Next week, on 2nd December, a new expansion pack for Destiny 2 arrives.
It's called Renegades, it's heavily inspired by Star Wars, and developer Bungie is hoping it'll begin to turn the sci-fi shooter's fortunes around.
Early signs are pretty good, as the expansion is firmly within the top five pre-order titles on PS Store, so it's not flying under the radar. But will it be the thing to bring players back?
In a new interview with IGN, Destiny 2's directors talk about the revamped approach to building expansions for the live service FPS, which began this year.
Essentially, The Final Shape brought the game's main storyline to a close, and the ill-received Edge of Fate began a new one. Unfortunately, rather than bringing in newcomers, Destiny 2 has been losing users, resulting in a high concentration of hardcore, highly critical, longtime players.
Here's game director Tyson Green on The Edge of Fate:
"I think we've been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games: those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don't. And we don't want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny. So we're listening to our players, and what our players are telling us is that they don't want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards."
Bungie shifted its development process to allow for two meaningful expansions to Destiny 2 per year. This allows the team to be quicker to respond to player feedback, as well as experiment with fresh ideas, and Renegades apparently already benefits from this approach.
"One of the advantages that the new release model gave us, which is two expansions a year, means you can experiment more within those individual expansions – you can try different things," says Green. "So we saw what we wanted to do with a 'space western' revenge story, and we figured, let's do it in that one, let's aim for this. So we took the idea of Star Wars as total inspiration and built a Destiny expansion around it; that's kind of how we always do it. In this case, I think it comes through much more richly, because it's being more deliberate with its influences and style, but it's still fundamentally a Destiny expansion."