Destiny 2: Year of Prophecy
Year of Prophecy is the name Bungie gave to Destiny 2's eighth content year, and to the bundle that collects its two paid expansions, The Edge of Fate and Renegades. It isn't a standalone game. You install the regular Destiny 2 client, and this package unlocks the campaigns, destinations, endgame activities and gear built on top of it.
The two halves feel like different games wearing the same armor. The first is a slow-burn mystery on an isolated planetoid, closer to puzzle-platforming than to a run-and-gun shooter campaign. The second casts your Guardian as an outlaw taking jobs from criminal syndicates, with Star Wars influences developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- Kepler rewards curiosity - Most earlier destinations in Destiny 2 were open patrol zones. Kepler works more like a Metroidvania: campaign missions hand out dark matter abilities, and older areas hide paths you can only reach once you have the right one.
- Matterspark turns the Guardian into a rolling Arc ball that slips through narrow tunnels and damages enemies on contact. Reviewers at CGMagazine likened it to the Morph Ball from Metroid Prime.
- Then there is the Relocator Cannon, Eliksni dark matter tech for teleporting between marked points.
- With Mattermorph, Strand and dark matter combine to reshape objects into platforms and new routes.
- A lightsaber you forge yourself - The Praxic Blade is a Kinetic Exotic sword earned during Fire and Ice, a story mission set on Europa. Blocking deflects incoming projectiles, and the heavy attack throws the blade; hold the button and it flies in a straight line, returning when you let go. Customization paths become available through bounties and syndicate reputation after the campaign, and each one alters how the weapon behaves in combat.
- Endgame for six players or three - Full fireteams get The Desert Perpetual, a raid set in unknown space inside the Nine's realm, later joined by a harder Epic version. Smaller groups can tackle Equilibrium, a three-player dungeon in which you work with the Praxic Order to stop Dredgen Bael's acolytes from looting a temple.
Story and Lore
With the Light and Darkness saga closed out by The Final Shape, Bungie pointed the plot at the Nine. These beings of dark matter are trapped in the gravity wells of the Sun and the planets, and for years they stayed in the background, speaking through an Emissary or through Xûr, the Exotic gear merchant.
The Edge of Fate begins with an invitation in an unlikely form: a 21st-century subway car arrives to carry the Guardian to Kepler, a planetoid in the Oort cloud. A singularity holds Kepler together, and its collapse would destroy the entire solar system. Lodi, a human from Earth's Space Age who washed up among the Aionian colonists living there, helps track down the strangelets needed to stabilize it. Two rival forces want that singularity too. The Eliksni House of Exile worships it as a god, and Maya Sundaresh, a Golden Age scientist now ruling a Vex faction as the Conductor, intends to take the Nine's power for herself.
Renegades picks up a few months later. The Vanguard has classified everything that happened on Kepler, and the Drifter refuses to let it rest. Patrolling on his own, he finds the Barant Imperium, a Cabal faction that set up a base on Mars seemingly overnight and that he suspects the Nine are backing. Without official support, he recruits a crew of outcasts, and the Guardian soon ends up working out of Tharsis Outpost, the hub of the Martian underworld.
A few threads tie the year together:
- The Nine's prophecy, spoken at the end of The Edge of Fate, hangs over the second campaign.
- Renegades borrows its moral map from Star Wars: the Praxic Order plays the role of the Jedi, and the Dredgen stand in for the dark side.
- Ash & Iron, a free mid-year update, returns to Earth's Plaguelands from Rise of Iron, where the Conductor's Vex fight beside Red Legion Cabal pulled from another timeline.
Gameplay and Mechanics
At its core this is still a first-person looter shooter: you play as a Hunter, Titan or Warlock, mix gunplay with elemental abilities and chase better gear across PvE and PvP activities. On The Edge of Fate's release day, every player's Power level was reset to 10.
Activities and difficulty
The Edge of Fate introduced the Portal, an activity screen grouped into Solo Ops, Fireteam Ops, Pinnacle Ops and Crucible Ops. Optional modifiers raise the challenge in exchange for better drops. The Portal proved unpopular, and Monument of Triumph restored the classic Director map, keeping Portal activities available as nodes along its bottom edge.
Gear and buildcrafting
- Weapons drop at tiers 1 to 5 depending on how difficult the activity was. Higher tiers roll stronger stats and enhanced perks, and tier 5 copies get a unique look.
- Each armor piece belongs to one of six archetypes. An archetype favors two stats, with a third picked at random from the rest.
- Legendary armor from this year onward comes with set bonuses that activate at two and four matching pieces.
- A new heavy weapon type, the crossbow, fires a single bolt you can recover after the shot.
The Lawless Frontier
Once the Renegades story ends, the Frontier makes territories on Mars, Venus and Europa available. None of them has free-roam patrol. You choose a territory, team up with as many as two other Guardians and accept a timed job:
- Bounty hunts, which chase down a notorious outlaw.
- Smuggling runs that move contraband out of the area.
- Sabotage, where you destroy generators, plant explosives or call airstrikes on enemy assets.
A job only pays out if your team survives the exfil at the end. Each day one territory is contested, and the bounties you complete there improve the odds that your aligned syndicate takes control of it. Reputation earns powers that only work in the Frontier, such as calling down an air strike or summoning an armored walker. Other players can invade your run, too, and an invader keeps hunting until they die three times or the clock expires.
Renegades also debuted Blasters, the weapon archetype whose heat system replaces magazines entirely. Their stat sheet tracks heat generated, cooling efficiency and vent speed instead of reload time.
Free updates during the year
Two content beats arrived at no cost for every player. Ash & Iron added Reclaim, a three-player activity about retaking ground on Earth, brought Iron Banner back from hiatus and later delivered the Heliostat Exotic mission, which rewards Wolfsbane, a sword that swings like a battle axe. Monument of Triumph went broader, with a permanent Pantheon boss gauntlet, Sparrow Racing League as a permanent activity, an hourly Distortions public event on corrupted destinations and catalysts for every Exotic weapon that lacked one.
Characters and Factions
The cast mixes long-running Destiny figures with faces created for this year.
- Lodi – Kepler's reluctant guide, and over the course of the year the voice through which the Nine increasingly speak.
- Ikora Rey, the Warlock Vanguard, leads the expedition into the Oort cloud.
- Orin used to serve as the Nine's Emissary. Having walked away from that role, she reaches Kepler with insider knowledge of their plans.
- The Drifter – Gambit's ringmaster becomes the ringleader of the Renegades crew, while his Ghost, Blue, works on decrypting the stolen Imperium plans.
- Aunor Mahal is a Warlock of the Praxic Order and the Guardian's teacher in the ways of the Praxic Blade.
- Eris Morn and Eido join the crew as familiar allies.
- Spider, the Eliksni crime boss, brokers your introductions to the syndicates.
- Dredgen Bael commands the Barant Imperium from behind a black mask. He shares a past with the Drifter in the Shadows of Yor, and his look and role draw heavily on Kylo Ren.
On the faction side, Kepler is contested by the House of Exile under Archon Levaszk and by the Nessian Schism, the Vex faction answering to the Conductor. Renegades swaps those for a different balance of power. The Barant Imperium, modeled on the Galactic Empire and its stormtroopers, is the main enemy, while three outlaw syndicates based at Tharsis Outpost compete for the Frontier: a Cabal outfit run by Psions, a Fallen gang and Vex that broke free from the Conductor's control.
Editions
Each expansion was sold on its own as well as in bundles.
The Edge of Fate (Standard) is the entry point for the first half of the year. It covers the campaign on Kepler, The Desert Perpetual raid and one Rewards Pass.
Renegades (Standard) works the same way for the second expansion. You get the Renegades campaign, access to the Lawless Frontier, the Equilibrium dungeon and the Lawless Rewards Pass (Season 28). The Edge of Fate isn't required to buy it.
The Year of Prophecy Edition combines both expansions in one purchase, with their raid and dungeon. It also includes premium Rewards Pass tracks for both expansions and both major updates, which standalone buyers would otherwise pay for separately.
The Year of Prophecy Ultimate Edition keeps everything from the Year of Prophecy Edition and adds a set of bonus items:
- The New Land Beyond Exotic sniper rifle, with its ornament and catalyst
- An Exotic emote and the Enneachord Exotic Sparrow
- The Dark Side Legends armor ornaments: General Grievous for Hunters, Darth Vader for Titans and Kylo Ren for Warlocks
- A Secret Stash delivered with each seasonal release, holding one Exotic cosmetic, one Exotic Cipher, two Ascendant Alloys and three Ascendant Shards