Bungie Confronts Missteps As Destiny 2 Moves Toward Renegades

Bungie is preparing to launch Renegades on December 2 while acknowledging that the previous Destiny 2 expansion failed to meet the needs of players who remained after The Final Shape. The Final Shape closed out a decade-long storyline and delivered a clear endpoint for many. Its conclusion also led to a sharp population drop, leaving those who stayed expecting a confident new beginning. According to Destiny 2 director Tyson Green, The Edge of Fate did not deliver one.

Green, speaking with IGN, said that the studio misread what players wanted from the start of the Fate Saga. The Edge of Fate leaned on progression systems and extended grinding at a time when the remaining audience sought meaningful rewards rather than numerical targets.

“The Final Shape brought things to a crescendo, where it’s like a fantastic ending that tied off a lot of the threads,” he said. “People were pleased and satisfied with what they played, and then the big spike in population. That happened because we ended the saga. So you get what you pay for, right?"

“That wasn’t the plan from the business perspective. We still want to keep making Destiny, we still have many stories to tell in this universe. There are still lots of things to do, and we have to keep building the game. Unfortunately, it was not gracefully managed, but we had to try something.”

Green added that the decision to focus The Edge of Fate on expanded pursuit systems reflected an attempt to give the most committed players a dense layer of progression. It did not translate into engagement.

“We looked at the problem that we had and we said, ‘we think there’s a route here’, which is leaning into more systems of pursuit, getting new tiers of gear, armour sets, and power progression, and things like challenge customization,” he explained.

“These things that can allow a core audience of players to really say ‘I’m really gonna take this game and put it through its paces, and get good rewards for it.’ It sounds great on paper, but it didn’t work.”

Green said the response reinforced a basic lesson about running a live-service game.

“I think we’ve been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games – those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don’t. And we don’t want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny."

“So we’re listening to our players, and what our players are telling us is that they don’t want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards.”

The studio’s shift to two mid-sized expansions per year offers a structural advantage. The faster cadence allows Bungie to test changes, adjust tone, and respond to feedback at shorter intervals. Green said this flexibility shaped Renegades, which follows a space-western revenge story with Star Wars influences.

“One of the advantages that the new release model gave us, which is two expansions a year, means you can experiment more within those individual expansions – you can try different things,” he said. “So we saw what we wanted to do with a ‘space western’ revenge story, and we figured, let’s do it in, let’s aim for this."

“So we took the idea of Star Wars as total inspiration and built a Destiny expansion around it, that’s kind of how we always do it. In this case, I think it comes through much more richly, because it’s being more deliberate with its influences and style, but it’s still fundamentally a Destiny expansion.”

Renegades introduces a new heat-weapon archetype modeled on Star Wars blasters, along with the broader thematic shift. Bungie hopes the expansion marks a steadier start to the Fate Saga and a more convincing post-Final Shape direction.

Read also, Destiny: Rising enters closed beta on Android in the United States and Canada on May 29. The mobile title marks the franchise’s first step onto phones, set in an alternate timeline where players defend Earth in a new storyline with both new and returning characters.