It has been over a year since Destiny 2 last received a new PvP map in Season of the Haunted. It has long been a topic of discussion among the community that the Crucible feels like it’s on life support, and now players are starting to take matters into their own hands.
An impressively official-looking Vex-themed Forge creation in Halo Infinite has gained a lot of traction on the Destiny 2 subreddit today. Sporting an original map layout centered around familiar teleporters and verticality, Cold Snap is the exact kind of PvP map that Destiny 2 fans have been craving to see from the game itself. However, Bungie hasn’t often dedicated resources to such content in an official capacity recently.
“We are so desperate for maps that we are making them in other games,” one user jokingly commented underneath the post. It’s a sentiment echoed by many others in the thread. It was back in May of 2022 that Disjunction—a Crucible map set on Savathun’s Throne World—was released, and the middling reception to it has made the wait for more maps all the more excruciating for many. The last expansion launch to contain any new Crucible maps at all was Shadowkeep back in 2019, underlining just how scarce PvP content has become.
Though Destiny 2 devs used to be capable of supporting the game’s PvE and PvP environments equally, not everyone is convinced this is still the case. Under a comment frustrated at Halo Infinite getting a Destiny 2 PvP map before Destiny itself did, another reply simply stated “because Halo is a mostly PvP game.” They were supported by another user, who stressed how the community negatively responds “about ‘having to do’ PvP in Destiny 2 to get some items,” adding that “it’s no wonder Bungie doesn’t invest more time into adding more into a mode that gives poor feedback.”
A new original Destiny 2 Crucible map is scheduled to release fairly soon with the next season, and this one is teased to be set inside the Vex Network that Season of the Splicer introduced. Other than that, Bungie has only re-released old maps from the vanilla Destiny and the Destiny 2 content vault to try and keep the Crucible playlists invigorated. It isn’t a complete stoppage of content production by any means, but as u/Ashen8th puts it, “two and a half years [after Beyond Light] and Halo gets a Europa-themed map while Destiny still has zero plans to add one”
It isn’t a surprise to see Bungie redirecting their PvP development efforts into the recently announced Marathon reboot and their other rumored project. However, it’s clear there is still a hunger in the Destiny 2 community for more resources dedicated to the Crucible experience in 2023 beyond the limited scope currently afforded to it.
