Once again, Bungie has listened to fans and feedback, resulting in a fairly significant change to the way story content is delivered in the second episode of Destiny 2's expansion Final Shape: major story beats are delivered on a weekly basis. Instead of delivering them all at once at the start of each act, players will be able to engage with the story content "at their preferred pace."

Since 2017, Destiny 2 has operated on a seasonal model, with new activities added with each new season and weekly storytelling that resembles Saturday morning cartoons with occasional plot twists. (Who can forget the finale of "Season of Plunder," in which the final god of pain, Nezalek, was teased?) But players were vocally fed up with the format, in which most weeks ended with the following message: "Please wait until X has completed processing Y before proceeding to Z.

Partly as a result of that feedback, in 2023 the studio announced that it would move to an episodic model after the release of The Final Shape expansion.

However, for many players, the substantive difference between "seasons" and "episodes" was not immediately apparent, except that The Final Shape will consist of three episodes instead of the traditional four seasons. Each episode will be further divided into three acts, each of which will run for six weeks, with new quests, activities, weapons, armor, stories, and other content added over the course of the duration.

This "Episode Cadence" content map shows it more clearly:

So far, the new story content released as part of Echoes follows the time-gate model of past seasons. Essentially, it is like a weekly soap opera. You watch an episode and twiddle your thumbs for seven days until the next episode airs. That's fine for the casual viewer (or player, as the case may be), but some dedicated fans don't want to wait.

In a developer livestream today, Destiny 2 scenario director Alison Luhrs said that will change with the launch of The Final Shape's second act, Revenant, which will be released in early October.

"We've listened to our fans, we've listened to the feedback," Luhrs said. 'So we're going to try something new in Act II. So we're going to try something new in Act 2." [We will drop all three beats in Act 1 at the same time, all three beats in Act 2 at the same time, and all three beats in Act 3 at the same time. The goal is to encourage players to play at their own pace, and if that's what they want, they can get all the content at once.

Luhr's comment about "doing something new in Act 2" was probably a misstatement; Destiny2Team's Twitter account revealed after the stream that this change will be brought to Episode 2: "Our next episode, The Revenant, the entire story of each act will be playable at launch instead of on a weekly basis. Our goal is to give players the opportunity to play at their own pace. We will be closely monitoring feedback as this change is implemented.

While anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to Destiny 2's story over the years will basically not be surprised at all, the immediate reaction to this change has not been entirely positive. The big issue seems to be that time gating is still happening, but will be pushed more to the forefront with this change: the story content for each act will be available at once, which means that avid players will no longer have to wait to access it, though, At the same time, it also means that after completing everything in four days, they will have to wait another five weeks for the next act to arrive, giving them even more time to get restless and think about playing other games.

Luhrs said that more information about the structural changes coming to "Destiny 2: The Final Shape" Episode 2 will be revealed closer to launch. It is scheduled for July 16.