Oh, weird: the Destiny 2 I know is about to be locked away

Cayde-6
(Image credit: Bungie)

For many, Destiny 2 is a constant companion, a parallel life. Perhaps, during periods of pandemic lockdown, it’s even their primary one. For me, it was an event FPS: a water cooler campaign that I blasted through with a friend, and then put down. At this point, it’s a hazy-but-fond memory of red grass, mile-high waves, and guns with satisfyingly strange shooting patterns.

From next week, those memories will be all that remain. When Beyond Light launches, Bungie will pack the original campaign and its two follow-ups away in the Destiny 2 Content Vault. There they will languish, inaccessible until the day the developer sees fit to make them playable again.

Destiny 2

(Image credit: Bungie)

Extreme though it is, this is a practical measure: Destiny 2 is now an enormous game, beyond Bungie’s capacity to maintain as digital janitors. The studio has determined that keeping all of its missions running simultaneously would degrade the quality of the game overall. To extend the caretaking metaphor, they would only realise a pipe had burst in the attic when water was already warping the ceiling and ruining the wallpaper in the master bedroom.

No matter how sensible the justification, though, the Vault leaves me uneasy, as if my own recollections were being wiped Eternal Sunshine style. When a friend buys Beyond Light and has a good time with it, there’ll be no crossover between our experiences—nothing shared to bond over. I can’t ask them what they thought of that statement second level, Exodus, played in third-person and at low health—the first time Bungie had flipped Destiny’s power fantasy to make the player feel mortal. I can’t vicariously enjoy their awe upon arriving in the New Pacific Arcology, Neptune’s rain-blasted surface giving way to the eerie calm and misplaced optimism of an abandoned city’s billboards.

Destiny 2

(Image credit: Bungie)

Losing access to treasured PC gaming memories isn’t new—it’s become a hazard of the medium ever since live service games rose to prominence. It’s the reason I can no longer boot up my beloved Orcs Must Die! Unchained, and why PC Gamer freelancer Sarah James can’t indulge in the nostalgia of revisiting TERA’s starting areas, all of which have been binned.

But those games were relative failures. It’s a stranger phenomenon for service games to become so successful that we have to bid a part of them goodbye. World of Warcraft has been grappling with the issue for a while—since October this year, it’s been rendering past expansions as museum exhibits accessible through a gnome-dragon curator. It’s only a matter of time before other beloved favourites get so large they’re faced with the same, painful downsizing problem.

In the meantime, pour one out for The Red War. You were a fairly good Halo-esque romp between the stars.

Contributor

Jeremy Peel is an award-nominated freelance journalist who has been writing and editing for PC Gamer over the past several years. His greatest success during that period was a pandemic article called "Every type of Fall Guy, classified", which kept the lights on at PCG for at least a week. He’s rested on his laurels ever since, indulging his love for ultra-deep, story-driven simulations by submitting monthly interviews with the designers behind Fallout, Dishonored and Deus Ex. He's also written columns on the likes of Jalopy, the ramshackle car game. You can find him on Patreon as The Peel Perspective.

Latest in FPS
Team Fortress Spy being shocked
An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy
Neighbors Suburban Warfare screenshot a child aims a slingshot at a man from across a cul-de-sac.
A beta of backyard FPS Neighbors: Suburban Warfare is out now, and the balance discussion is hysterical: nerf trash can lids and children
Fragpunk
Somebody finally figured out casual Counter-Strike
Image for
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s getting a new roguelite wave defense mode that sounds a whole lot like a souped-up take on Killing Floor
Destiny 2: Season of Plunder promo image.
'We made one big mistake': Destiny 2 developer reveals how a small team dedicated to player retention led to a 20 hour server outage and character rollback
Bears in Space
I downloaded this bear-obsessed comedy FPS to kill time before Doom: The Dark Ages and discovered the most underrated shooter on Steam
Latest in Features
A snakewoman holding a sickle
Magic: The Gathering's Tarkir: Dragonstorm set isn't just about dragons
A screenshot from game Mudborne of a little humanoid frog in a marsh
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 24, 2025)
Fragpunk
Somebody finally figured out casual Counter-Strike
Dean Hall at GDC 2025.
Outer space inspired DayZ's Dean Hall to become a modder and game developer, and now he's making a Kerbal successor called Kitten Space Agency
An image of a corpse with the text "You've been re-educated."
I played the lost videogame sequel to 1984, and came away more nostalgic than ever for gaming's awkward adolescence in 1999
Bears in Space
I downloaded this bear-obsessed comedy FPS to kill time before Doom: The Dark Ages and discovered the most underrated shooter on Steam