Destiny 2 is over. Marathon is great but not doing numbers. What is FPS institution Bungie to do? According to our very attractive and informed readers, whom we love and value in a normal way, it’s Destiny 3 by a country mile.
I included a poll on the matter in our story a few days ago about the community reaction to Destiny 2 ceasing new content updates. I left it open for a week because it’s the first one I made and I’m doing my best here, but I think we can call it now. PC Gamer readers really, really want Bungie to play the hits. At the time of writing, the results are:
- 74% Destiny 3
- 14% a new IP
- 6% transcend corporate animosity to make Halo 7
- 4% Double down on Marathon (ouch)
- 2% Reboot Bungie’s cult classic dark fantasy RTS series, Myth (realizing now I should have thrown a bone to the Oni fans too)
It’s not even close, and I really expected more hopeless romantics to say “Damn the odds, I want Halo.” Destiny 3 really does make the most sense, and it’s why many of us at PCG assumed the announcement of Destiny 2’s end of life was made in the first place. Only one problem: It’s not happening, at least not any time soon.
According to Bloomberg, Destiny 3 is not in active production, and the major limiting factor is the budget required. That’s not to say Bungie’s skunkworks isn’t ideating on what a third Destiny game might look like, but given the long lead time of contemporary triple-A, Destiny 3 only being in some form of preproduction now realistically means it couldn’t be out until the 2030s.
Our distant second place, “some kind of something new.,” similarly feels unlikely. The incubator FPS codenamed Gummy Bears appears to have survived the layoff bloodbaths at Bungie in recent years, but it’s also been spun off into its own studio.
My darkest secret wish, that Bungie just make a normal game with a campaign and stuff, feels almost laughably absurd. Sony lending Bungie to Microsoft for Halo 7 will happen sometime after world peace, but before we reach Alpha Centauri, and I mostly threw Myth in there as a joke.
That’s not a great place to be in as a studio: The thing everyone wants has effectively been foreclosed on, all the alternatives feel preposterous, and no one seems to seriously consider the possibility that Marathon could become a company-sustaining, Destiny-sized going concern. There have been more shocking come-from-behind stories in gaming, but not many.