did, but they only really talked about the next three “episodes”, ending with a tease for something called Destiny: Frontiers, which doesn’t feel like an expansion, but rather maybe a brand new arc with a theory that Destiny players will leave its current solar system. that include extensions?

Some theories suggest that Destiny will move to an episode-only model for a while, which more or less equates to extended seasons, and that there won’t be any significant expansions between them.

However, even with all this amid uncertainty and lack of confirmation of new episodes. Even with Catarina gone, I’m still not convinced that’s what’s going to happen. For what ? It’s pretty basic.

Money.

The vast majority of the money Bungie brings in, now funneled directly to new owner Sony, comes from selling its annual expansion, or a bundle of that expansion with its subsequent seasons for around $100. Or past expansions as players new or old try to catch up.

Yes, Destiny 2 has microtransactions, yes you can buy seasons, but the main drivers of both revenue and then maintaining a player base that spends money on other things are these expansions. Losing this would be huge and would mean less money to spend on content production, which would mean fewer opportunities for engagement and spending etc. While yes, Bungie is bringing Marathon as a new game, it’s a very big risk in today’s multiplayer landscape where everyone is stuck playing Fortnite, Warzone, and Apex for the last few years, not giving new games a chance. many new arrivals. Bungie needs Destiny to continue, and a future without expansion seems almost impossible to imagine.

I’ve heard other theories that it’s about cutting back and working on Destiny 3. Just make episodes for two years and release Destiny 3 in 2026 or something. This schedule is simply impossible, continuing to produce live content while working on a full-scale sequel that would be released very soon. I believe a Destiny sequel will arrive one day, but not until the next generation of consoles, and it can’t get past a conceptual phase at the moment. It would probably take 4-5 years to make a game of this size, which is why I don’t think it will arrive before the PS6 and Xbox release regardless. But we’ll see.

I think Destiny 2 needs expansions, but there are so many changes out there that it’s hard to know where things are going. Before Catarina left, game director Joe Blackburn also left. Meanwhile, more controversial leaders like the rarely seen Pete Parsons, Luke Smith, and Mark Noseworthy remain. I think Bungie needs to start being more specific about what’s coming beyond codenames, because the current episode format alone could start losing players quickly.

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