Destiny 2 is Bungie's most successful FPS, but thanks to the Destiny Content Vault, it's far from the game many players want it to be. The Red War and other Year 1 content were removed from Destiny 2 with the release of the Beyond Light expansion in November 2020, and it's now the Forsaken expansion's turn to join them in the DCV. The news of Destiny 2: Forsaken's vaulting has Destiny 3 trending on Twitter at the time of writing - for all the wrong reasons.
Beginning with the Destiny 2: The Witch Queen expansion's launch on February 22, 2022, Forsaken's campaign, the Tangled Shore destination, Year 4 Seasonal content, and the Presage and Harbinger Exotic missions will no longer be accessible. According to Bungie's announcement post, this will free up "space" to implement the new expansion and new features, such as weapon crafting, a Legendary difficulty campaign option, and the Glaive weapon archetype.
The Destiny Content Vault was introduced in the summer of 2020. According to Bungie's explanation at the time, Destiny 2 had become "too large to efficiently update and maintain," leading to bugs, slow patch implementation, and "less innovation." Still, this has left many players wondering why, rather than vaulting old, paid-for content, Bungie doesn't just create a Destiny 3. Forsaken's vaulting brought this discussion back to community's attention, causing "Destiny 3" to trend on Twitter on October 8, 2021.
Why Bungie Isn't Making A Destiny 3
In that initial 2020 announcement of the DCV, Bungie explained it didn't want to make a Destiny 3 because it felt even making a Destiny 2 was a mistake.
"We left behind all of Destiny 1’s content and many of the features players grew to love. We believe now that it was a mistake to create a situation that fractured the community, reset player progress, and set the player experience back in ways that took us a full year to recover from and repair. It’s a mistake we don’t want to repeat by making a Destiny 3. We don't believe a sequel is the right direction for the game and for the past two years we have been investing all of our development effort into new content, gameplay, and new engine features that directly support a single evolving world in Destiny 2."
Vaulting Forsaken appears to be an extension of this philosophy - an effort to move Destiny 2 forward without fracturing the community and while keeping the game's development manageable. Bungie has already started work on redesigning the Light Subclasses' user interface to match the way Stasis subclasses operate, and The Witch Queen will bring with it a whole new destination and more. To Bungie, it likely makes sense to improve a game enjoyed by a large player base, rather than to introduce a new game with the content updates it already planned to put in the old one.
The question does remain: If Destiny 2 doesn't have the capacity behind the scenes to support infinite updates like a traditional MMO, why not start from scratch and begin building a truly "live," ever-expanding Destiny 3, even if it meant temporarily splitting the player base? Judging from many of the trending topic's tweets, a lot of players simply don't mind the loss of old content if it means the relevant elements of Destiny 2 keep getting better, though others are quite upset with the change. For now, it seems Bungie is sticking with Destiny 2 until at least the Lightfall expansion - and it will likely go on beyond that, according to Polygon.