After this week's mass layoffs at Bungie, the future of its upcoming projects is uncertain. Rumors have been flying ever since Bungie made the announcement, as the loss of 17 percent of its workforce will have no doubt impacted the studio tremendously, but conflicting rumors and statements from Bungie's former employees have muddied the waters a little bit.

Thankfully, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier has provided some much-needed clarity on the whole situation, though you may not like what he has to say if you were hoping for a new Destiny. According to a report from Schreier that includes statements from ten current and former Bungie employees, Destiny 3 is not a project that is being worked on at the studio.

Bungie is reportedly more focused on its recently announced title Marathon, as well as plans to keep updating Destiny 2, though in a much more scaled back manner to what we've seen in the past. Schreier seems to confirm previous rumors about Destiny 2, as Bungie will allegedly stop releasing paid expansions for the title, despite the success of The Final Shape, as sales of expansions had been declining year over year.

Instead, it's claimed that Bungie will now start releasing smaller content drops similar to that of 'Into The Light', while also working on making the onboarding process a lot smoother for newcomers, in an attempt to try and make the game more appealing to those that feel intimidated by its size.

A lot of rumors about a Bungie project called Payback also began floating around following the layoff announcement, which some people believed was the internal codename of Destiny 3. According to Schreier, this wasn't the case, as Project Payback was actually a spinoff title set in the Destiny universe that took cues from games like Warframe and Genshin Impact.

Bungie reportedly decided to scrap this project two months ago and shift most of the developers working on it to Marathon, a PvP extraction shooter that is planning to launch at some point in 2025. That's what Bungie apparently looks like at the moment, albeit with a smaller staff, less experience, and shorter deadlines, and even if the studio does recover and kicks on from these brutal layoffs, it seems as though the future of Destiny 2 will change drastically regardless.

Posted: Aug 07, 2024 9:49 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/destiny-3-not-in-development-bungie/