The latest expansion for Destiny 2, titled Lightfall, launched on consoles and Steam earlier this morning. It’s an important and highly anticipated expansion — it is the opening arc of Bungie’s planned conclusion to its long-running MMO shooter, and the bearer of many long-awaited changes from UI to weapon balance. As if Lightfall weren’t already blowing previous expansions out of the water with its community-pleasing feature set, it’s also setting records on Day One. The brand new expac has already eclipsed Destiny 2‘s standing record for concurrent players on Steam by a wide margin.
As reported by SteamDB and Gamespot, Destiny 2: Lightfall rocketed past 300,000 concurrent players at launch. This beats the game’s previous Steam record of around 292,000 players when it first jumped from Battle.Net to Steam back in October 2019.
Yes, I had forgotten the PC version of Destiny 2 was once only accessible via Battle.Net too.
Of course, these are just the PC numbers. Destiny 2 is also available on PlayStations 4 and 5, and Xboxes Series X, S, and One, so what we’re seeing on Steam is a drop in the bucket amongst what it surely a far larger number of concurrent players.
The Destiny 2 base game is free-to-play on all platforms. The Lightfall expansion and its first wave of seasonal content, the Season of Defiance, are paid content but can be purchased together as a bundle. The Lightfall expansion begins the war to save the universe itself as The Witness, the biggest bad in Destiny history, arrives in the Sol system. This expansion puts players in the middle of a cyberpunk-styled Neptunian city under siege from an alien army that threatens to end existence as we know it, a sentence that makes the lifelong sci-fi nerd in my extremely happy to type out.
Among its many changes, players can now harness Darkness as a new Guardian subclass, and zip around Neptune with a grappling hook.
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