For many longtime players,Destiny 2is in a bit of a rut at the moment. The latest season is proving to be a breaking point for many as the content presented so far has been a bit underwhelming, placing more emphasis on the stale bounty and upgrade grind. Evenupcoming content like Grandmaster Nightfallshas seemingly not provided that spark Bungie was likely hoping for as many players including high profile members of the community like Gladd prepare to go on a bit of a hiatus.
As player sights continue to look towards the future of the game, arecent leak about the rumored Fall expansionhas seemingly sparked a bit of life into the community. According to the supposed information, Bungie’s Fall 2020 expansion is known as Collapse and intends to usher in the Darkness as the next major antagonist, giving players that long awaited showdown teased all the way back in the very firstDestiny. The expansion adds in new locations, a new raid, new enemies to fight, and even a set of new subclasses all based on the Darkness.
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Needless to say, there’s a lot to dissect but one of the main problems is that there’s no mention of a source for this info. Therefore, most of the content of the leak can simply be waved away as the information has either existed in past leaks or is already well established inside of the base game. While the information sounds great on paper, here’s why theDestiny 2expansion leak is likely too good to be true.
The Reveal Date
According to the leak, Bungie is going to announce the new Fall expansion two months from now in June.
For any person looking to make a fake leak or rumor, this should be the easiest point to include as Bungie typically makes announcements for its big Fall content in June. Last year, Bungie debuted and introduced the Shadowkeep expansion with anew trailer at the Google Stadia event, held its own pre-E3 live show with Luke Smith and company, as well as attended the E3 2019 YouTube Live Show with Geoff Keighley. Beyond that, Bungie has previously shown off other expansions like Forsaken, and the originalDestiny 2reveal before that. This has been a common pattern and trend for the studio for quite some time.
The Skeleton Crew Theory
The leak also attempts to justify why the current seasonal content has been so limited lately. Namely, Bungie has entrusted a small crew to keep the game going while the majority of the studio is working on the other big projects, namely the Matter IP and this new expansion.
Again, these things are fairly common knowledge as Bungie has previously mentioned that it has a Live Team to handle seasonal updates and the like. Bungie, as a company, has ballooned in size to support multiple projects including the publicly known IP known asMatter,a partnership between them and NetEase. So naturally, part of the studio would be devoted to that major project, while the studio also has plans to keepDestinyrolling along sinceDestiny 3has continually been pushed back.
ConsideringDestiny 2is its only real way to keep money flowing in, there’s no chance the studio would stop developing new content for the game anytime soon. Longtime fans have also seen the ups and downs that both Destiny games have gone through in terms of content, so the fact that things are a little barebones right now shouldn’t be too surprising.
Pyramid Ships Arrival
The Pyramid Ships have been an enigmatic threat ever since they were shown at the end of theDestiny 2base campaign. Having been pinged by the reawoken Traveler, the ships have been slowly inching their way back into the Solar System. Although always in the background, the Pyramid Ship story was pushed forward in the Shadowkeep campaign as players discovered one below the surface of the moon.
Even though Season of the Worthy hasn’t been a big hit withDestiny 2players, it has continued to push forward the Pyramid ship story in significant ways. When the Io Seraph Bunker opened, players were greeted to an in-game cutscene between theWarmind Rasputin and Commander Zavala. Following that reveal, the in-game maps were updated to show that the Pyramid Ships were now inside of our Solar System and inching closer. The red flashing pyramids can now also be seen from the Seraph Bunkers as well as a countdown timer which is updating after each weekly reset.
Therefore, the arrival of the Pyramid Ships were always a foregone conclusion as most players expect some sort of showdown with them in future content whether that beDestiny 3or something else.
The Veil and Winnower
A major component of the leak indicates a brand new faction of enemies called the Veil who appear ghostly and will feature a lot of different units to fight against. They’re led by a mysterious veiled woman nicknamed The Winnower who appears similar to the statue seen inside of the Shadowkeep pyramid ship.
This part of the leak isn’t new at all and seems to have been repurposed byanother leak from nearly a year ago. Thankfully, the person does acknowledge the past leak from AnonTheNine, but again, it’s easy enough to grab that content and continue running with it. OriginalDestinyconcept art as well as lore that was introduced inside of the Black Armor update has been the source of much of these rumors and leaks, so again, it’s nothing new.
Also, The Winnower is a term most players have seen already as part of the lore book Unveiling, which is given out once per week from Eris Morn. There’s an entry in there called Gardener and Winnower, and many fans have spent plenty of time trying to make sense of it. There’s been a few players that have tied the story to the relationship of The Traveler and the Veil, so making a connection between the word Winnower and the leader of the Darkness isn’t much of a stretch.
Darkness Subclasses
Like the Veil above, getting Darkness based subclasses isn’t a new revelation by any stretch. In fact, much of this conversation originated during the Joker’s Wild update which seemingly had players pick sides between the Drifter and the Vanguard. At that point, many began to speculate that future could content could introduce the idea of rogue lightbearers.
Not only that, the idea of Darkness being wielded by players was touched on in the originalDestiny 3leak from AnonTheNine, but the issue here is that this new leak really doesn’t provide any new details outside of what fans have already heard in the past. In fact, it can be argued that the original 2019 leak had way more in terms of details than this current one. While this 2020 leak indicatesnew Darkness-based subclasses and abilities, That’s something that the 2019 leak made clear originally. So again, there’s nothing new here and just rehashes information previously known through the original leak and in-game lore that hints at this being possible.
As fun as this theory is, the majority of it seems highly unlikely. However, with the delay toDestiny 3, it’s plausible that whatever content Bungie had coming could have once been attached to that game and reworked to be an expansion or stopgap. This is especially true when considering that it was just last year that Activision and Bungie ultimately split, so whatever the studio had been working on for this year could have also been reworked as an expansion rather than full fledged sequel.
Regardless, the summer months are typically devoted to revealing what’s next for the studio so fans won’t have to wait too long to find out for sure. With the studio in desperate need of a win, a major reveal like this could be what the doctor ordered.
Destiny 2is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
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