In June 2020, Bungie made what would come to be remembered as one of the most reviled PR incidents in modern videogames: It announced the content vault. To make Destiny 2’s long-term development more manageable, the studio said, the launch of its Beyond Light expansion coincided with a culling of in-game content, paring away story campaigns, world regions, and activities of all stripes.
The content vault may have been defensible on technical grounds, but the sunsetting of swaths of game content, many of which players had previously paid to access, left Destiny 2 with a reputational stain that never fully washed out. But now, six years after Destiny 2’s downsizing and two months after its end of live service development, its players are learning how to pull some of those lost worlds back out of the vault—not for play, but for preservation.
Over the last few days, videos have started bubbling up on X and YouTube seeming to show Destiny 2 players wandering around now-inaccessible game areas, as well as regions that were never fully implemented in the game. Those videos are the products of work being done by developer stanuwu, who’s building what he calls Destiny 2 Shadowkeep Singleplayer Exploration Mode—an upcoming tool allowing users to load into and explore the environments present in the last Destiny 2 build released before the Beyond Light content vaulting.
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Before you get your hopes up too high, the tool won’t make old builds of Destiny 2 playable. You won’t be replaying any Red War missions or old raids. Instead, it’s purely for exploration and preservation, as stanuwu writes in the Github repo’s readme: “No mechanics are implemented and none will be implemented.” Once players load up the requisite Season of Arrivals build—something you’ll have to provide for yourself—its maps will be empty of enemies, NPCs, and activities.
But it will let users freely navigate the Destiny 2 destinations that have been absent from the game for half a decade, offering additional exploration features like flight and noclip. Personally, I’m eager for a chance to return to the Echo Basin on Io, one Destiny’s more alien-feeling regions that was never revisited after its vaulting in 2020. (Rest in peace, Asher Mir. At least you didn’t have to see all the Star Wars stuff.)
While I’ll welcome the chance to reinhabit some of my old Destiny 2 stomping grounds, stanuwu’s work is more promising as a preservation tool—particularly when Bungie doesn’t seem to have its own method for easily accessing all of its vaulted material. By making those spaces explorable again, it will help ensure that the full breadth of Destiny 2’s environmental art and design will remain accessible, even after someone eventually pulls the live game’s plug.
Stanuwu says he plans to release the tool some time in the next two weeks, and that the tool will be both free and open source once it launches.
