Over the years, Destiny 2's popularity has waxed and waned, once peaking at over 300,000 players per month and subsequently settling at around 35,000 players, with annual updates often resulting in an influx of returning and new players. Now, according to a blog post from Bungie, the developer claims that Destiny 2 will adopt a new content delivery strategy and look to a combination of non-linear narratives and new game formats, like "rogue-likes or survival shooters" for future content updates.

In the blog post celebrating the Destiny franchise's 10th anniversary, Bungie details how the company will be moving away from large, yearly explanations containing one-shot stories. Instead, with the new content delivery strategy, which Bungie calls Codename: Frontiers, the free-to-play RPG will get two expansions per year and four major free content updates every year.It's important to note that these new expansions will be smaller in scale than the previous yearly expansions, with Bungie calling them "medium-sized." Destiny 2 game director, Tyson Green, specifically calls out Metroidvania and rogue-like game mechanics for future game expansions, citing a formulaic and repetitive expansion cadence as the reason for the shift.

The first update in Destiny 2's new content strategy is Codename: Apollo, which will be a non-linear adventure that will supposedly have players follow various different threads, in no specific order, to get to the end-point, instead of players simply following the same story beats and travelling from one location to the next in a pre-determined fashion. As previously mentioned, Destiny 2's annual updates generally result in a sudden bump in player count, so it's possible that Bungie is trying to capitalize on that interest and increase average player counts by updating more frequently.

It's also worth noting that Destiny 2 won't be the first game in the genre to experiment with different game types in its expansions. Warframe, a third-person shooter MMO often compared to Destiny, recently garnered praise for The Duviri—a roguelike game mode introduced in a major content update.

In the same blog post, Bungie committed to addressing several common complaints regarding the core gameplay. Namely, the developer wants to make the core game both more approachable for new players and more challenging for veterans. It aims to achieve this by offering a greater degree of customization to in-game challenges and introducing what it calls gameplay modifiers. It sounds like these modifiers will be things like enemy buffs and ability and kit changes that make enemy encounters more engaging, rather than turning foes into bullet sponges.

Ultimately, it looks like Bungie wants Destiny 2 players to engage with the game more freely, experiment with different gear, and explore more of the world.