With Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate, an Unsteady Bungie Is Trying Its Best

By Moises Taveras | July 22, 2025 | 12:15pm

Video Games Features Destiny

With Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate, an Unsteady Bungie Is Trying Its Best

In 2024, Bungie closed the book on the story it had kicked off with Destiny 10 years prior, capping an imperfect, but nonetheless impressive, narrative. It was far from a storybook ending, and the road to The Final Shape‘s conclusion was fraught with pains of all shapes and sizes, but it had managed. It seemed implausible 11 years ago that games like Destiny and its sequel could make it so far, but Bungie fought against the odds and realized the milestone. It defied fate, and broke it, even. But given the turmoil that’s cropped up at the studio since—troubles that have echoed across the company for years now, culminating in distressing layoffs and internal collapse—it may prove true that it was in fact Bungie that was broken in the long term.

So, given all we know about Bungie’s tumultuous last few years, is it really any surprise that Destiny 2‘s newest expansion, The Edge of Fate, is all over the place?

I want to love Edge of Fate, the beginning of what Bungie’s been calling a new saga in the series, but I can’t quite bring myself to, at least not entirely. Despite its highs, like the fate-defying trajectory of this arc and the performances of many of the expansion’s leads, there’s also no shortage of pain points to be found here. For example, this expansion’s campaign adopts a Metroid-like structure that should’ve been a homerun for me. As a lover of games inspired by Metroid, and as a guy who revels in any chance to urge game makers to design more curiously, this tidbit about the campaign fascinated me most. Bungie has traditionally excelled at building a sort of mystique around its characters, worlds, and mythos, and many of Destiny‘s best moments, like community-wide ARG puzzles, have capitalized on the sort of hunger these mysteries have provoked in its sometimes ravenous players.

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I relished the idea of getting a set of abilities that might threaten to crack Destiny‘s well-polished facade. After all, that’s a lot of the popularity of games like Metroid, isn’t it? Finding that new ability that almost breaks the world just a bit, and emboldens you as a player to try something new, something you might not have thought possible before, and break from a game’s otherwise linear path to the end credits. To Bungie’s credit, it tries, even if the nonlinearity here muddles the team’s effort to tell a cohesive story about extraplanar entities and fate. Moreover, Bungie’s implementation of the genre’s mechanics, while inoffensive in the grand scheme of things, barely passes the smell test, and actually proves to be one of the most restrictive incarnations of the design philosophy I’ve seen. Rather than deepening the intricacy of its level design in order to facilitate the kind of open-endedness that titles like Hollow Knight cultivate, much of Edge of Fate feels narrow and designed to trap the player into using these new tools, rather than inviting them to play with something new and fun. It smells of insecurity, and to be honest, a lot about Edge of Fate does.

You’d think that a game going on its eighth year, and a franchise going on its 11th, would know itself better by now, but how could it? Reports of Destiny‘s mismanagement have persisted about as long as the game has, and the situation there doesn’t appear to have improved. The company is currently split between two immensely difficult projects that are facing the uphill battle of a lifetime. On one hand, you have a team hard at work trying to feed the beast that is Destiny and its community, who pontificate about its theoretical end, its player numbers, and its cadence of content, every day. On the other hand, there’s a great deal of people there working on Marathon, a game whose troubled existence seems to elicit ire like nothing else in this industry. If you ask me, Bungie’s fighting a losing battle on both sides, and the studio and Destiny are fatigued for it.

And yet, it’s trying its best, and I can tell as much with Edge of Fate. Nearly everything here is smaller and more cautious than many of Bungie’s moves the last few years. Kepler, a planetoid with a black hole at its center threatening to rip it apart from the inside, is a fine (and unsubtle) new destination but it isn’t reinventing the wheel by putting Metroid locks and keys throughout its various zones. The missions here are a step back from the sweeping, multi-tiered raid-like encounters that have defined Destiny‘s expansions since The Witch Queen, and many of them get bogged down by the very same emphasis on puzzles, locks, and keys. There are less new weapons and armor sets to get excited about, and Edge of Fate‘s new abilities are painfully limited in scope.

It is a piece of DLC that feels tragically reflective of the woes facing the resource-strapped team working on it. But like Lodi, a curious new character in this expansion and easily its brightest spot, Bungie is trying to wrestle its fate free from the powers that be, be they the game’s enigmatic Nine, its venomous fandom, or CEO Pete Parsons and corporate owner Sony themselves. It swings where others might languish, even if it’s mostly swinging in the dark.

To that end, the team has hit the reset button on player’s power levels and reworked how deeply one can buildcraft with Destiny 2‘s Armor 3.0 system. It has streamlined the ammo economy that once perplexed and evaded casual players. Even the Portal menu, which now presents playlists for designated activities (like solo play, team-based activities, power-leveling, and competitive play) is an effort on the team’s part to smoothen the experience for newcomers and longtime players. Destiny 2 is not suddenly an easier game to fall into, but it might be starting down that path.

It’s been one week since Edge of Fate launched, and I’m not prepared to say whether its new additions are detriments to the game or not. I haven’t even done the raid yet. I certainly can’t say whether this expansion or any of the ones currently planned will be the silver bullet that alters Destiny and Bungie’s fate. Both futures remain frustratingly uncertain, and I’m not much interested in divining these kinds of answers here, if I’m being honest. But as someone who has loved and struggled with this game for about half my lifetime, I do feel uniquely equipped to say that Bungie is still building something here and doesn’t seem content to let it go down without a fight. It is a fight that threatens to make this blemished, special, and frustrating monster of a game something worth your money, time, and even admiration, or die trying.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.