Bungie’s Witch Queen expansion tease has Destiny fans clamoring for ‘Old Chicago’

Bungie dropped a small but powerful teaser image for Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion, The Witch Queen, in its Thursday blog. And while the image has a blurry background, every Destiny detective seems to be shouting the same thing on Twitter and Reddit: Old Chicago.

If you’ve been around the Destiny community for a long time, you’ve probably heard someone talk about Old Chicago. If you have no idea what we’re talking about, Old Chicago was supposedly a planned location for the original Destiny, but it got cut during development. Lore books have mentioned Old Chicago a few times in both the original game and Destiny 2, but the only playable Earth locations have been the Last City, The Farm, The Cosmodrome (Old Russia), and the European Dead Zone.

Image: Bungie

According to Destiny lore, Old Chicago is an overgrown swamp. It housed incredible tech laboratories in the Golden Age, before the original Destiny, but is now a lush and overgrown city-forest.

When Bungie teased the above image on Thursday, Destiny fans’ first guess was Old Chicago. On a separate tweet of this image from assistant game director Joe Blackburn, almost all of the responses are some variation on “Chicago,” “Old Chicago,” or “finally, Old Chicago.”

The original teaser images for Old Chicago all included some kind of lush, green forest. It’s a kind of biome we haven’t really seen in either of the Destiny games, with The Cosmodrome giving off industrial vibes and the EDZ highlighting a quaint, European village. With the swampy nature of those old concept images — including the infamous giant frog — and the deep green background, fans think we might finally head to the Windy City for the game’s next expansion.

But all of this is speculation. As for what we definitively learn from this screenshot? Not much. It looks like there could be a street lamp in the background, suggesting a once-urban setting. And it’s possible there’s a tank/big rock in the background as well. Outside of the Hunter’s glowing green armor, it’s hard to see much of anything clearly.

Fans don’t know much about Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, so any sliver of information will explode into a million theories. But the Old Chicago theory does have some legs, and is so widespread that seemingly everyone in the Destiny community is thinking the same thing. It wouldn’t be the first time Bungie scrapped a location and brought it back years later; Europa from Beyond Light was previously a victim of the cutting room.

Bungie revealed that it will give players more details about Witch Queen later this summer — likely closer to the start of Destiny 2’s next season, at the end of August. The studio will likely drop a few more teases like this ahead of its full reveal.