Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass

Project: ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ - a year-long sequence of seasonal content releases following the launch of ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken’, delivering new activities, exotic quests, narrative beats, power progression updates, sandbox tuning, and rotating endgame challenges across the “Season of the Forge,” “Season of the Drifter,” and “Season of Opulence” releases. The Annual Pass represented Bungie’s first major shift toward a more frequent, live-service‑driven content cadence with ‘Destiny 2’.

Final Role / Title: Quality Assurance Engineer (contract) - supported the launch and ongoing development of the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ releases by partnering with multiple cross-functional feature teams to validate seasonal content drops, UI/UX updates, gameplay systems, backend services, and live-service deployments across overlapping release branches. Contributed to pre‑release sign-off, hotfix validation, and continuous live-service support throughout the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ cycle.

What is Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass?

The ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ is a collection of seasonal content expansions for the Bungie-developed first-person shooter video game ‘Destiny 2’. The ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ was introduced alongside the release of the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken’ expansion in late 2018. The ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ acted as Bungie’s initial seasonal content model for ‘Destiny 2’, and included three premium downloadable content packages: “Season 5: Season of the Forge“ (AKA “Black Armory”; released December 2018), “Season 6: Season of the Drifter“ (AKA “Joker’s Wild”; released March 2019), and “Season 7: Season of Opulence“ (AKA “Penumbra”; released June 2019).

Key features of the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ include:

  • New Endgame Challenges

  • New Locations, Characters, & Lore

  • New Exotics, Weapons, Armor, & Vanity Rewards

  • New Pinnacle Activities & Triumph Records

Role & Responsibilities

  • Supported the release and ongoing iteration of the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’, validating seasonal content drops, UI/UX updates, exotic quests, power progression changes, and rotating endgame activities across the “Season of the Forge,” “Season of the Drifter,” and “Season of Opulence” releases.

  • Co-owned testing and validation for core systems and backend‑driven mechanics, ensuring that new seasonal features, sandbox tuning updates, and service-dependent activities integrated cleanly into ‘Destiny 2’s live environment without disrupting existing gameplay loops.

  • Designed and executed complex validation plans across multiple overlapping release branches, contributing heavily to bug filing, triage, prioritization, and cross-discipline tracking throughout the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ development cycle.

  • Coordinated feature-specific and cross-team playtests to evaluate in-progress builds, surface systemic risks, and provide actionable feedback to designers, engineers, and producers working on seasonal content and live-service updates.

  • Partnered with platform teams (Xbox, PlayStation) to support certification and distribution requirements for seasonal patches, hotfixes, and content updates, ensuring timely approval and deployment across all storefronts.

  • Actively participated in daily stand-ups, sprint planning, milestone reviews, and post-mortems, providing QA insight that informed prioritization, risk assessment, and cross-team alignment across the entire ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ content pipeline.

Challenges, Learnings, & Career Impact

As ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken’ shipped, our team shifted immediately into supporting the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ - a year‑long sequence of seasonal content drops that demanded a dramatically faster development cadence than traditional expansion work. Bungie’s live-service model required delivering meaningful new activities, quests, tuning updates, and endgame challenges every three months, all while maintaining the stability and quality expected from a top‑tier live game.

Adapting to this rapid release cycle was one of the most significant challenges of my time at Bungie. It was common for teams to be working on two or three seasonal releases in parallel, each at a different stage of development and each with its own dependencies, risks, and technical constraints. I had to learn how to quickly assess competing priorities, understand the unique needs of each release branch, and support fast iteration without sacrificing quality or stability.

This environment taught me how to operate effectively inside a complex, multi-track live-service pipeline. I learned how to manage near-constant context switching, how to coordinate seamless hand-offs between interdependent teams, and how to surface risks early so designers and engineers could make informed decisions under tight timelines.

My experience supporting the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ strengthened my ability to bring clarity to ambiguity, maintain alignment across distributed teams, and keep execution steady even as priorities shifted week to week.

Where to get Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass

The ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ was originally released to all major digital video game platforms and retailers in September 2018 (current availability may vary).

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