Despite Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion acting as the culmination of a 10-year journey that started with Destiny’s original launch, Bungie isn’t planning to stop when it comes to introducing new stories and content to Destiny 2 next year.
Revealed in today’s annual Destiny Showcase event, Destiny 2 will be taking a very different shape after the launch of the expansion, ditching the seasonal model it has donned since Shadowkeep in favor of a new “Episodes” system. Three of these Episodes—Echoes, Revenant, and Heresy—will replace what would have been four seasons over the year of The Final Shape, with Bungie saying that these will be more innovative and more cinematic than the content model players have come to know.
“What’s really important about Episodes, is that it’s a really big shakeup to what we’ve been doing,” said Robbie Stevens, Destiny 2’s assistant game director. These three Episodes are each supposed to be larger than a season, each using a three-act structure to routinely feed the player base with new Artifact mods, gear, and narrative experiences.
The first batch of Episodes is about the impact of The Final Shape’s events, re-establishing the state of the world and how the expansion’s story has affected the characters within it, and the three-act structure is key to how it’s delivered. “The acts act as these anchors for us to introduce new weapons, new artifact mods, new activities,” Stevens said. “There’s going to be new missions coming around the corner. There’s going to be new story moments.”
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Each of these acts, according to the graphic provided by Bungie during the Showcase, will last around six weeks in total before a new act is introduced along with a new slew of content. These first three Episodes will also last right through to February 2025, representing a full year of updates even after The Final Shape’s conclusion.
Each Episode is also described as a “standalone” experience by general manager Dan McAuliffe, meaning that all three can be experienced whether you’re a seasoned veteran of the franchise or just starting out with The Final Shape. Stevens even added that you can enjoy the Episodes “in any order you want to,” implying that they will be sticking around throughout the year in a similar fashion to seasonal activities and quests.
“I think the opportunity with this big epic moment is that we get to innovate the game. We get to move the game forward,” McAuliffe said.
“It’s all about change frequently,” Stevens said. “It’s all about deeper story moments. It’s all about more weapons, more loot, more often, and it really provides the team with a platform to go much deeper into the themes and fantasies and story of any individual Episode as compared to the seasons you know of today.”
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The first Episode, Echoes, is scheduled to release next March. That puts it a month after The Final Shape, which is due to launch on Feb. 27, 2024.
