Bungie Says It’s ‘Not Done With Destiny,’ and Marathon Is Becoming a Survival Shooter to Win Players Back

Bungie spent the last two weeks laying out where both of its live-service games are headed next. In a blog post published September 17, joint studio leadership promised to restore content that had been removed from Destiny 2, and a follow-up post published this week detailed how Marathon is evolving well past its original extraction-shooter pitch.

A Blunt Apology and a Promise on Vaulted Content

The September 17 post, titled “The Next Chapter for Bungie” and signed jointly by studio head Poria Torkan and Marathon general manager Josh Deane, was unusually blunt about the studio’s recent struggles. Bungie cut 292 full-time employees in June, the same month Destiny 2 received its final major content update before active development wound down. “We are not asking you to trust what we say today,” the pair wrote, adding that trust has to be earned through the quality of the studio’s games rather than its statements. The post also confirmed there’s no Destiny 3 in development. Instead, Bungie committed to restoring Destiny 2 campaigns, destinations, and raids that had previously been removed from the game, making them available to every player again. The studio cautioned that the work isn’t as simple as reactivating old files, since changes made to Destiny 2 since the Beyond Light expansion mean lighting, encounters, and combatants all need to be rebuilt for the restored content to function, and no restoration date has been set yet.

Ghaul and the Red War campaign are among the Destiny 2 content removed from the game that could return under Bungie’s restoration plan.

Marathon Is Becoming a Survival Shooter

Marathon launched in March to generally favorable reviews, though early access scores briefly dipped before settling in the low 80s on Metacritic once outlets had more time with the finished game, and it hasn’t held on to as many players as Bungie had hoped. A follow-up post this week laid out a pivot away from a purely competitive extraction loop. “We will be evolving Marathon into a more alien and dynamic survival experience,” the studio wrote, introducing the game’s first permanent PvE mode alongside new alien enemies that multiple outlets compared to Helldivers 2’s bug swarms. Two updates carry that shift forward. An October 6 patch called the Nightfall Refresh, a Marathon-specific name unrelated to Destiny 2’s Nightfall strikes, resets player progression and the in-game economy, brings back the limited-time Vault Breaker PvE mode, and adds a free NuCaloric Reward Pass plus sponsored matchmaking queues. The larger Symbiosis update, delayed from its original September 22 date to December 8, adds the new permanent PvE mode, a new Runner shell, a refreshed Perimeter zone, a social space with a firing range, an experimental Team Deathmatch mode, and smoother onboarding for new players.

Why Now

The timing follows a rough few weeks for Bungie’s public image. Just days before the Next Chapter post, a viral leak falsely claimed the studio was secretly merging Destiny 2 and Marathon into one universe, a rumor Marathon’s creative director had to publicly shoot down. Between winding down one game’s active development and watching the other underperform, Bungie’s new messaging reads as an attempt to convince both fanbases that neither project is being abandoned, even as the studio asks players to judge it by results rather than promises.

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Picture Source: Bungie