Game developer Bungie outlined the future plans for online shooter Destiny 2, revealing three major expansions coming to the game yearly between now and 2022 ensuring that players will have enough content to continue exploring the game’s world.
One of the problems developers have to tackle for the game to flourish for years to come is its unrelenting growth, the sheer size, and the amount of the available content some of which is not relevant anymore.
After three years of non-stop growth, the scope and complexity of Destiny 2 has ballooned to unprecedented scale.
As of this writing, Destiny 2 features nine destinations, 40 story missions, 54 adventures, 42 Lost Sectors, 17 strikes, 31 PvP maps, 12 one-off special activities (like Menagerie or Zero Hour), seven raids, six Gambit arenas, three dungeons, many, many quests, patrols, public events, and of course, thousands of associated rewards. All of that, plus hundreds of game systems which layer on top of that content.
Maintaining that much content slowed down the team’s ability to update the game with fresh experiences, reduced the ability to innovate, and delayed the reaction to community feedback.
Instead of making Destiny 3, the developers are going to adopt a new content model called Destiny Content Vault (DCV). Each year the team is going to cycle older, less actively engaged content out of the live game and into the DCV. Content that goes into the Destiny Content Vault may return in the future, altered (if necessary) to fit the new state of the universe.
Going forward, our explicit goal will be to try to keep the scope and scale of Destiny 2 at a relatively consistent size in order to increase our agility and to be able to properly support and maintain the game. Over the course of each year, the game’s content scope will grow as we add new destinations and activities in our expansions and Seasons. As we approach the next expansion, another cycle of content will go into the DCV to make way for a new influx of destinations and activities.