Bungie unvaulting Destiny 2 content was a studio-saving emergency decision, because Marathon updates were never going to be enough
Over the past couple of months, my Destiny 2 Fireteam has given me a tour of the Destiny 2 content I missed when I hopped off the train following the pandemic. When you play all the dungeons back-to-back, it’s a buffet of delights—a concentrated dose of amazing and frequently obtuse FPS level design that you simply can’t find anywhere else. A reminder that Bungie, pre-layoffs, was the very best at what it did.
And yet, no game has had more caveats in its lifespan. There was always an amazing experience inside Destiny 2 somewhere, but recommending it to any normal person was out of the question. The onboarding for rookies was rough. Hoovering up all the expansions and dungeons was pricey and confusing. And after the release of The Final Shape, Bungie pissed off its player base repeatedly until the game was no longer sustainable. At what point would you ever advise a new player to jump in?
Still, none of those issues compared to the content vault, first introduced in 2020. In removing entire campaigns from the game, not only did Bungie break players’ ability to understand the complete story of Destiny 2, it also raised questions about the ethics of deleting content that you thought you’d paid for. It cast a shadow over the game for the rest of its lifespan.
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Now, three months after its supposedly final update, Bungie’s decision to unvault Destiny 2’s oldest content may have been the only move left on the board to keep the studio going. While this is only really a first step to winning players back, it’s a savvy decision that has reignited a sensible amount of hope in the game’s community. It also means the developer isn’t solely dependent on the dicey fortunes of Marathon to keep going.
When the content vaulting began, I sympathised with Bungie’s effort to keep the Destiny 2 file size reasonable and the experience streamlined. The thought of having 200GB of storage dedicated to one game I’d never delete was not appealing.
But it quickly created many more problems for Bungie than it solved: if you wanted the complete Destiny 2 story, which was already pretty confusing to follow, tough luck. The original Red War campaign from 2017 has now been unavailable for well over half the game’s lifespan, and the whole point of that experience was to give players a solid entry point to the wider universe of the game. If you came to Destiny after playing the highly scripted Call of Duty single-player campaigns, it made you feel at home.
Unfortunately, much of the content that defined the game’s early years and cemented its appeal was gone by 2022, including its signature raids that showed Bungie’s masterful level designers at their best. And that permanently broke trust in the studio.
Now Bungie has chosen the last possible moment to reverse course on this, which, along with the tone of the update posted on Bungie.net, is how you know the studio is not in a good place.
The smart tactic in Bungie’s announcement is that it promises a mix of short-term changes (expanding the remit of what Marathon can offer players), mid-term changes (unvaulting Destiny 2 content, which doesn’t sound like a small job) and long-term things to look forward to (all-new Destiny content in an unspecified form). That’s a clever strategy because it all seems actionable on paper—it doesn’t overpromise, which is vital for the studio to start rebuilding trust.
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Drastic action
The Marathon piece of this feels slightly less optimistic. We know the next major update is now coming in December with a permanent PvE mode, and that the studio aims to turn the game into a “deeper survival experience” and shed its “genre constraints” as a hardcore PvP FPS.
The merits of Marathon are well-documented on this website, and it’s still one of my favourite games of 2026. But even that game has been dogged by Bungie’s perpetually strange decision-making in its short life, like divisively wiping progress each season or time-limiting the PvE experiences that might expand its appeal. That’s the sort of flex that only makes sense when you have ten times the number of active players.
Pinning all of the studio’s hopes on Marathon probably wasn’t going to work.
All of this leaves you with the sense that Bungie had to do something drastic—that the unvaulting and revival of Destiny is an emergency maneuver to save the studio either from closure, or simply becoming a downsized incubator for game projects you won’t get to play for 10 years (if ever).
Combined with the recent delays in seasonal content rolling out, Bungie is now in the strange position where one of its games is having an identity crisis while the other has unexpectedly come back from the dead.
FPS buffet
Still if you’re able to divorce Destiny 2 from the drama of studio machinations and the live-service woes of its final years, there’s an undeniably positive story in here. Unvaulting everything may leave us with the richest treasure trove of first-person shooter content in history, or at least since The Orange Box. That would be quite a turnaround, and well worth celebrating, especially with some kind of future for Destiny on the horizon. But will it be enough?
The big caveat with all of this, of course, is that Bungie has already laid off many of the staff who made those individual pieces of Destiny 2 special. To blindly accept that any future Destiny content could reach the same standard without those esteemed designers and artists would be giving the studio leadership too much credit. Based on the tone of the letter to the community, they surely know this.
Still, Bungie gets credit for finally reversing the biggest self-own in its history. And some of the stuff sitting in that vault is pure gold.
I spent some of my darkest pandemic days roaming the platforms of New Pacific Arcology on Titan while listening to podcasts—I can’t quite believe I’m going back there. The wretched sparrow race in Scourge of the Past will soon be playable again, too (and I’ll once again fail to reach the finish line). Maybe I’ll even fight my beloved Callus again on Leviathan, if I can overcome near-the impossible odds of finding three additional friends who still play Destiny 2.
These were foundational Destiny 2 experiences for me and many other players. It will be grand to have them back.
