It seems that the desire for Destiny 2 free-to-play is going to be met by Bungie, as a new edition called Destiny 2: New Light. A leaked article has revealed some details of upcoming changes to Bungie’s flagship “MMOFPS” in the near future, one of which is a shift towards a free-to-play model at the launch of its new expansion being released. Essentially, it seems that the game will be shifting to an F2P model for expansion content, similar to that of Dungeons & Dragons Online.
An Engadget article was accidentally published early that detailed a Destiny 2 free-to-play edition. While the article has since been removed, Redditor /u/adefran83 managed to copy much of the article’s text and submit it to the /r/DestinyTheGame subreddit. The big-ticket reveal in the Engadget piece is that Destiny 2 will be shifting to a free-to-play model at the release of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep on September 17, 2019.
The core game is going to be retitled Destiny 2: New Light. All year one content is going to be included in the free-to-play version, including “foundational modes, activities, and rewards.” Expansion content is going to be accessed by purchasing the individual expansions as they come out. Effectively, players will no longer be as severely restricted in content due to not having purchased the latest expansions and they’ll be able to pick and choose which expansion content they would like to experience.
Other changes are also reportedly coming in the Destiny 2 free-to-play edition. More comprehensive cross-play support is being added into the game. Xbox One and PC players will be able to access the same characters from their primary account on different platforms. Unfortunately, PS4 players won’t yet have access to this feature at launch. Furthermore, Bungie says that there will no longer be any platform-exclusive weapons, armors, maps, or activities.
It should be noted that the Destiny 2 free-to-play leak comes via a Reddit post that was copy-pasted. We were unable to find any caches or archives of the original article, although we did find that the article is still listed in Google (with a portion of the correct text in the meta description). The veracity of this leak is slightly stronger with the addition of a screenshot posted to Imgur. As always, take this leak with a grain of salt. That said, it seems like the odds are good that we’ll be seeing a Destiny 2 free-to-play version launching in September 2019.
