In June 2020, Bungie made what would come to be remembered as one of the most reviled PR incidents in modern videogames: It announced the content vault. To make Destiny 2's long-term development more manageable, the studio said, the launch of its Beyond Light expansion coincided with a culling of in-game content, paring away story campaigns, world regions, and activities of all stripes.
The content vault may have been defensible on technical grounds, but the sunsetting of swaths of game content, many of which players had previously paid to access, left Destiny 2 with a reputational stain that never fully washed out. But now, six years after Destiny 2's downsizing and two months after its end of live service development, its players are learning how to pull some of those lost worlds back out of the vault—not for play, but for preservation.
