Destiny 2’s Best Campaign Ever Is Free Until Lightfall

Bungie announced on Thursday that Destiny 2’s Witch Queen expansion will be free to access for all players through the weekend. With a flashy new expansion, Lightfall, coming in hot on February 28, it’s a perfect time to give one of the best sci-fi shooters around a second chance. Or a third, or a fourth. Wait. Where are you going? Come back!

It’s a hype time to be playing Destiny 2. Season of the Seraph just concluded with one of the top missions and cinematic cutscenes of the past year, and a new trailer just revealed a huge showdown and some new mysteries coming in Lightfall next week. And while there’s always plenty of good excuses not to dive back into Bungie’s loot shooter, the studio is trying to remove one of those many barriers by making the normally $AU60 Witch Queen campaign briefly free on Xbox Series X/S, PS4/PS5, and PC.

Destiny 2 Witch Queen free weekend

Here’s the exact timing:

Start:

• February 24 at 4 AM AEDT (check your local time here).

End:

• Xbox: February 27 at 6:59 PM AEDT (check your local time here).
• PlayStation, Steam, MS Store, and Epic Games Store: February 28 at 4 AM AEDT (check your local time here).

The Witch Queen is the most Destiny 2 has ever felt like a traditional shooter campaign, by which I mean one with a sort of self-contained story you can play through to a satisfying conclusion while hardly engaging at all with the rest of the live service loot grind. The levels take you through eerie alien pyramids and giant gothic cathedrals, and a Legendary difficulty option means the challenge has been precisely calibrated to make you feel like you’re just getting through by the skin of your teeth.

Bungie has also confirmed that anything you complete and collect during your time with the free version of The Witch Queen will follow you back to the standard free-to-play version of the game. So, in theory, you could get through the 6-8 hour campaign this weekend and come out the other side with a decent arsenal all ready to tackle Lightfall.

I have no idea why Xbox players will lose access to the campaign almost a full day earlier (Bungie did not immediately respond to a request for comment), but those on PC and PlayStation will be able to play up until servers go down for maintenance ahead of Lightfall’s launch. Haven’t touched Destiny since the first game came out in 2014? No problem! The giant white space ball only just woke up eight years later, so you didn’t really miss anything.