Destiny 2’s planned Cosmodrome expansion won’t be happening, the studio told fans Thursday in its weekly blog post. Instead, Bungie will focus on new projects.
Last year, Bungie said that Destiny 2’s new Season of the Chosen would bring back two old Strikes from the original Destiny and expand the Cosmodrome location to “roughly Destiny 1 Year 1 parity.” But when players logged on Tuesday morning for the new season, they found Old Russia unchanged.
The Devil’s Lair Strike made it back into the game — although it’s currently not selectable on the map, available only via the Nightfall — but the Fallen S.A.B.E.R. Strike wasn’t available, and the Cosmodrome was still the same size as it was last season. Bungie clarified that The Devil’s Lair will be a normal playlist Strike next week, and that Fallen S.A.B.E.R. is currently disabled due to a bug.
But even with the Strikes in place, that didn’t explain the missing parts of the Cosmodrome. Bungie’s promise to expand the destination goes back to June 2020, in its first post outlining the Destiny Content Vault, a new system that lets the studio cycle content in and out of the game. Two days after the Season of the Chosen launch, the studio finally said why the Cosmodrome hadn’t changed.
“When we first shared our plans, we were still early in development and uncertain how far we would go with the Cosmodrome unvault,” said Bungie, referring to the initial announcement from June. The studio went on to say that as the November release of the Beyond Light expansion got closer, it had to decide whether to continue spending time and resources on bringing the Cosmodrome back to its original splendor from Destiny or shift to developing new content for the future of Destiny 2.
With the returning Strikes done and the new player experience already in place, the team decided to move on.
“Given that we believed we had achieved our original goals and knowing the community and team’s desire for new content, we chose the latter option,” said Bungie. “But, when we made that decision, we failed to properly update your expectations for how far the Cosmodrome experience was going to be extended and that was a mistake.”
With the Destiny Content Vault, there’s a chance Bungie could expand the Cosmodrome sometime in the future by adding the missing locations or the Plaguelands area — introduced in the original Destiny’s Rise of Iron expansion — but the studio said it has nothing further planned for the location at the moment.
The Cosmodrome was the first place players set foot in when Bungie launched the original Destiny in 2014. The studio brought about half of the location’s original map to Destiny 2 last fall with Beyond Light, and placed a new player questline there to help acclimate new Guardians to the sequel.
