‘Destiny 2’ Reveals Its ‘Content Shredder’ As A Result Of Recent Lawsuit

One of the most controversial aspects of Destiny 2 over the years was Bungie’s Beyond Light-era decision to start putting things in a “content vault,” in order to save space, reduce technical debt and have less ongoing aspects of the game to maintain. This ranged from Crucible maps to strikes to planets to the entire base campaign of the original box copy.

Now, there’s an absurd development on that front, as part of a new lawsuit in which Bungie needs to prove they did not rip off the storyline of Red War from some random author (the claims made show that it almost certainly did not). It turns out they…cannot actually show the court the game or these storylines to prove it, directly.

Stephen Totilo first reported this in his Game File newsletter, that because of this vaulting Bungie could not produce something viewable to the court, even something internally they could share, “Because (1) Destiny 2’s narrative is only available to players in the form of a live-service video game that has changed significantly over time, and (2) physical copies of Destiny 2, and any 2017 version of Destiny 2, are no longer available, the attached videos are the best possible way for the Court to review the accused work.”

Their answer instead was to refer the court to Destiny 2 YouTuber MyNameIsByf’s 10 hour video on Destiny lore, which includes the Red War campaign, and former IGN editor Destin Legarie’s collection of archived cutscenes over the years (something they eventually told fans to stop doing, as they were going to do it officially themselves).

This news item has sort of broken the illusion that the content vault is like some server that the old content was moved onto and would be able to potentially bring it back into the game later. Instead it appears it mostly functions as a content shredder, as once something goes in there, it’s not coming out again. As the document says, the data exists, but the current framework of the game means even Bungie can’t play it, so it might as well not exist.

This would explain why a lot of Destiny 1 content can be reworked and redone to reappear in Destiny 2, but this only happens in extremely rare instances with actual Destiny 2 content, such as a one-time return of The Leviathan to a season or a few Crucible maps. Almost everything else is Destiny 1 and it seems like even if Bungie wanted to bring things like the Red War or Forsaken campaigns back, they couldn’t. Who knows what else may have been fed into that furnace.

Bungie has said that they don’t want to focus on bringing as much past content into Destiny 2 as they want to continue to make new content, but one actual reason for that appears to be A) there is not all that much substantive Destiny 1 content left to port at this point and B) the erased Destiny 2 content may in fact be just that, erased, with no way to bring it back unless maybe they put meat back on some skeletal remains that are laying around. But again, Bungie couldn’t even record/play an internal demo for a literal court case, and this stuff is gone gone.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

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