Destiny 2: The Witch Queen expansion pushed into 2022

With Destiny 2: Beyond Light expansion and current season in full swing (and in a quite enjoyable place), it’s difficult to think about what’s coming next for the franchise. Well Bungie today dropped a bit of bad news, the next big expansion, known as Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, has been officially bumped to early 2022.

We’re sure they’ll be trying to fill in the gaps by extending upcoming seasons and producing other content and events, but it’ll be a while before the next evolution of the game takes place.

Definitely head over to the official Bungie blog for the gory details, since there are quite a lot of them. Check out some of the info below as well.

THE WITCH QUEEN, LIGHTFALL, AND BEYOND
Last summer, we outlined our ambition for the next era in Destiny 2 by announcing the full arc, starting with Beyond Light, followed by the Witch Queen and Lightfall. As we began to scale production on the Witch Queen last year, we made the difficult but important decision to move its release to early 2022; we also realized we needed to add an additional unannounced chapter after Lightfall to fully complete our first saga of Destiny.

We?ve long thought about moving Destiny?s annual release to the early half of the year primarily for the health of the team, but the Witch Queen and not being tied to legacy expectations allowed us to make this choice early for three important reasons:

• The Witch Queen represents an important evolution in the ongoing story of Destiny 2. Beyond Light built the foundation and allowed us to weave the world-building of Destiny and Destiny 2 together, but The Witch Queen will light the fire on a strongly interconnected narrative across Lightfall and beyond, unlike anything we?ve ever attempted before, with characters, arcs, heroes and villains that persist over multiple future releases. Even more importantly, the conclusion of these releases will also conclude the ?Light and Darkness Saga,? the conflict we first introduced with the launch of Destiny many years ago. As we?ve been developing The Witch Queen, we realized that we needed this release to be the first of many moments crucial to the story of Destiny. With so much leading to and dependent on what happens in The Witch Queen, we wanted to make sure that we gave ourselves enough time to build out this journey in the right way, starting with an exceptional first chapter in The Witch Queen.
• With Destiny now committed to being an everlasting evolving world, we want to make sure we are still taking the time to upgrade the systemic foundation of Destiny 2 to support everything we want to do in the future. Our ultimate vision for Destiny 2 still stands ? a definitive action-MMO, a unified global community where you can play Destiny anywhere with your friends. For 2021 this means upgrading our approach to keeping Destiny?s weapon and armor game fresh, refining our vision for PVP, implementing transmog, and adding Crossplay. More below.
• Finally, and the most important reason, we are proud to be uncompromising when it comes to our commitment to the health of our teams. With COVID-19 keeping us away from the office, and the large amount of work on our plates, we needed to move the date in order to make sure that both this year’s updates and The Witch Queen were both delivered at the quality we strive for, and on a schedule that made sense for everyone involved.

Making this choice is not one we took lightly. Believe me, as someone close to The Witch Queen?s progress, there’s no one more than us that wants to get it out as soon as it?s ready. But at the end of the day, we know we?re making this call for The Witch Queen and future chapters in Destiny 2 for all the right reasons, ones that puts our team first and our game at the quality bar we strive for ourselves.

We’ll have more to share on The Witch Queen and beyond in the late summer of this year.