Destiny 2 game director says "we don't want to be a dead live game" as Renegades arrives at a low for the MMO, admits "relatively few [new] people come" in and Edge of Fate pivot "didn't work"

For years, Destiny 2 players have turned to numerous State of the Game blog posts during difficult times; The current creative minds at the helm of the game will speak up and share what's working, what's not, and what's in development. On this front Bangui has been unusually quiet since the rocky launch of The Edge of Fate, an expansion that actively irritated many in-game players with its bland portal activity center and tedious power grinding, and which gave many others no reason to stick around after The Final Shape.

Bungie admitted it was taking “the wrong path for Destiny” in an apologetic blog post this month, but it's still great to hear game director Tyson Green talk about the game's recent struggles and the next plan for change.

“Over the years, Destiny has continually strengthened its core. [audience]”,” he says. “More and more of the core players are staying and playing the game, but relatively few [new] people come to the game. Tightening and shrinking is happening, and that creates problems for the game you're trying to support as a live service, especially if you want to continue to serve core players with great, compelling expansions.”

This reduction is largely due to the fact that Destiny 2 is trying to implement a clean onboarding process and cannot don't delete huge chunks of the gameand after The Final Shape the situation only got worse. Green says: “Big [downwards] population surge [came after]” the end of the Light and Dark saga, which created a natural exit point for people who may have had enough of Destiny for 10 years, or at least who were considering a break.

“It wasn't a business plan,” Greene adds. Apparently, having realized what a corner he had driven himself into by putting Final In the expansion's climactic title, Bungie was quite vocal about the future of Destiny 2. After Final Shape, the company worked on creating new storylines that could continue into future years, and The Edge of Fate does have a compelling story despite its systemic flaws. But “unfortunately,” Greene says of the Final Shape transition, “it wasn't managed gracefully, but we had to try something.”

(Image credit: Bungie)

None of this helped, of course, but The Edge of Fate's unpopular changes are largely to blame for the state of the game, and now Bungie is working to reverse the decisions. it just did to reassure players who abandoned ship. Renegades won't be making sweeping changes here because Bungie hasn't had enough time to do that kind of refactoring, but Green suggests the expansion does address some outstanding issues and says the studio's new model of releasing two average expansions per year allows for greater agility in planning.

“It sounds great on paper, but it didn't work,” Greene says of The Edge of Fate's “Portal” and “Force” twist. Instead, “our players tell us they don't want to chase a prime number that goes up, they want real rewards.” It's me, I'm the players.

In the most important line of the IGN interview, Green says: “I think we've been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two types of live games: those that listen to players and respond, and those that don't. And we don't want to be a dead living game, we want to continue building Destiny.”

Bungie and the Star Wars owner sat down to discuss the tone of the new Renegades expansion for Destiny 2 and realized it couldn't “feel like a side quest”: “What's a bad version of that?”