Destiny 2 has gotten a major expansion every year since its release, but 2021 will be different. Bungie announced today that The Witch Queen, originally scheduled to launch in the second half of this year, is being delayed to 2022 due to the magnitude and ongoing problems with working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“When we started scaling up production of The Witch Queen last year, we made the difficult but important decision to move the release to early 2022,” the studio wrote.[W]We also realized that after Lightfall, we needed to add an additional unannounced chapter to fully complete our first saga Destiny
In addition to teasing this sequel to the previously planned 2022 expansion, which is presumably now slated to 2023, Bungie assistant game director Joe Blackburn addressed the causes of the delays more detailed:
- The Witch Queen represents a major evolution in Destiny 2’s ongoing storyline. Beyond Light laid the foundation and allowed us to weave the Destiny and Destiny 2 world structures together, but The Witch Queen will ignite fire on a highly interconnected story about Lightfall and beyond, unlike anything we’ve ever tried before, with characters, arcs, heroes, and villains that will survive multiple future releases. More importantly, the conclusion of these releases is also the conclusion of the “Light and Darkness Saga,” the conflict we first introduced with the launch of Destiny many years ago. While developing The Witch Queen, we realized we needed this release to be the first of many pivotal moments to Destiny’s story. Because so much led to and depended on what happens in The Witch Queen, we wanted to make sure we gave ourselves enough time to build this journey the right way, starting with an exceptional first chapter in The Witch Queen.
- With Destiny committed to being an ever-evolving world, we want to make sure we still take the time to upgrade Destiny 2’s systemic foundation to support everything we want to do in the future. Our ultimate vision for Destiny 2 still stands: a definitive action MMO, a unified global community where you can play Destiny with your friends from anywhere. For 2021, this means an upgrade of our approach to keep Destiny’s weapon and armor game fresh, refine our vision for PVP, implement transmog and add Crossplay. More below.
- Finally, and most importantly, we pride ourselves on being uncompromising when it comes to our commitment to the health of our teams. Since COVID-19 keeps us away from the office and the large amount of work on our plate, we had to shift the date to ensure both this year’s updates and The Witch Queen were both delivered with the quality we strive for, and according to a schedule that made sense to all involved.
Actually, The Witch Queen sounds like it will kick DestinyThe story, which has been an incredibly slow fire since the first game’s release, went into overdrive, and to get that right and do the basic fix, Bungie needs more time.
Traditional, Destiny extensions launched in September. In recent years Beyond light was the first to slip, arriving in November, the studio’s first expansion after breaking out Activision. With the announcement of these latest delays, it looks like the series’ original predictable release cadence will making way for the more realistic approach of ‘it’s over when it’s done’.
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In the meantime, Bungie is focusing on overhauling a number of things in the game, including the recently added and much criticized sunsetting system where new loot was given an annual expiration date.