Destiny 2 Stream Reveals Shadowkeep, Confirms Cross-Save, Stadia Support, And More
Bungie's long-awaited 'next chapter' livestream has wrapped up, and now we have a sense of what's coming in Destiny 2's next expansion, and how the game will ultimately change going forward.
Titled Shadowkeep, Destiny 2's next expansion will, in fact, take us back to the moon (as multiple leaks suggested previously). It'll arrive on Sept. 17 at a price of $35. And, wow, it seems the Hive have been busy since we last stepped foot on Luna in the first Destiny! Now they've erected a large crimson fortress there where, inside, hordes of space monsters likely await. And it'll be on us to once again clear out Earth's rock and beat back the darkness (while scoring some fine loot, of course).
It seems crazy, but the reveal of Shadowkeep might have been the least substantial thing to happen during Bungie's stream. The studio broke some huge news regarding the future of the franchise, and regardless of the platform you play on or the kinds of interactions you've had with Destiny in the almost five years since the first game launched, all of these changes affect you.
To start, Destiny 2: Shadowkeep will point the game in an entirely new direction with regard to genre. Bungie is going to lean very hard into the MMORPG side of the game, and if you know Bungie, that's a term the studio has never wanted to use. But it seems the community at large enjoys the more RPG-focused elements of the game. There's a desire to tweak armor perks and such, and a wish that players could move the perks they like into armor that also looks cool. That'll come in something called Armor 2.0, and Bungie will no doubt expand on everything that Armor 2.0 entails later this summer.
Also, exclusives are gone. If you've been playing on Xbox One since the series launched or, more recently, on PC for Destiny 2, you're probably well aware of the content you've been missing thanks to the exclusive marketing deals Sony's had with the franchise. Those are extinct. There will be no more PlayStation-exclusive strikes or gear. No platform will have them. With Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, all content going forward will be available to the entire Destiny 2 community, and thank goodness.
And what about that community? It's growing. Bungie confirmed today that Destiny 2 will come to Google's Stadia streaming platform. Not only that, but Destiny 2 is high-tailing it out of Blizzard's Battle.net launcher and will make a new home on Steam come fall. Players who currently reside on Battle.net will have a system in place when the time comes to easily transfer their accounts over to Steam, and Bungie has assured those who've purchased content that the appropriate licenses will make the jump, as well.
Plus, with cross-save, which was confirmed on the stream to work with all platforms — including PlayStation 4 — players should easily be able to move to any platform they choose, and they'll still have access to their same Guardians and their same gear.
There's one more item of note from the stream, and it has to do with how Destiny 2 will handle content and pricing in the future. There's been a lot of experimentation with how Destiny 2 has dished out content, from season passes to expansions to, more recently, Forsaken's Annual Pass. From Shadowkeep on, Bungie will only sell updates piecemeal, and will structure them in such a way that one update is not required to play another that comes later. Further, a completely free version of Destiny 2 called New Light will give new players access to the base game, the Curse of Osiris and Warmind expansions, and parts of Forsaken in order to help them get a foot in the door.
Bungie plans to talk more about Shadowkeep and some of the major changes coming to Destiny 2 in the months ahead. In the meantime, you can pre-order Shadowkeep on your platform of choice now.