Bungie Is Likely Developing ‘Destiny 3,’ Codename ‘Payback’

Bungie blew past most expectations with a Final Shape livestream on Tuesday, showing off a new element-combining Prismatic subclass, and exotic combining to match. Plus the game’s first fully new enemy race in a decade, the Dread.

But the video opened with Luke Smith promising more Destiny 2 after the Final Shape and larger plans for Destiny as a franchise after that, despite recent troubles at Bungie. And we have some information on what that might look like.

While I am not prone to normally put much stock in reddit throwaway accounts, this one is a bit of a different situation. As Destiny Bulletin first reported, back in February, an account posted something far-fetched on the Destiny2leaks subreddit. They revealed something called Prism, which ended up being the Prismatic subclass. The comment, which is still up today:

“Anyone here know if prism has been leaked yet? Since there’s been no answer yet I guess I’ll leak it: Bungie is working on a system called prism that will allow players to mix and match abilities from different subclasses. This is one of the things being worked on during the delay. Imagine throwing a lightning grenade while on solar, or procing devour and rampaging with Stormcaller.”

Again, this was the first time this was reported anywhere, and it ended up being one of the biggest reveals of the showcase. So, if that was accurate, it stands to reason the second half of the comment might be as well. That’s about Destiny 3:

“Destiny 3 is (was? idk) in development under code name payback. One of the big changes for Destiny 3 is (was, again idk) for classes to no longer exist and allow any character to spec into any ability since lore wise there is no reason you couldn’t (Hunters explicitly learned blink from Warlocks and blink isn’t tied to a single element, hence the logic there).”

So, the idea here is that Prismatic is a set-up for how Destiny 3 might evolve the game in a major way by eliminating subclasses altogether and letting players mix and match powers to a greater extent. Though I do wonder if Prismatic was built because of the delay, that they’d already base the entire next game around it. The poster also doesn’t seem 100% sure Destiny 3 is still in development, but I have to imagine that it is.

Another open question would be the timing here. Would this be something that just appears one fall during what would normally be an expansion window after a bunch of yearly episodes, or would Destiny 2 need to stop producing content for a while so the vast majority of the studio could work on this? (And lets not forget Marathon). There’s no info on that here, though stopping content production means stopping revenue, something I’m not sure new owners Sony wants to happen. Though I think the entire Destiny community agrees that yes, at some point, a true Destiny 3 will need to arrive at some point if the series is going to survive. My prediction has always been it wouldn’t arrive until the next console generation, and with this news, I’m still sticking with that from a timing perspective.

So, interesting stuff, especially about subclass removal. I’ll dig around to see if I can find anything else on this.

Update: That account is back and posting again, this time about the codename itself, Payback:

“I’ve seen some speculation on this front and want to set the record straight. Codename Payback does not mean we lose in the Final Shape, or after the 3 episodes (though, tbf, I know nothing more than any of you about the episodes). The internal codename of D3 is not a reference to any story events. Rather, Codename Payback refers to Bungie getting payback against themselves by creating something they hope everyone will love. I do not know if there are any plans for Destiny 2 items to carry over into Destiny 3.”

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.