‘Destiny 2’ Enters Hibernation For A Long Winter

At reset on Tuesday, Destiny 2 players were treated to an abruptly short story quest involving patrol farming and some Blind Well runs. While the stage is set for the seasonal finale, Riven’s comment about a “delay” for the final egg to collect so we can make our wish and get through thee portal indicates that may be in in another Witch Queen situation, where the ending will be held for months until it bumps up against Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape. This is exactly what happened with the eventual exorcism of Savathun.

However, even if the finale is next week, because of the Final Shape delay, it’s still a six month long season, and it seems Destiny 2 is going into hibernation as a result. Rather than a month, month and a half of relative dead time in a normal season, now we have 4-5 months with Bungie trying to fill that gap in a few ways.

Circling back to Joe Blackburn’s “game update” video a month ago around when Wish launched, we know this about what’s coming:

• Things will “start slow” in February with Moments of Triumph.
• A series of “progression-centric, reward-driven” weekly quests called Wishes will also start in February. No further information but this is also supposed to be something all players can do, not just season owners.
• In March Guardian Games returns with some sort of new class-based competition angle.
• In April and May something called “Into the Light” will launch. It’s built not just for “the folks with 5,000 hours into the game” but also people who are just getting into Destiny, somehow, right before The Final Shape drops.
• Some time during this stretch we are supposed to see the release of the Crucible Map Pack with three new maps, but we do not have a fixed date for that.

Generally speaking, it sounds like the rest of January, February and March are going to be relatively dead. I’m not precisely sure what Wishes are, but they are more or less guaranteed to be less content than what we’ve gotten with the seasonal story weekly reset drops. Then it’s just Guardian Games and…? Yeah.

Into the Light remains an open question, but again, that’s not until April. And I remain skeptical of how it will engage longterm Destiny players like myself, if this is meant to be some sort of onboarding for brand new players and a F2P offering. But we’ll see.

The answer, of course, is to play other games during this time. No doubt almost everyone has a backlog from the massive release year that was 2023. And of course we are going to start seeing new games coming out soon. For me personally, I am really going to give Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League a shot as Rocksteady’s first new game in close to a decade and another live looter shooter, however much people may frown on that concept. While I too have been skeptical, I’ve heard surprisingly good things from the closed alpha, so we’ll see.

But yes, Destiny 2 is going to have pretty minimal content for a long while now, and no large 30th Anniversary Pack like last year. It’s going to be a tough time for avid players, but probably even tougher for the revenue forecast-missing Bungie, with few new things to sell due to the delay.

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