Bungie's plans for Destiny and Marathon gives us better reasons to return

Years after removing some of Destiny 2’s earliest campaigns, Bungie now wants to put them back. The Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind and Forsaken are all planned to return, giving new and returning players a way to follow parts of the story that have been missing for years.

Marathon is moving in a different direction. After reaching fewer players than Bungie hoped, it is getting permanent PvE and Team Deathmatch alongside its extraction mode.

Both plans make coming back easier, just for very different reasons. Destiny 2 needs its history back. Marathon needs more ways to keep people playing once extraction alone is not enough.

Bungie wants to bring back The Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind and Forsaken, campaigns that disappeared from Destiny 2 in 2020 and 2022. Anyone who joined after that could play the newer stories, but there was no way to go back and experience several of the chapters that led into them.

Putting those campaigns back would make Destiny 2 much easier to follow from the beginning. Instead of watching recap videos to fill in the gaps, new and returning players could work through those older stories inside the game and see how its world reached the point it is at now.

Bungie says the restored content will be available to all Destiny 2 players. A veteran taking a friend through The Red War would not first have to work out which old expansion they need to own or whether the missions are still accessible.

The raids could bring back former groups for a different reason. Returning for one familiar raid is a much smaller commitment than catching up on months of progression or buying into another full expansion cycle.

Only three months ago, Monument of Triumph arrived as Destiny 2's final planned live-service content update. Bungie was still leaving room for stability fixes, but restoring entire campaigns, destinations and raids now gives the game something much larger to work toward.

Bringing The Red War back is considerably more complicated than restoring an old download. When Bungie introduced the Destiny Content Vault in 2020, it argued that Destiny 2 had become too large and difficult to maintain efficiently. Every destination, mission and enemy encounter added more testing whenever another part of the game changed.

Years of updates since Beyond Light have widened that gap. Bungie says returning missions need work on lighting, encounters, enemies and underlying systems before they can function properly inside the current game.

There is still no date for the first restored campaign, and Bungie has not published an order for what returns first. The campaigns, destinations and raids already mentioned cover some of the largest missing pieces, but they do not account for every seasonal mission removed over the years.

Presentation will matter almost as much as restoration. Putting old missions back into the game does not help much if a new player still has to search online to learn whether Forsaken comes before or after another campaign.

A coherent timeline, clear campaign order and sensible access from the director would go a long way toward making the restored material useful rather than merely available.

Bungie has referred to future Destiny stories and games alongside this work, but none of those comments amount to a Destiny 3 announcement or a new expansion date. The concrete promise for now is rebuilding parts of Destiny 2 that are no longer there.

Marathon has almost the opposite problem. Bungie says the game has reached fewer players than it hoped, and the current extraction loop gives anyone who drops off relatively little reason to stick around.

The next updates are trying to widen that appeal. Permanent PvE will let players take on enemies cooperatively without entering a normal extraction run, while Team Deathmatch gives the same weapons and movement a more straightforward competitive mode.

The October 6 Nightfall Refresh resets progression and the economy after Bungie said Season 2 pushed some players into the endgame too quickly while others struggled to keep up. A Rewards Pass, balance changes and quality-of-life updates arrive with it, giving Bungie another chance to make the climb through the existing extraction game feel better.

The more important change comes with Symbiosis on December 8. Permanent PvE gives players somewhere to fight without hostile squads, while experimental Team Deathmatch offers another way to use Marathon's weapons outside a deployment.

A refreshed Perimeter zone and another Runner shell add more content, but the social space, firing range and onboarding changes may be just as useful for someone returning after bouncing off the game the first time. Learning weapons and systems before risking a real loadout removes some of the pressure from getting started.

Bungie is still keeping extraction at the centre of Marathon. The difference is that enjoying the gunplay will no longer automatically mean signing up for that same loop every time you log in.

July's temporary Vault Breaker event gives some idea of how Bungie might keep PvE separate without cutting it off from the rest of the game.

Players entered Cryo Archive without hostile squads and used a special Sponsored Kit rather than their normal equipment. Powerful gear found inside did not simply move into the extraction inventory. Runs instead rewarded Vault Data, which could improve the Sponsored Kit or be exchanged for equipment used elsewhere.

Bungie designed those limits to stop a lower-risk mode from flooding the wider economy with powerful loot.

Vault Breaker returns temporarily before Symbiosis, giving the studio another chance to see how that progression works after October's reset. Bungie has not said that December's permanent PvE mode will follow the same structure, but the experiment already points toward the problem it needs to solve.

Permanent PvE needs rewards good enough to keep cooperative players there without turning it into the obvious preparation route for everyone else.

If the safest way to build a strong extraction loadout is spending a few hours fighting AI, players who prefer PvP risk feeling pushed into PvE before every serious deployment. Make the rewards too weak and the opposite group gets a mode with little reason to keep playing once they have seen its encounters.

Vault Breaker's separate kit and controlled flow of rewards offered one answer. A permanent mode has to hold up over much longer periods, especially for someone who wants to stay mostly in PvE rather than treat it as a stop between extraction matches.

Team Deathmatch sidesteps some of that problem by giving players somewhere to enjoy Marathon's combat without tying every match to loot. PvE still needs progression of its 

own, because repeating difficult encounters loses much of its appeal if there is nothing worthwhile waiting at the end.

Getting that balance right will decide whether Marathon genuinely supports different types of players or simply gives extraction players several extra places to spend time.

Marathon is much closer to finding out whether Bungie's plan works. The October reset arrives first, followed by permanent PvE and Team Deathmatch in December. Players who liked the shooting but disliked the pressure of extraction will soon have other places to use it.

Destiny 2 has the potentially more important long-term repair. Restoring The Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind and Forsaken would give new and returning players a way to experience its own history in order.

Bungie now needs to show when that restoration begins, how much of the missing content will return and what order those campaigns will arrive in. After years of removing playable history, the question is whether players can trust that the restored version of Destiny 2 will still be there when they want to come back again.