What you need to know
- Roughly three months after announcing Destiny 2: Frontiers, Bungie has revealed precisely what's next for that upcoming chapter of the space fantasy looter shooter and beyond.
- Specifically, the studio announced "Apollo" and "Behemoth" expansions for Frontiers and 2025, along with four "Major Updates" that will be released throughout the year at three-month intervals.
- Destiny 2 will have two "medium-sized" expansions and four of these season-style Major Updates in future years, with Bungie aiming to focus on making expansions more creative and experimental and Major Updates more substantial.
- Additionally, the developers plan to overhaul the core of Destiny 2 to streamline its UI, implement more adjustable difficulty options, and add new high-tier Legendary rewards to a range of endgame activities.
It's been just about three months since Destiny 2 developer Bungie first announced "Frontiers" — a major project for the space fantasy looter shooter that will take the game beyond 2024's The Final Shape and its three Episode releases. At the time, next to nothing was known about Frontiers other than that it's scheduled to come in 2025. Now, though, a new blog post has revealed exactly what Frontiers is and how it will shape the future of Destiny.
The post — published by Bungie on September 9, which is the 10th Anniversary of the franchise — explains that Destiny 2: Frontiers is a roadmap for the game's 2025 expansions and content additions. That roadmap includes codenamed major expansions "Apollo" and "Behemoth" in the summer and winter seasons, respectively, along with four "Major Updates" (two during each expansion) that will "refresh the Core Game with new and reprised content" that's completely free-to-play like everything in Into the Light was.
Notably, Bungie's structuring of Frontiers has been chosen for Destiny 2's annual model moving forward, meaning that players can now expect two expansions and four free Major Updates every year starting in 2025. This replaces the shooter's current schedule of one annual expansion and three longform Episodes, which itself took the place of the series' "one DLC + four paid seasonal releases" model that was used from 2019's Shadowkeep until this year's The Final Shape.
The biggest change here is the shift from one new expansion every year to two, which is being accompanied by a plan to make each of these major DLCs smaller, but more creative and experimental. "Starting next year, instead of one big Expansion, we are going to deliver two medium-sized Expansions, one every six months," writes Destiny 2 game director Tyson Green. "Each of these will depart from the one-shot campaign structure we’ve been using essentially unchanged since Shadowkeep, and each will be an opportunity to explore exciting new formats instead."
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"We believe it’s time for Destiny to change and evolve, and that our community wants this game to grow and innovate too," Green continued. "And to do that, we need to start breaking some of the molds."
This fresh approach begins with the Apollo expansion coming in Summer 2025, which will kick off Destiny 2's next narrative saga and feature a "nonlinear character-driven adventure." In it, you'll be able to progress through the DLC's various different locations and story threads in an order of your choosing — a first for the franchise. Narrative director Alison Lührs didn't reveal much about it beyond that, but did tease that "Apollo ends with the narrative gasoline that will propel us into the next few years with a clear theme, goal, and a destination that won’t come at you as a straight line but will be well-worth the trip. It’ll reward you, it’ll surprise you, and it’ll take us places Destiny has never seen before."
The move back to four Season-style updates per year is also noteworthy, though it sounds like Bungie is aiming to make them much less formulaic than they were in the past. Green says "each update will be a substantial refresh of the core game, bringing new activities and reward content," and their free-to-play nature means they'll be more accessible than Seasons (the presence of a "Rewards Pass" on the Frontiers roadmap suggests they'll still have a paid battle pass attached to them, though).
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Speaking of the core game, it's something that Bungie is planning to refine and refresh as it moves Destiny 2 in its new direction. Specifically, the studio will address the looter shooter's complexity and raise its approachability for newer players, while simultaneously offering a wider array of challenge options and meaningful rewards for Guardians to earn.
Supplementary blogs about core activities, rewards, and a new activity browser codenamed "The Portal" explore these aspects of Destiny 2 and how Bungie is looking to improve them, but the TL;DR is that the developer hopes to streamline the game's user interface, make it easier for players to know what they should be playing to get certain types of loot, give them more adjustable difficulty settings with things like gameplay modifiers, and add exciting high-tier Legendary gear rewards to a variety of endgame activities.
Given that Destiny 2 is currently experiencing some of its lowest-ever player count numbers, it's clear that the game was in need of a big shakeup like this in the post-Final Shape era. Whether what's coming in Frontiers and the future actually pulls players back into Destiny long-term or not remains to be seen — I expect its success will hinge on how much it actually overhauls the experience — but what's been announced here sounds fairly substantial.
