Destiny 2: The Witch Queen Expansion Delayed to 2022

Bungie has just announced the delay of this year’s Destiny 2 expansion, ‘The Witch Queen‘, for early 2022.

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen was announced as the next era of the new arc of the looter-shooter RPG. The new strategy of storytelling began with the recently released Beyond Light expansion and will be followed by the now delayed The Witch Queen and Lightfall. It’s revealed on a community post that Bungie began “scaling production” on the new expansion and figured that the initial schedule was impossible to meet, especially with COVID-19’s enforced restriction like remote work.

Bungie confirmed their plans to move Destiny’s annual release to the early half of the financial year “primarily for the health of the team”, but the developer alludes to three reasons behind the delay:

The Witch Queen is crucial for the future of the franchise.
A suggested overload in the development team with keeping Destiny’s weapon and armor game fresh, refining PVP, implementing transmog, and adding Crossplay.
COVID-19 and remote work.

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.

Making this choice is not one we took lightly. Believe me, as someone close to The Witch Queen’s progress, there’s no one more than us that wants to get it out as soon as it’s ready. But at the end of the day, we know we’re making this call for The Witch Queen and future chapters in Destiny 2 for all the right reasons, ones that puts our team first and our game at the quality bar we strive for ourselves.