New Report Sheds Light on What Will — and Won't — Return to Destiny 2 When Bungie Adds Back Vaulted Content

Bungie will freely return vaulted content it previously stripped from Destiny 2, but is unlikely to include everything fans were once able to play.

That's according to a Forbes report that details exactly what players should (and shouldn't) expect to be returned to Destiny 2 over the coming months, following Bungie's surprise announcement that it will dust off Destiny 2 content it controversially removed.

At the time, Bungie argued that Destiny 2 was becoming too big and too unwieldy, and argued that the game's original campaign and even its popular Forspoken expansion were acting as a barrier or confusing relic for newer players it was trying to tempt in with fresh additions.

But day-one players revolted over the move to cull existing content — such as story levels, multiplayer strike missions and raids — that they had paid for. Others simply bemoaned the fact that this content had been deleted rather than somehow preserved, and made unreachable for those who simply wanted to revisit it out of nostalgia.

Of course, all of that has now changed, as Bungie attempts to stabilize itself following devastating job losses and the decision to end Destiny 2's live-service updates. These have prompted loud and ongoing calls for PlayStation to greenlight Destiny 3, as player apathy to Marathon continues.

As you might expect, Bungie reportedly has no plans to charge for access to content it returns to Destiny 2. This makes sense as many players have already paid for access to this content (via the base game, or Forspoken), while those who joined Destiny 2 in its free-to-play era got to play most of it for free already. In other words, simply adding stuff back is the more straightforward solution for all involved here, rather than attempting to put up fresh paywalls for various bits for various people.

However, while campaign content and connected activities is planned to be added, Forbes reports that Destiny 2's 25+ seasons of additional content will not be. On the one hand, this makes sense — just like any live-service game, seasonal content was always planned to be temporary, and it was not "vaulted" in the traditional sense. On the other hand, though, seasonal content was used to deliver important story beats and features its own fun activities that seemingly won't return.

I'd have loved to see Bungie run through Destiny 2's seasons again, so players can revisit the story and see it unfold again as it did back in the day. (Fortnite offers such an experience via its Fortnite OG mode, which has rerun the game's first 10 seasons over the past couple of years.) But a key consideration here has to be made for Bungie's own bandwidth. It remains only slightly more than half the studio it was in terms of headcount, and there has been no suggestion that Destiny 2 will return to being a live-service game again (even featuring past content). This also rules out holiday events such as the annual Halloween extravaganza Festival of the Lost, or Christmas-like The Dawning.

If it needs stating, this also means regular patches are also unlikely to return, beyond fixes for major "gamebreaking" bugs. There's also no indication that all-new content, including the unfinished Shattered Cycle expansion, is being worked on.

"I wish we could just flip a freaking switch," Bungie head of product Josh Deane said in a video released this week, "but we're going to commit to unvaulting the Destiny 2 campaigns, the destinations, the raids that never should have been ripped away to begin with. They were an essential part of our journey together and definitely a place where we built memories with y'all."

Still, any sign of life for the Destiny franchise is good news — and hopefully a spark that can be fanned into future games. While nothing is yet confirmed, Bungie previously teased it still wanted to develop new Destiny projects, with this unvaulting a small but meaningful first step.

"When we look to the future of Destiny all up this restoration is the first step to lay the foundation for how we reforge into new stories and games that you all deserve," Bungie stated. "We’ll have more details on our unvaulting efforts in the coming months, and we're very excited to share more about our vision to celebrate Destiny’s legacy and build its future with you all as soon as we can."