During its Beyond Light livestream earlier this summer, Bungie introduced fans to the Destiny Content Vault. As Bungie noted, Destiny 2 can't continue to grow forever as this not only poses a technical challenge for the team, it would also pose a high cost for players' hard drive space as well. The content vault is a way that Bungie can take old and less used content and remove it from the game, sometimes temporarily. The team can make changes or evolve the legacy content and perhaps bring it back for players to experience down the road. However, the DCV may have alternative and much bigger purposes as well.
Last week, Bungie revealed all of the content going into the vault in November from game modes, maps, activities, gear, weapons, and more. Needless to say, the large amount of stuff leaving the game came as a shock to many players. Notable Destiny 2 player Aztecross attempts to explain why nearly 50% of the game is leaving, linking it to the content purges that many other MMO-style games go through to help focus players on the newer content. However, considering Destiny 2 doesn't have nearly as many things for players to do as a traditional MMO, he goes a step further to say that Beyond Light is actually positioning itself to be Destiny 3.
While he directly mentions it in the video, it appears the latest Aztecross theory may be based more in fact than opinion. He mentions sitting down last September for eight hours with Luke Smith, the team and other content creators, openly discussing the coding issues that Destiny 2 currently has and how the studio plans to fix it. In order to essentially recode the game, the plan is to take parts of it away through a system like the DCV instead of simply starting from scratch with a Destiny 3.
Smith went on to directly ask the group why they wanted a Destiny 3 to which they provided a list of new things like darkness subclasses, more customizable subclasses, and much more. However, everything discussed could be added to the current game if they simply were able to refresh the current parts of the game. Being able to vault content in order to fix, improve, and rebuilt things would allow the team to continue adding new mechanics and features down the road, hence why multiple expansions over the next couple of years have already been announced.
What's interesting is that this is something Bungie has never mentioned on any level, implying that this entire conversation may have been under some sort of NDA. Still, Aztecross does mention that if Bungie had come out and explained this master plan, fans would have been much more understanding of losing 50-60% of the current game's content. Just listing off things that are leaving and not explaining the hows and whys of the situation isn't a great look. The viewpoint now changes if the DCV is actually a content rehabilitation instead of a graveyard.
If true, this also likely means that the content being removed will be likely coming back sooner than later once it is fixed and/or rebuilt in a new engine. Perhaps remove the content will also allow Bungie find a way to reduce the game's overall footprint, letting them push closer to the dream of having both Destiny and Destiny 2 content together in one entire package. With old areas like the Cosmodrome and Vault of Glass coming back in November, fans may likely be getting closer to a World of Destiny style experience.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X versions also in development.