Destiny 2 delays The Witch Queen, locks in new 2022 release date

Destiny 2 expansion The Witch Queen is set to miss its original planned 2021 release date, Bungie has revealed. Instead, the highly-anticipated release has been delayed to “early 2022” in a bid to “maintain Bungie’s standards.”

The next planned Destiny 2 expansion won’t make its 2021 release window, assistant game director Joe Blackburn confirmed in Bungie’s weekly TWAB blog post on Thursday, February 25.

“Last summer, Bungie outlined our ambition for the next era in Destiny 2 by announcing the full arc, starting with Beyond Light, followed by Witch Queen,” he said. “As we began to scale production on Witch Queen last year, we made the difficult but important decision to move its release to early 2022.”

“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 put our team first and our game at the quality bar we strive for ourselves.

He continued, “We also realized we needed to add an additional unannounced chapter after Lightfall to fully complete our first saga of Destiny.”

Considering just how huge The Witch Queen is expected to be — Blackburn promised it would “light the fire” for the Destiny saga moving forward — it makes sense that Bungie wants to give it as much time as possible.

“Witch Queen represents an evolution in the Destiny 2 story,” he continued.

“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.

“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.”

• Read More: Witch Queen will be make or break moment

Expect to hear more about the Witch Queen’s new release date, and the “unannounced expansion,” later this year ⁠— likely “late summer,” Blackburn said.

On top of the shock Witch Queen delay, Bungie also revealed some other major changes for Destiny 2 in their February 25 developer update.

The biggest news was that “sunsetting,” which has totally divided Guardians since its introduction late last year, is being dropped. The Destiny developers realized it was too tricky to solve, and instead decided to scrap the ‘vault’ mechanic completely.

• Read more: Bungie is working on a brand new game series

Full crossplay across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC is also being deployed in Bungie’s series by Season 14, the devs promised. Catch up on all the details here.