With roughly a month to go until Destiny 2: Renegades — a Star Wars–tinged expansion scheduled for December 2 — Bungie has started rolling out glossy trailers and familiar reassurances. Still, the most recent rounds of promotion and communication have done little to calm a restless community.
On November 4 Bungie published a brief trailer that showcases new Renegades gear, calling special attention to genuinely striking Exotics: a Titan jetpack, a heavy sniper, and several Star Wars-style energy weapons that buzz with satisfying flourish. For context, the prior Renegades update on the official YouTube channel was a September 12 livestream.
After the trailer, principal communications manager dmg04 stepped into increasingly heated conversations about a long-promised roadmap for Destiny 2 — a roadmap many players feel has been missing amid a weak expansion, major shifts to Bungie’s business approach, and disruptive changes to the in-game economy.
“Cannot apologize enough for the delay here,” dmg wrote in response to a concerned player on Twitter. So far, the official Destiny 2 channels haven’t echoed that candor publicly, which leaves the impression that dmg is shouldering the outreach alone.
He added: “Team’s still jamming. Hope to have some comms out soon. Please continue to yell at me directly, and I say this without any sarcasm. They’re focused on our immediate and long-term future. I am happy to take 100% of the blame here in promising comms early that we could not execute on in the projected timeline.”
Destiny 2: Renegades | New Weapons and Gear Trailer – YouTube
This isn’t the first time Bungie has moved faster than planned or promised more than it could deliver, but the current climate feels especially fraught. Eleven years in, Destiny 2 reads like a different — and for many players, a diminished — MMO. The tidy conclusion of The Final Shape completed the decade-long Light and Darkness Saga, and many players used that moment to step away.
SteamDB indicates a steady decline in player numbers over recent months, with peak concurrent players dipping well below 20,000 in recent weeks — a new, worrying low as November begins.
A third-party tracker, Popularity.report, has also become a frequent reference point. Its platform-by-platform breakdown suggests The Edge of Fate is underperforming across the board. While the tracker still shows several hundred thousand total players, those figures sit beneath the drought-era lows of the Curse of Osiris period in 2018. By publicly available and reasonably aggregated metrics, Destiny 2 is in a precarious spot.
In a follow-up reply, dmg wrote: “We want to make Destiny the best game it can be. Not just a game, but a place for people to make long lasting friendships and life long memories.”
Not surprisingly, the Destiny subreddit greeted dmg’s comments with skepticism — readers largely interpreted them as an implicit admission that Bungie either lacks a clear plan or isn’t ready to share one.
Conversation has circled back to the now-absent “From the game director” letters, the missing roadmap, the muted lead-up to Renegades, and Bungie’s relative silence as player numbers visibly shrink ahead of the expansion’s launch.
It’s easy to sympathize with community representatives who are taking heat despite not being responsible for the loot and progression decisions themselves. At the same time, the state of Destiny 2 is hard to defend: Renegades has been marketed as “More Destiny, but it’s Star Wars now,” yet what the game seems to need most is urgent triage.
Bungie says it’s working to rebuild trust while removing a problematic currency and replacing it with a more generous system for players.
Source: gamesradar.com
