Bungie commits to building on Destiny 2, rather than making Destiny 3

Bungie has unveiled its plans for the future of Destiny 2 -- plans which involve continued maintenance and adaptation of the game itself, rather than moving forward to a Destiny 3.

In a blog post today, Bungie acknowledged that its team is not capable of maintaining the three-year-old game and all its ongoing content updates and expansions as long as they continue the current method of simply piling new content on top of old content.

"This unrelenting growth has resulted in a game that requires players to download up to 115GB to play, as well as huge patches tied to frequent updates," the post reads. "And those numbers are rising rapidly, as we've been adding approximately 25GB of content each year to Destiny 2 since launch.

"Those sizes not only stress hard drive capacity but also push the limits of patching capability. It also makes the time to generate a stable update for the game after all content is finalized, tested, and ready to go balloon to literal days instead of hours.

"Worse still, that 115GB includes a lot of content that isn't relevant anymore - and can't remain relevant - as we evolve the world and introduce new experiences that will take center stage instead. For example: Warmind's campaign represents only 0.3% of all time played in Season of the Worthy and yet the Warmind Expansion accounts for 5% of our total install size. This dramatic imbalance between player engagement and overall cost to maintain is found in a lot of our legacy content."

Bungie goes on to acknowledge that maintaining old content slows its team's ability to create new content and react to community feedback, as well as takes a toll on developers.

"With Destiny 1, we solved the 'ever-expanding, exponential complexity' problem by making a sequel in Destiny 2. We left behind all of Destiny 1's content and many of the features players grew to love.

"We believe now that it was a mistake to create a situation that fractured the community, reset player progress, and set the player experience back in ways that took us a full year to recover from and repair. It's a mistake we don't want to repeat by making a Destiny 3. We don't believe a sequel is the right direction for the game and for the past two years we have been investing all of our development effort into new content, gameplay, and new engine features that directly support a single evolving world in Destiny 2."

Instead of a third game, then, Bungie is implementing what it calls the Destiny Content Vault -- a new content model where it will cycle some content out of the game once per year in order to make room for new, incoming content.

Cycled out content may return in the future, and it may be adjusted in certain ways to fit whatever the current state of the game is when it is put back.

This also means that Bungie is including Destiny 1 content in its Destiny Content Vault, and may cycle in things from the original game -- such as the original Destiny 1 raid, Vault of Glass, which is planned to return in the coming year of content.