Destiny 2 delays The Witch Queen and pencils in cross-play
Bungie have announced that The Witch Queen expansion for Destiny 2 has been moved from its planned 2021 release until sometime in 2022.
Joe “Joegoroth” Blackburn, the Assistant Game Director on Destiny 2 revealed the reason for the delay in a blog post on the Bungie website.
As we began to scale production on the Witch Queen last year, we made the difficult but important decision to move its release to early 2022; we also realized we needed to add an additional unannounced chapter after Lightfall to fully complete our first saga of Destiny.
We’ve long thought about moving Destiny’s annual release to the early half of the year primarily for the health of the team, but the Witch Queen and not being tied to legacy expectations allowed us to make this choice early for three important reasons:
The Witch Queen represents an important evolution in the ongoing story of Destiny 2. Beyond Light built the foundation and allowed us to weave the world-building of Destiny and Destiny 2 together, but The Witch Queen will light the fire on a strongly interconnected narrative across Lightfall and beyond, unlike anything we’ve ever attempted before, with characters, arcs, heroes and villains that persist over multiple future releases. Even more importantly, the conclusion of these releases will also conclude the “Light and Darkness Saga,” the conflict we first introduced with the launch of Destiny many years ago. As we’ve been developing The Witch Queen, we realized that we needed this release to be the first of many moments crucial to the story of Destiny. With so much leading to and dependent on what happens in The Witch Queen, we wanted to make sure that we gave ourselves enough time to build out this journey in the right way, starting with an exceptional first chapter in The Witch Queen.
In addition, it seems that Covid-19 also played a part as the developers had to adjust to working remotely, there is a lot in the roadmap update, check that out here.
The other big news is that cross-play is coming, but is not expected until at least Season 15, but there is no date for that yet, Season 13 is set to run until early May, so don’t expect 15 until the end of the year.
