• This week Destiny 2 suffered a 20-hour downtime.
• The game was taken offline to protect player progress following the discovery of a bug linked to the removal of Legacy triumphs.
• The incident has players concerned about the stability of the game and its future.

On Tuesday, Destiny 2 was offline for most of the day bleeding into Wednesday. This, we have since learned, was the result of Bungie’s eagerness to deploy new features.

Ahead of the forthcoming expansion, Lightfall, Bungie hoped to issue several quality-of-life changes ahead of that release. These included but weren’t limited to:

• Unlocking all Armour mods for players
• Increase the drop rate of Deepsight Weapons (used in crafting)
• Boost reputation gains in Gambit and Iron Banner

“Unfortunately, one of these updates unexpectedly caused an issue with Titles, Seals, and Catalysts losing progress for players, and we made the tough call to take the game offline to allow for a rollback. This required downtime to protect our players’ progress,” the newly minted Destiny 2 Team account on Twitter relayed to players.

The developer says that its teams worked around the clock to bring the game back up and eventually, late on Wednesday afternoon, the game was up and running again although players did have some of their progress reset.

“We discovered that the issue was caused when some currently incompletable EDZ and Nessus Triumphs were moved from Forsaken into the archived Triumphs section. To make that change, we used a tool that can move player state from one location to another in the player’s account. This tool is very powerful but requires careful and cautious handling. Due to a configuration error, we accidentally re-ran an older state migration process used for the Beyond Light release. As a result, we ended up re-copying old data from before Beyond Light into the current configuration, essentially undoing certain aspects of player progression since then,” Bungie explained in a blog post.

Essentially any progress made between 8:20 and 11AM PST (18:20 and 21:00 SAST) on Tuesday was undone as were any purchases made with Bright Dust and Silver during this time.

This is the second incident in our memory that saw a progress rollback being implemented. Before this week’s bug, an issue in 2020 saw Bungie rolling progress back.

This latest incident occured after an alarming number of other bugs have appeared in recent months. This has many players questioning whether Bungie’s Tiger engine is getting along in years given the game’s age.

To be clear, Bungie has worked hard to improve the backend of Destiny 2, its performance and the experience for players. However, there is really only so much that can be done with an ageing engine and many believe that Bungie will eventually be forced to move to a newer, more capable engine.

Does that mean a Destiny 3 is inevitable? We aren’t so sure. In the past Bungie has talked of Destiny 2 existing long after the Light versus Darkness saga is complete but how much effort Bungie will put into maintaining both Destiny and Destiny 2 is unclear.

With all of this going on, we are concerned about the launch of Lightfall at the end of February. Our recommendation is to expect downtime and perhaps players should shift their expectations to playing the day after launch rather than the day of.