Destiny 2: Beyond Light

Destiny 2: Beyond Light
Developer(s)	Bungie
Publisher(s)	Bungie
Director(s)	Luke Smith
Composer(s)	Michael Salvatori Skye Lewin Rotem Moav Pieter Schlosser
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5 Stadia Xbox One Xbox Series X and Series S
Release	November 10, 2020
Genre(s)	Action role-playing, first-person shooter
Mode(s)	Multiplayer

Destiny 2: Beyond Light is an upcoming major expansion for Destiny 2, a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie. It is scheduled to be released on November 10, 2020, as the fifth expansion of Destiny 2. Players will travel to Jupiter's icy moon Europa to confront the Darkness, which will become a new power for the player. The expansion will also see the return of the Exo Stranger from the original Destiny's campaign, as well as Variks from the original game's House of Wolves expansion. Beyond Light will add content across the game, including missions, player versus environment locations, player gear, weaponry, and a raid. Some of the less played locations and activities from Destiny 2 will be cycled out of the game, while locations and activities previously explored in the original Destiny, such as Earth's Cosmodrome, will return. Beyond Light will be the first expansion of Destiny 2 to be released on new platforms, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S. Bungie has described this expansion as the beginning of a new era for the Destiny franchise.

Gameplay

Main article: Destiny 2 § Gameplay

Beyond Light maintains the basic gameplay of Destiny 2; the player, as a Guardian using a power called Light that gives them superhuman abilities and the ability to be regenerated, fight in a mix of first-person and third-person shooter gameplay in both player versus environment and player versus player activities in a massively multiplayer online game world. Cooperative activities include various bounties, story-related missions, strikes, raids, open-world public events, special seasonal events, while competitive matches include matches with other Guardians in the Crucible or a team versus team mode in the Gambit arena. Players are rewarded with both new weapons and armor as well as various materials that are used as a form of in-game currency to gain or upgrade other equipment. Players can have up to three active characters, one from each of the game's main classes: Titan, Hunter, and Warlock, each that has several subclasses based on the type of elemental damage they select prior to missions. Players seek to improve their character's overall Power level—a rough average measuring the quality of weapons and gear they have collected—that allows them to take on more challenging activities in the game.

Prior to Beyond Light, there were three main elements: Arc, Solar, and Void, which are rooted in Light; Beyond Light will introduce a fourth element called Stasis, which creates ice and cold-based damage, rooted in Darkness, and will have fully customizable skill options compared to the existing subclasses. Each class will get a new subclass for Stasis abilities: Shadebinder Warlocks will have them using an icy staff that shoots projectiles and unleashes an explosion to freeze and shatter enemies through their "Winter's Wrath" super, Revenant Hunters will utilize ice picks that they can throw and create icy storms to trap and freeze enemies through their super "Silence and Squall", while Behemoth Titans use frozen gauntlets to allow for melee destruction and unleash icy shockwaves on the ground through their super "Glacial Quake". Game director Luke Smith said that these new customization options for the Stasis subclasses are an "experiment...to see how this goes" and that they may later add these options to the existing Arc, Solar, and Void subclasses.

Other major gameplay changes include:

• Five of the game's current destinations—Titan, Io, Mars, Mercury, and the Leviathan ship and their associated campaigns and other activities—as well as activities and content from Year 2's Annual Pass, will be removed from the game and placed in the Destiny Content Vault (DCV), while two new areas, Earth's Cosmodrome (previously featured in the first Destiny) and Europa, will be added to the game. One of the original raids from Destiny, "Vault of Glass", will also be added to the game sometime during Year 4.
• The shell for the player's Ghost, who in-game provides a companion for the character and aids in respawning the character if they die, will be able to be customized with modifications similar to other armor pieces introduced with the Armor 2.0 system. Prior to Beyond Light, while the player could obtain Ghost shells with various properties, these were typically fixed or had some random generated perks given to them. Bungie stated this was intended to give even further customization options to the character.
• The mixed cooperative-competitive Gambit mode will drop the original three-round mode in favor of the newer single-round Gambit Prime mode, tweaking some of the enemies that spawn in the mode and other timing factors. Impacts of armor from the Reckoning (a PvE arena activity introduced in Season of the Drifter), which could boost certain Gambit gameplay factors such as being able to summon more powerful blockers to the opponent's side of the map, will be reworked into armor mods.
• Armor transmogrification will be introduced sometime in Year 4, which will allow players to change legendary quality armor pieces into universal ornaments, similar to those purchased in the Eververse microtransaction store.
• All weapons and gear will now have a Power infusion cap, meaning older weapons and gear introduced in previous seasons will have a maximum Power infusion limit and eventually will be less viable in activities that require a high Power level.

Plot

Following the events of Season of Arrivals, in which multiple Pyramid ships began invading the Solar System, a new power is born out of the ancient Pyramid ship above Jupiter's icy moon Europa, and a dark empire has risen beneath, united under the banner of the Fallen Kell of Darkness, Eramis, the Shipstealer. The Exo Stranger, last seen at the end of the original Destiny's campaign, calls Eris Morn and the Drifter to the Jovian moon to investigate the ship. The Exo Stranger explains that she comes from a different timeline where the Darkness won. Just as she had provided aid to the Guardian against the Vex six years ago, she has returned to the present time to help prevent the Darkness from claiming victory and causing a second Collapse.

Season of the Hunt

Happening concurrently alongside the events of Beyond Light, Season of the Hunt will focus on Osiris and a resurrected Uldren Sov, now known as The Crow, as they fight corrupted Hive, Cabal and Fallen under Xivu Arath, God of War, a Hive god and youngest sister to Savathûn and Oryx.

Release

Unveiled on June 9, 2020, Beyond Light was originally scheduled for release on September 22, 2020; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its launch was delayed to November 10. In addition to beginning Year 4 of Destiny 2's life cycle, Bungie has described this release as the start of a new era for the franchise, as Beyond Light begins a trilogy of expansions where players "will explore the true nature of Light and Dark"—Beyond Light will be followed up by The Witch Queen in 2021 and Lightfall (working title) in 2022. The expansion will be available as paid downloadable content (DLC) and there will also be a collector's edition and a digital deluxe edition. Seasonal content for Year 4 will also change. During Year 3, seasonal content was only accessible during the season it was active. While season passes will still be available à la carte as they were during Year 3, the content of previous seasons in Year 4 can be experienced all year, regardless of when a player begins playing, much like the seasons during Year 2 of Forsaken's Annual Pass, though the player must still purchase each season's seasonal pass to access the content. The narrative across each season will also be more interconnected instead of being cut into individual seasonal arcs.

Core client changes

Destiny 2's size over its first three years had grown too large for Bungie to efficiently update and maintain, creating several software bugs when they introduced new content. The total content had reached about 115 GB and often required large patches with some updates. Rather than focus on developing a Destiny 3, Bungie decided to work on refreshing the current Destiny 2 content and address the state of the game with Beyond Light.

Beyond Light will introduce the "Destiny Content Vault" (DCV) as part of this major reworking of the game. Five of the game's main worlds (Titan, Io, Mars, Mercury, and the Leviathan area) will be removed from the game and placed in the DCV along with certain activities including the campaigns, raids, weapons, armor, and items associated with those worlds. The DCV also includes all of the content from the original Destiny game. After Beyond Light is released, Bungie plans to go back to areas in the DCV and remaster them over time so that they can be better incorporated into the game at a later time (as seen with Earth's Moon location in the previous Shadowkeep expansion).

Because of this change, the install size of the game will drop by about 30 to 40% on all platforms, but will require players to effectively reinstall the full game once Beyond Light is released.