Destiny 2 Lead Says Bungie is Trying to Improve Player Experience as The Edge of Fate Underperforms

Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate is part of the game’s eighth year of major new content. One of the game’s leads has opened up on trying to make the game more accessible and inclusive as the shooter’s player numbers continue to drop.

Bungie’s track record is one of the best. It established its legacy with Halo and has spent over a decade cultivating the complexities of the Destiny universe. We’ve come to expect an annual expansion to inject Destiny 2 with a ton of extra DLC content. The Edge of Fate is that very content in 2025.

Its debut numbers are way down compared to The Final Shape. A game lead has opened up on the whole process.

Destiny 2: Edge of Fate Sees Huge Drop Off in Players

guardians flying in destiny 2

Flying into disaster? Credit to Bungie

In an interview with MrRoflWaffles (through GamesRadar), assistant game director Robbie Stevens addressed issues first-time users face, the confusing interface and menus, and popups.

There’s a “more robust review process” for popups, meaning: “It should be a lot less stuff just flashing on your screen in that first five minutes.” Cleaning up the presentation was apparently a big goal for The Edge of Fate, and Bungie has additional “Medium and long-term plans and features where we want to do even better here,” said Stevens.

Stevens revealed how the team is trying to make newer players feel more welcome: “We really want to be looking at things like New Light and other parts of the game and really thinking about, hey, how do we get you into the fantasy of being a Guardian? What’s the right way to do that? How do we do some big updates to that in the future to update it with where the game is at today? So that wasn’t a specific focus this time around, because we had so many other parts of the games that we needed to just get right, so that we can build part of that new experience in the future.”

The dwindling player numbers have become apparent in recent times. Using Steam Charts as our baseline, we can go as far back as October 2019—when Shadowkeep came out.

Just under 300K players hopped into Destiny 2 into Shadowkeep at its peak. Beyond Light was around 250K, The Witch Queen was closer to 300K again, and Lightfall and The Final Shape both comfortably eclipsed 300K.

The Edge of Fate has so far not even been able to push Destiny 2 above 100K concurrents at peak on Steam. This is a huge decrease compared to all other expansions since October 2019.

Can Bungie get Destiny back on track? Or should the company start pushing Destiny 3 and a hard reset for the franchise?