Bungie will cycle out content to keep Destiny 2 fresh well into next-gen

Bungie today announced a multitude of changes coming to Destiny 2, but only after taking an eight-minute, forty-six second moment of silence made out of respect to George Floyd and the protests over his killing by the Minneapolis police. The resources shared during that tribute can be found here.

The following moments of today's stream focused on laying out a future for Destiny 2, both for the next few years of content and the ever-increasing hoard of seldom-played missions and activities that came before.

What's especially interesting is the company's new plan to cycle out missions, locations, and other in-game content to keep the long-running massively multiplayer shooter feeling fresh without significantly increasing its hefty install size, which Bungie says can be up to 115 GB. 

"Destiny 2 is too large to efficiently update and maintain," reads an excerpt of a Bungie blog post published today. "Instead of building a Destiny 3 and leaving D2 behind, each year, we are going to cycle older, less actively played content out of the live game and into what we’re calling the Destiny Content Vault (DCV)."

Notably, Bungie now says its decision to address the content limitations of the original Destiny by making a Destiny 2 was a mistake that created "a situation that fractured the community, reset player progress, and set the player experience back in ways that took us a full year to recover from and repair." 

The company plans to regularly remove content from the game (usually timed to coincide with the release of an expansion) starting this fall, when it plans to release the Destiny 2 expansion Beyond Light. Bungie plans to release two more major expansions in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and it will continue to move content in and out of the game "to try to keep the scope and scale of Destiny 2 at a relatively consistent size in order to increase our agility and to be able to properly support and maintain the game."

Bungie also confirmed that Destiny 2 will debut on both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles later this year, and players who have paid for the (now free-to-play) game's expansions on either PlayStation 4 or Xbox One will gain access to the corresponding next-gen console versions for free.  

The company also said it's working to enable cross-generation multiplayer for Destiny 2 players on PlayStation and Xbox. While there's no word on exactly if or when Destiny 2 will open up cross-platform play quite yet, the team is hopeful 2021 will be the year Destiny 2 can "can finally do the thing and get them playing together in the same ecosystem."