Destiny 2's Edge put the game on a "wrong path," Bungie admits

Just three months after Bungie released perhaps its most divisive and arguably disappointing expansion for Destiny 2, The Edge of Fate, the company has released a statement confirming that it has taken the nearly decade-old live-services title “down the wrong path.”

In a content calendar update shared on Bungie's official website, titled “Where We've Been and Where We're Going,” it acknowledges the mistakes that led Destiny 2 to the current path it's charting.

With Edge of Fate, we presented a different vision for the future of Destiny 2's core game. One was to refocus our releases and player calls to action on a familiar but deeper quest for power and ascension to higher levels of gear within a wider range of activities supporting customizable challenges and proportional rewards.

Feedback very quickly made it clear that this was the wrong path for Destiny.

Even if our execution was perfect, and we can clearly see that it wasn't, it's clear that grinding Power will never replace getting a trophy. Climbing through the discard levels on your way to the gear you want to build isn't difficult. And the Portal itself gave up too much of Destiny's sense of place and exploration. Our team has taken these lessons and many more to heart over the past three months.

From 9.0.0 to 9.1.5, we've been focused across the team on player feedback, from the fastest changes to the more demanding ones. We focused on faster, better rewards, more player representation in choosing activities, and removing barriers to playing with friends.

At the end of the update notes, the team states that Destiny as a franchise “has always been a living, reactive world” that has both successes and failures. Only this time the failure rate was much higher, so the team had to admit that it was actually wrong.

Destiny 2 was in the dumps

When Edge of Fate launched in July, in addition to massively changing everything about Destiny 2, the expansion also revamped the voice actors for the game and added more controversy to what was already something very divisive.

This was likely due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, which affected the ability to record with the original actors, but ended up creating a situation with disparate or, in some cases, completely silent characters.

Fast forward to October and Destiny 2 hit an all-time low in player count, falling all the way below 3,000 players, something the game has never seen before. If all that wasn't enough, it was further reported that Sony, who acquired Bungie, isn't too happy with the amount of money they're making back on their investment, specifically how much Destiny 2 generated, putting even more pressure on Marathon to become a hit.

In other words, an apology is just the latest in a series of failures.