Future 2‘s most controversial apply isn’t any extra. Bungie confirmed throughout its 2022 showcase immediately that no extra of the loot shooter’s content material shall be vaulted. That announcement comes after numerous fan complaints lately as enormous parts of the sport had been eliminated to make room for brand new expansions.
Starting with the 2020 launch of Past Gentle, Bungie has been “vaulting” previous content material, deleting total campaigns and planets, to attempt to maintain the sport’s digital footprint and technical calls for inside cause. However that’s additionally led to the lack of any semblance of an entry level for brand new gamers, in addition to the erasure of a few of Future 2‘s finest story beats (I’m you, Forsaken).
“We’ve additionally been engaged on the Future engine behind the scenes, getting ready our expertise and our recreation to final for a lot of, a few years to return as a result of Future 2 will not be going wherever and neither are your expansions,” Future 2 common supervisor, Justin Truman, stated throughout Tuesday’s showcase. “We would like this story since we first communed with the Darkness on the Moon to be absolutely playable from begin to end and we’re comfortable to announce immediately that we’re not planning to sundown any extra expansions.”
What Truman is saying is that Bungie desires some stage of continuity between the launch of Shadowkeep in 2019 and the conclusion of the Saga of Gentle and Darkness with The Ultimate Form someday in 2024. That four-part arc revolves round encountering The Darkness and its brokers, and is pretty much as good a place to begin as any to cease pruning. Seasonal content material, in the meantime, will seemingly nonetheless proceed to filter out yearly.
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One clear takeaway from Truman’s little speech was that Future 3 will not be coming anytime quickly, if in any respect. Future launched again in 2014 with Activision because the writer, an organization infamous for the aggressive annualization of gaming sequels. Bungie broke from the Name of Obligation maker in 2019, nonetheless, and was bought earlier this 12 months by Sony. The launch of the PS5 and Xbox Sequence X would have been a pure peg for Future 3, however as a substitute Bungie launched a new-gen replace for Future 2 on the finish of 2020.
This places the sport in keeping with different huge MMOs like World of Warcraft and Warframe, which frequently iterate reasonably than rebuilding from scratch each few years. And whereas it’s positively extra sustainable from a improvement perspective, I’d be mendacity if I stated I wasn’t barely upset. I’d like to see Future take some huge dangers and make some enormous modifications after The Ultimate Form concludes. We’ll see if it might nonetheless handle that evolution on the present basis that launched again in 2017.
In fact, Truman did solely say that that is what Bungie was “planning” to do, and plans can all the time change, particularly if the technical constraints develop into too huge down the highway. Future has promised (and achieved) plenty of issues through the years that it later reversed course on. Hopefully an finish to vaulting content material isn’t one in all them. And solely time will inform if the stuff that was already banished will get a second likelihood in some unspecified time in the future.
