Bungie recently celebrated eight years since the launch of Destiny as a franchise and also five years since the release of Destiny 2, which is still going strong into its sixth year with the release of Lightfall closing in. Destiny 2 has been getting better over time thanks to Bungie's shift to the live service and season-based model, which allowed the game to grow constantly while also making it possible to have more frequent patches and story developments than a few expansions a year. Bungie also became more communicative with the game's community, albeit some recent issues took away a bit of this two-way interaction.
Generally speaking, however, Bungie has been growing and hiring more and more people to join its ranks, both for future Destiny 2 or Destiny-related content and multimedia projects, and also for at least a whole new game that the company ideally wants out by 2025. This is not exactly a brand-new piece of information, especially considering that Bungie filed one project for a trademark under the name of "Matter," which remains an undisclosed video game at this stage in time, and Matter could even be a placeholder name, to begin with. And yet, recent rumors make it so that Bungie is actually developing a game in the Marathon universe to revive the franchise as a live service extraction-based team shooter.
Destiny 2 Needs Competition, and a Marathon Revival Could Be It
Fans of games like The Division will immediately recognize this genre as something that's been out and about for a long time, and while it's quite different from what Destiny 2 strives to be in the gaming industry, Bungie has the potential of making it right. What this means is that Bungie could actually pull off making a video game that manages to do what many other so-called "Destiny killers" never managed to, and that's providing Destiny 2 with actual competition in a niche Bungie itself created.
Again, Destiny 2 is not a game that was always successful. On the contrary, it was largely considered a bad game when it first launched all the way back in 2017 due to how short the main campaign was and how little was there for players to do when they reached the endgame. The Leviathan Raids did shake things up for a while, and so did the unnecessarily long grind for Prophecy weapons in the Curse of Osiris DLC, but the only saving graces of Year 1 were by many considered to be Escalation Protocol and the Raids themselves.
As such, reviving Marathon as a franchise and making it into a live service has a chance at taking a piece of that huge niche that Destiny 2 eventually took for itself over time, and that's because if there's a company that can make this sort of game a good one it's Bungie. Of course, it wouldn't make sense for Bungie to make its own competition for Destiny 2 a big hit, but it's also true that there are currently no games like Bungie's iconic looter shooter, even though many tried to actually do that.
An example comes from Anthem, which was a great game in concept thanks to the focus on great flying mechanics, but the execution eventually led to it crashing down and being abandoned by EA. As it stands, Destiny 2 needs another game like it for players to have some sort of alternative in the sci-fi looter shooter genre that is also treated as a live service title. If the rumors are true, Bungie could very well turn this Marathon revival into a new dawn for the extraction-based looter shooter niche, and that's a very good thing.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.