For all the improvements Bungie continues to make to Destiny 2, sunsetting continues to be a hot-button topic for both the developer and the game's larger community. The reveal stream for the game's next major expansion, Lightfall, brought with it a sign of relief for many players as Bungie is no longer going to sunset expansion content, meaning locales such as the Moon will remain in the game for the foreseeable future. However, game director Joe Blackburn gave some additional insight in a new interview and on social media about where seasonal content stands amid this change.
The subject was first broached to Blackburn as part of a recent interview with PC Gamer, going into further detail about Bungie's plans for Lightfall. On the subject of sunsetting, Blackburn reiterated the decision to no longer sunset expansions is to let old and new players, experience the full story involving The Witness and its Black Fleet from when guardians discovered the Lunar Pyramid in Shadowkeep. When it came to seasonal content, though, Blackburn said Bungie will continue to let seasonal content "expire" with every new expansion.
Blackburn expanded on this point, saying the team will always need to make "hard trade-offs" when it comes to Destiny 2's systems, new and old content, and the file size. He added on Twitter the difficulties in this balance are akin to asking the team to "defy gravity" and the studio doesn't "want to make a promise we can't keep."
At the time of this writing, Destiny 2 is in its second week of Season of Plunder which saw the addition of the Ketchcrash, Expedition, and Pirate Hideouts. The three activities follow the redesigned Leviathan space, Nightmare Containment, and Expunge missions from Season of the Haunted and PsiOps Battlegrounds for Season of the Risen. All this content does not account for everything added inside The Witch Queen, along with the Duality dungeon and reprised King's Fall raid.
Once a player breaks down all the content Bungie has added since February 2022, they could start to see Blackburn's point about needing to continue seasonal content sunsetting. It could lead to a situation Bungie found itself in ahead of Beyond Light's release where, due to the sheer amount of content added to the game between its 2017 launch and Season of Arrivals, the game was ballooning and becoming much harder to manage. Sunsetting seasonal content while keeping expansion content allows Bungie to split the proverbial difference by keeping expansion content, which most players could argue is the more important content, and cycling out seasonal content annually.
Destiny 2 is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: PC Gamer
