Destiny 2: New Light

Project: ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ - Bungie’s major transition of ‘Destiny 2’ into a free-to-play live-service model, introducing a redesigned new player onboarding experience, streamlined early game progression, cross-platform accessibility improvements, and broad systemic updates to support a significantly expanded player base. ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ marked a foundational shift in how ‘Destiny 2’ was packaged, delivered, and sustained as a long-term live service experience.

Final Role / Title: Quality Assurance Engineer (contract) - supported the launch and ongoing development of ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ by partnering with multiple cross-functional feature teams to validate new player onboarding flows, UI/UX updates, gameplay systems, backend services, and live-service functionality across overlapping seasonal and expansion development tracks. Contributed to pre-release sign-off, hotfix validation, and continuous support as ‘Destiny 2’ transitioned into a free-to-play ecosystem.

What is Destiny 2: New Light?

‘Destiny 2: New Light’ was a significant re-factoring of the Bungie-developed first-person shooter video game ‘Destiny 2’. ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ was developed with the intention of lowering the barrier for entry required to play ‘Destiny 2’, as well as make the player experience more cohesive and smoother without the need to play the original ‘Destiny’ and ‘Destiny 2’ storylines (as well as any associated expansions) in linear order. With the release of ‘Destiny 2: New Light’, ‘Destiny 2’ also became a free-to-play experience, and the intro of the game was significantly altered to incorporate elements of the original ‘Destiny’ game’s introductory sequence.

Key features of ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ include:

  • New ‘Destiny 2’ Free-To-Play Experience

  • Updated ‘Destiny 2’ Introductory Sequence

Role & Responsibilities

  • Supported the launch of ‘Destiny 2’s transition to a free-to-play model, validating the redesigned new player onboarding experience, early game UI/UX flows, and progression systems introduced with ‘Destiny 2: New Light’.

  • Co-owned testing and validation for core systems and backend-driven functionality, ensuring that new onboarding content, cross-platform accessibility updates, and service-dependent features integrated cleanly into the live ‘Destiny 2’ ecosystem.

  • Designed and executed complex validation plans across multiple overlapping release branches, contributing heavily to bug filing, triage, prioritization, and cross‑discipline tracking as ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ prepared for launch.

  • 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 new player experience improvements.

  • Partnered with platform teams (Xbox, PlayStation) to support certification and distribution requirements for ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ and its associated 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 throughout the free-to-play transition.

Challenges, Learnings, & Career Impact

My work on ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ began while Bungie was simultaneously closing out the final season of the ‘Destiny 2: Forsaken Annual Pass’ and ramping up development on their next major expansion, ‘Destiny 2: Shadowkeep’. This meant stepping into a uniquely complex moment in ‘Destiny 2’s lifecycle, where the studio was transitioning from a traditional boxed product model to a fully free-to-play, expansion-plus-seasonal pipeline. ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ was the cornerstone of that shift, and it required rethinking how new players entered a game that had already evolved significantly over the previous two years of live updates and narrative evolution.

The biggest challenge during this period was adapting to the scale and ambiguity of the refactor effort. The team needed to redesign the new player experience from the ground up - removing reliance on legacy ‘Destiny’ and early ‘Destiny 2’ story content, streamlining onboarding, and ensuring that first-time players could understand the world, systems, and progression loops without years of narrative context. This required extensive prototyping, rapid iteration, and a willingness to question long-standing assumptions about how ‘Destiny 2’ introduced itself to new players as a free-to-play experience.

Working across multiple parallel releases also pushed me to refine my ability to prioritize effectively in a live-service environment. Each development branch running in parallel - ‘New Light’, ‘Season of Opulence’, and ‘Shadowkeep’ - had its own dependencies, risks, and timelines, and supporting all three required constant context-switching and tight coordination with designers, engineers, and producers. I learned how to surface risks early, how to maintain alignment across distributed teams, and how to keep execution steady even as priorities shifted week to week. This experience deepened my understanding of how to support large-scale systemic changes in a live game and strengthened the production instincts that now define my work.

Where to get Destiny 2: New Light

‘Destiny 2’ was updated to ‘Destiny 2: New Light’ on all major digital video game platforms in October 2019 (current experience may vary).

Destiny 2: New Light - Links & Media