‘It didn’t work’: Destiny 2 director says The Edge of Fate didn’t appeal to the players who stayed after The Final Shape

Destiny 2’s director says the game’s latest expansion didn’t deliver what players wanted, at a crucial time in its life.

Last year Bungie released The Final Shape, a long-awaited expansion that ended the story of the Light and Darkness Saga which had been running for 10 years since the release of the first Destiny.

Following this, Bungie announced the start of an entirely new long-term story called The Fate Saga, which it started in July 2025 with the release of The Edge of Fate. The second expansion, Renegades, is set to launch on December 2 and has been inspired by Star Wars.

According to director Tyson Green, however, the Fate Saga hasn’t started as well as it could have, because players weren’t happy with what The Edge of Fate offered.

In an interview with IGN, Green said that the expansion didn’t deliver on player expectations, at a crucial time when numerous players moved on to different games after The Final Shape brought a natural end to a 10-year storyline.

“The Final Shape brought things to a crescendo, where it’s like a fantastic ending that tied off a lot of the threads,” he said. “People were pleased and satisfied with what they played, and then the big [downwards] spike in population [came after]. That happened because we ended the saga. So you get what you pay for, right?

“That wasn’t the plan from the business perspective. We still want to keep making Destiny, we still have many stories to tell in this universe. There are still lots of things to do, and we have to keep building the game. Unfortunately, it was not gracefully managed, but we had to try something.”

Green explained that The Edge of Fate focused too much on grinding to reach a higher level, rather than providing the player with more satisfying rewards.

“We looked at the problem that we had [after The Final Shape] and we said, ‘we think there’s a route here’, which is leaning into more systems of pursuit, getting new tiers of gear, armour sets, and power progression, and things like challenge customization,” he explained.

“These things that can allow a core audience of players to really say ‘I’m really gonna take this game and put it through its paces, and get good rewards for it.’ It sounds great on paper, but it didn’t work.

“I think we’ve been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games – those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don’t. And we don’t want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny.

“So we’re listening to our players, and what our players are telling us is that they don’t want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards.”

Green said the silver lining to this is that Bungie’s decision to switch from releasing one large annual expansion a year to releasing two mid-sized ones instead gives the game a chance to adapt to player feedback quicker.

“One of the advantages that the new release model gave us, which is two expansions a year, means you can experiment more within those individual expansions – you can try different things,” he said. “So we saw what we wanted to do with a ‘space western’ revenge story, and we figured, let’s do it in [Renegades], let’s aim for this.

“So we took the idea of Star Wars as total inspiration and built a Destiny expansion around it, that’s kind of how we always do it. In this case, I think it comes through much more richly, because it’s being more deliberate with its influences and style, but it’s still fundamentally a Destiny expansion.”

Destiny 2: Renegades launches on December 2, and introduces a new heat weapon archetype inspired by the Blasters from Star Wars.