Destiny 2: Beyond Light is a major expansion for Destiny 2, a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie. Representing the fifth expansion and the fourth year of extended content for Destiny 2, it was released on November 10, 2020. Players travel to Jupiter's icy moon Europa to confront the Fallen Kell Eramis, who plans to use the power of the Darkness to save her people and take revenge on the Traveler back on Earth, as she and many Fallen believe that the Traveler had abandoned them before the Golden Age of humanity. The player's Guardian also obtains this new Darkness-based power as a subclass called Stasis, which features new ice-based abilities that can freeze enemies.
The expansion saw the return of the Exo Stranger from the original Destinys (2014) campaign, as well as Variks from the original game's House of Wolves (2015) expansion, both of which guide the Guardian on Europa. Furthermore, Beyond Light added other content across the game, including missions, player versus environment locations, player gear, weaponry, and a raid. Beyond Light was the first expansion of Destiny 2 to be released on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S platforms. Bungie had described this expansion as the beginning of a new era for the Destiny franchise. On June 4, 2024, the Beyond Light campaign became free-to-play, including access to Stasis, with the rest of the expansion's content repackaged as the Beyond Light Pack.
In addition to the expansion, some of the less played locations and activities from the first three years of Destiny 2 were cycled out of the game into what Bungie called the Destiny Content Vault (DCV), which also included all areas from the original Destiny. This was done to cut down on the install size of the game, but Bungie planned to cycle areas in and out of the DCV, updating older destinations to fit the current state of the game. Earth's Cosmodrome from the original game returned alongside Beyond Light. This location mainly serves as the introductory and tutorial destination for first-time players of the New Light free-to-play base game with a full questline, but it was also utilized for seasonal content. The original game's "Vault of Glass" raid also returned during Season 14, updated with Destiny 2 mechanics.
Beyond Light had four seasonal content offerings for Year 4 of the game: Season of the Hunt, which was available alongside Beyond Light, Season of the Chosen in February 2021, Season of the Splicer in May 2021, and Season of the Lost in August 2021, which lasted over six months (26 weeks) due to the delay of the next expansion, The Witch Queen, to February 2022. Due to the lengthened time, the Bungie 30th Anniversary Pack was released in December 2021, which added a new dungeon, a six-player activity, and gear inspired by Bungie's previous games as a celebration of the developer's 30th anniversary. With the release of The Witch Queen, this seasonal content was removed from the game with the exception of the Battlegrounds activity from Season of the Chosen and the content of the Bungie 30th Anniversary Pack; the Battlegrounds activity was merged under the Vanguard Operations playlist. The Astral Alignment activity from Season of the Lost was re-added in December 2025 as an arena activity.
The seasons bridged the events of Beyond Light to the next expansion, The Witch Queen. Following Beyond Lights campaign, Season of the Hunt centered on the Hive God of War Xivu Arath's attempt to conquer the Sol System by raising an army of corrupted "Wrathborn" using mysterious monoliths, with the Guardian assisting Osiris (who lost his Ghost, Sagira), The Spider, and the newly resurrected Guardian, Crow, who was formerly Prince Uldren Sov, to hunt the Wrathborn. In Season of the Chosen, the Cabal Empress Caiatl demanded that Commander Zavala's Vanguard bow to her and form an alliance against the Hive, but Zavala refused, prompting a shadow war of ceremonial combat to defeat her growing War Council and prevent the Last City's subjugation. Season of the Splicer saw the Vex plunge the Last City into an "Endless Night", requiring Ikora Rey and the Vanguard to recruit Mithrax, a Sacred Splicer and Kell of the House of Light, to hack the Vex Network and expunge the Vex. In Season of the Lost, Queen Mara Sov returned to the Dreaming City to exorcise her captive, the Witch Queen Savathûn, where in exchange for removing Savathûn's parasitic Worm, Savathûn promised to return Osiris, who she had secretly been possessing for months.
Gameplay
Beyond Light maintains the basic gameplay of Destiny 2; the player, as a Guardian using a power called Light that gives them superhuman abilities and the ability to be regenerated, fights in a mix of first-person and third-person shooter gameplay in both player versus environment and player versus player activities in a massively multiplayer online game world. Cooperative activities include various bounties, story-related missions, "strikes," dungeons, raids, open-world public events, and special seasonal events, while competitive matches include matches with other Guardians in the Crucible or a team versus team mode in the Gambit arena. Players are rewarded with both new weapons and armor as well as various materials that are used as a form of in-game currency to gain or upgrade other equipment. Players can have up to three active characters, one from each of the game's main classes: Titan, Hunter, and Warlock, each that has several subclasses based on the type of elemental damage they select prior to missions. Players seek to improve their character's overall Power level—a rough average measuring the quality of weapons and gear they have collected—that allows them to take on more challenging activities in the game.
Prior to Beyond Light, there were three main elemental damage types, Arc, Solar, and Void, which are rooted in a power called Light. Beyond Light introduces a fourth elemental damage type called Stasis, which creates ice and cold-based damage, and is rooted in the power of the Darkness. Each class gets a new subclass for Stasis abilities: the Warlock's Shadebinder has them using an icy staff that shoots projectiles and unleashes an explosion to freeze and shatter enemies through their "Winter's Wrath" super, the Hunter's Revenant utilizes dual ice kamas that they can throw and create icy storms to trap and freeze enemies through their super "Silence and Squall", while the Titan's Behemoth uses frozen gauntlets to allow for melee destruction and unleash icy shockwaves on the ground that freezes enemies through their super "Glacial Quake". Further, other abilities of this subclass can be customized by gaining a range of Aspects and Fragments through quests, and assigning them to the core abilities. For example, players can opt to have their grenades explode into a wall of crystals, or create a field that slows and freezes enemies stuck within it through these Aspects and Fragments. Game director Luke Smith said that these new customization options for the Stasis subclasses are an "experiment...to see how this goes", with Bungie later confirming that Light classes would receive similar customization updates within The Witch Queen expansion. Stasis powers were modified multiple times through the months after Beyond Light release, notably tuning the powers' use in player-vs-player matches to reduce the impact of freezing effects. According to Kevin Yanes, one reason to introduce Stasis was to address the issue of aggressive play in the Crucible prior to Beyond Light, and knew they would have to adjust it over time as they saw how players adapted to Stasis.
Beyond Light was the first major revision to the larger game universe. Five of the game's destinations that were available during the first three years of Destiny 2—Titan, Io, Mars, Mercury, and the Leviathan ship and their associated campaigns and other activities—as well as activities and content from Year 2's Annual Pass, were removed from the game and placed in the Destiny Content Vault (DCV). A wholly new destination, Jupiter's moon Europa, was added to the game as well as a subset of Earth's Cosmodrome, previously featured in the first Destiny, along with some of the Destiny Cosmodrome activities reworked for Destiny 2, as well as the addition of two Lost Sectors in areas not previously accessible in the original game. While Bungie had planned to expand out the Cosmodrome to the full version from the original Destiny over the course of Year 4 (excluding the Plaguelands location from the original game's Rise of Iron expansion), Bungie later stated during Season 13 that they had cancelled these plans in favor of focusing on future new content.
A new raid mission, "Deep Stone Crypt", was released on November 21, 2020, during Season 12, and takes place in the Clovis Bray facility located on Europa, which is the birthplace of the Exos. Subsequently, a number of new activities on Europa were unlocked for all players once the raid was completed. The "Vault of Glass" raid, which was the very first raid of the original Destiny, was added on May 22, 2021, during Season 14 for all players to access. It features the same story as the original, but accounts for differences in Destiny 2, such as gameplay mechanics and newer Vex enemy units, as well as a new starting instance to replace the absent Venus destination that had been present in the first game (players begin the raid in the same location as the original, but cannot explore Venus beyond this area). A node called Legends was added on the Destinations tab of the Director, which is where "Vault of Glass" is accessed from, and serves as the hub for any other legacy content that Bungie may unvault in the future. Previous Destiny strikes "The Devil's Lair", and "Fallen S.A.B.E.R.", and "The Will of Crota" were added with the introduction of the Cosmodrome, with "The Will of Crota" renamed as "The Disgraced" and reworked to line up with the "New Light" story line for new players. Another new strike, "Proving Grounds", was added during Season 13. Other major gameplay changes include: The shell for the player's Ghost, which in-game provides an A.I. companion for the Guardian and aids in respawning the character if they die, can now be customized with modifications, similar to other armor pieces introduced with the Armor 2.0 system. Prior to Beyond Light, while the player could obtain Ghost shells with various properties, these were typically fixed or had some random generated perks given to them. Bungie stated this was intended to give even further customization options to the character. The hybrid PvE/PvP Gambit mode that was added with Forsaken (2018) dropped the original three-round mode in favor of the single-round Gambit Prime mode (renamed as Gambit) that was introduced during Year 2's Season of the Drifter (Season 6), tweaking some of the enemies that spawn in the mode and other timing factors. Impacts of armor from the Reckoning (a PvE arena activity that was also introduced in Season of the Drifter), which could boost certain Gambit gameplay factors, such as being able to summon more powerful blockers to the opponent's side of the map, were reworked into armor mods.