If you weren’t paying attention, it has lately been apparent that Destiny 2 is almost as popular as ever, thanks to the post-Lightfall era’s explosive player growth for the six-year-old game and nine-year-old franchise. In addition to their creation of other new live service games and their capacity to assist other PS companies in making them, Bungie’s production of this particular game is significant enough for Sony to agree to spend $3.6 billion for the company.
But these are the things that Bungie has ostensibly been doing over the past few years:
Bungie reassigned a sizable portion of its Destiny 2 PvP teams, whose employees also created Gambit, the PvPvE game, to concentrate on a variety of other unannounced projects that almost all have a strong PvP focus.
Also read: Destiny 2 erred in dumping Gambit for four years.
The job offers, leaks, and rumors we’ve seen and heard indicate a variety of projects in this area, some of which might never be revealed and others that might at any moment. The primary ones seem to be a team-based extraction shooter and a battle royale. The biggest leak, though, is the return of marathon IP for a hero shooter. Yes, any new PvP games Bungie releases could end up being huge successes. They appear to be trying to rehash what Riot Games did with Valorant or how Respawn went from the well-liked but troubled Titanfall to the entirely multiplayer Apex Legends.
It is clear that they are continuingdevelopment on Destiny, but the cuts they’ve made to get these new projects off the ground have been enormously, and their impact on Destiny 2’s multi-million player base has not been lost. In short, that’s the gamble, are these new games you’re making worth what Destiny 2 has lost on its PvP side? I’m not so sure, although we can’t know for sure until a new game comes out.
Destiny 2’s PvP development is little more than sandbox changes, a reordering of the rules and game modes. The biggest development of the year is a singles new map, along with bringing back some old maps that were pushed to the content vault for reasons. This is a game that once launched its Taken King expansion eight new multiplayer maps. At one point, several years in Destiny 2 went by without a single new Crucible map being released at all. And the one it finally made after all this time everyone hates. Sure, sometimes PvP still has worthwhile rewards (The Immortal!), but overall it’s deeply unhealthy.
As for gambit? I mean, what can you even say about Gambit. It’s meant to be a “core pillar” of Destiny 2 alongside Crucible and the Strike/Battleground playlist, and yet it actually has shrunk over time, loses two of his six cards, where it’s now just the same four played over and over again. Ironically, Gambit is probably in its best state ever, with new subclass changes and breezy, short games, but we haven’t seen a new Gambit map since 2019, and since these are styled like PvP maps to some extent, if we’re not getting any new Crucible cards, we’re pretty darn sure we’re not getting any Gambit cards.
