Destiny 2 never stays the same for long. Between its expansions and frequent content updates, you’re almost guaranteed to come back to something new whenever you return to the game from a break. And starting in 2025, Destiny 2 is going to move at an even faster pace, getting two expansions and four smaller episodes each year, as opposed to one expansion and three episodes. This week, developer Bungie hosted a livestream showing off some of what players can expect from the next major update this month and the first expansion of next year.
Revenant: Act 1, the next content update for Destiny 2, arrives on October 8. Befitting its arrival at the start of spooky season, Revenant follows the story of the Scorn, a group of undead warriors, through a season that narrative designer Jerome Virnich described as “metal.” Based on the overall theme, and a piece of concept art that could easily be the cover of a metal album, that seems apt.
As for what players will be doing during Revenant, the livestream spent a considerable amount of time on its new mode, Onslaught: Salvation. Onslaught is a wave-based mode where players defeat hordes of increasingly powerful enemies. Salvation adds three new maps, two new enemy types, and defensive structures ranging from slowing tripwires to fire-spitting turrets. Along with fending off enemies, players will need to free captured Eliksni (better known as Fallen), who are being captured for mysterious reasons as part of the episode’s main storyline.
That story follows the new Hunter Vanguard, Crow, as he attempts to deal with the Scorn, which he’s technically responsible for creating. Several other Eliksni will serve as major characters throughout the update, including Eido, who oversees a brand-new gameplay system.
Revenant has Eido running the Apothecary, which lets players craft two types of consumable items: combat and reward tonics. Chugging a combat tonic will improve one of the Artifact mods you currently have equipped, giving you bigger bonuses to whatever perk they already offer. Reward tonics are tied to specific weapons in the episode, and using one will increase the likelihood that you’ll find an enhanced version of that weapon on your travels.
Bungie also showed a quick preview of some of the hot new gear coming to Destiny 2. The perfectly named Xurfboard is essentially a sci-fi surfboard for your character to zip around on, decorated with sigils of The Nine, the faction of in-game vendor Xur. Players can also look forward to collecting some appropriately Halloween-y wizard robes.
The second half of the livestream looked ahead more to the next expansion, Codename: Apollo. When Bungie announced its new update structure, it said that future expansions could take on entirely new types of gameplay, drawing inspiration from Metroidvania and roguelike games. It’s making good on that promise right away, as Apollo will take on a Metroidvania-inspired structure for a non-linear campaign that lets players explore its locations in any order. As narrative director Alison Lührs explains, players may need to visit one location to unlock a path to speak to a character in another, and the story will change based on the order in which they’re visited.
Lührs also provided some narrative rationale for Destiny 2’s switch to two expansions per year, saying it will help the pace of the story.
“With these two tentpoles beats a year, the feeling that the world is changing and growing and moving is going to come much quicker now,” she said. “Which means we can move the plot along at a much quicker pace than we used to.”
To that end, Bungie will be breaking with a long-criticized aspect of Destiny 2, where important NPCs are scattered throughout the galaxy, requiring players to make constant stops at the same locations over and over. Lührs says that starting with Revenant, characters will be more present in different locations in the world, and the need to repeatedly return to their fixed spots will be a thing of the past by the launch of Apollo.
Finally, Bungie announced sweeping changes to how gear works, with the introduction of “next-generation armor.” Bungie says in a companion blog post that it’s aiming to make building an armor set “more active” with stats that are “more impactful, less confusing, and less constraining” starting with Revenant. Overall, there will be fewer unique stats on any given piece of armor, but each point in those stats will provide bigger benefits. On top of that, armor will be getting set bonuses. Like in many RPGs, equipping different armor pieces from the same set will grant additional abilities, with bonuses applied at two and four armor pieces.
However all these changes shake out, it’s safe to say that Destiny 2 should feel like a very different game than it does now by the time Apollo launches next year. Not every one of them is likely to be a total hit with players, but for a game that’s followed the same structure for so long, mixing up everything from core systems to the pace of story developments feels like a welcome refresh. We’ll get our first taste of the new era of Destiny 2 when Revenant: Act 1 launches on October 8.
