The Destiny community was caught off-guard at large by the recent State of the Game address written by Joe Blackburn, Assistant Game Director, from Bungie. In this address, Blackburn wrote about the delay of the upcoming expansion, The Witch Queen from 2021 to 2022. This information has come as a slight shock to the community, as seen from reactions on Twitter, Reddit and the Bungie forums, but given the reason Bungie chose to delay, the community has shown to take it in a positive light.
Blackburn wrote on the post, “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.” Blackburn stated that the health of the team was their primary concern and that they didn’t want to overwork their team in order to get the release out.
The gaming community has seen from the disasters of Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda what can happen from overworking team members to meet release dates. Both games released with major issues plaguing the games and both never fully recovered, with Anthem 2.0 being cancelled last month.
With the Witch Queen being delayed and Lightfall as well, the Destiny community will have to accept the next year will be the standard season pass model, but with tepid excitement for the expansions. However, it seems that most of the reactions to this news is positive, with players accepting the honesty from Blackburn and the Bungie team. As a whole, the Destiny community has for the most part, been of the idea that if Bungie needs to delay something in order to make sure it launches as good as possible and with as little bugs as possible, then they will accept it. We saw Destiny 2: Beyond Light get delayed last year and it launched with huge fanfare and success.
What remains to be seen, however, is how Bungie will fill this now void year with content. Will they extend the upcoming seasons? Will they add a new season of content? All of these questions are likely to be answered in the next few months to come.