Renegades Brings a Star Wars Style Makeover to Destiny 2
Bungie is leaning hard into spectacle with Destiny 2's Renegades expansion, dropping alongside some wild balance changes and triple digit percent buffs in an effort to win back lapsed players. Renegades is a full blown crossover style Star Wars themed expansion, but Bungie is trying to make sure it still feels like Destiny rather than a throwaway side story.
The team at Bungie even went into its first meeting with LucasFilm asking a simple question: what is the bad version of this? The goal was to avoid anything that would feel like a cheap mashup. Instead, Renegades is meant to slot cleanly into the ongoing storyline that kicked off with The Edge of Fate, while still letting you live out a blaster swinging, pseudo Jedi fantasy.
To sell that fantasy, Bungie has leaned into a scoundrel tone. Under the guidance of The Drifter, the resident morally questionable guide, your Guardian joins a ragtag crew doing under the table work for shady syndicates. Think less noble space wizard and more scruffy gunslinger who still happens to wield the Light.
New Activities, Abilities, and the Lawless Frontier
The core of Renegades gameplay rests on a new activity called Lawless Frontier. This is a three player mode built around doing jobs for the criminal underworld, playable across three maps: Europa, Mars, and Venus. These locations were chosen specifically because of their visual and thematic overlap with classic Star Wars style locales.
Lawless Frontier features several mission types:
- Smuggling style missions for that illicit cargo run fantasy.
- Bounty Hunt style objectives where you track and take down targets.
- Sabotage operations focused on disruption and destruction.
Each run can be configured with invasions on or off. With invasions enabled you risk a one off attack from an enemy Guardian, adding a touch of PvP tension into your PvE runs. Turn it off and you get a pure cooperative PvE experience.
Renegades also introduces expansion specific abilities called Renegades abilities. These temporarily replace your grenade and melee slot for content tied to the expansion. You can use them in the campaign and Lawless Frontier, and they can be upgraded across three power levels.
Like other live service titles that experiment with borrowed power systems, these abilities are locked to the Renegades era of content. You will not be able to bring them into older endgame activities like raids. That design keeps the sandbox contained but also raises questions about whether Bungie should have focused more on permanent upgrades like new aspects and fragments that would persist into future seasons.
Praxic Swords, Exotic Gear, and the Barant Empire
The main story in Renegades revolves around a new Cabal faction called the Barant Empire. They function as a sort of Destiny style stand in for the classic Sith order, with two main antagonists: Dredgen Bael and Premier Lume. On the side of the Light is Aunor, a Praxic Warlock who has previously appeared as a detective type and now basically fills the Jedi mentor slot in all but name.
This leads straight to one of the headline features: the Praxic Sword. Destiny has had swords for years, but this one is different. The Praxic Sword lives in the kinetic weapon slot, which makes it far easier to integrate into more loadouts. You will earn it through a questline tied to Aunor, which almost certainly pulls you through the new Equilibrium dungeon.
The Praxic Sword is clearly designed as Destiny’s answer to a lightsaber. It can:
- Reflect incoming fire back at enemies.
- Be thrown at targets from range.
- Be customized with subclass verbs like Weaken, Jolt, Scorch, and Sever.
Bungie described it as a unique exotic rather than a traditional craftable weapon. You will not be dragging it to Mars to shape it. Instead all customization happens directly on the weapon inspection screen. That customization goes beyond the color of the blade and its crystal and extends into functional tweaks that affect how it plays.
Renegades is also stacked with new exotics meant to deepen both the power fantasy and buildcrafting:
- Heirloom A solar special ammo crossbow inspired by Chewbacca’s bowcaster, perfect for players who want a Star Wars flavored precision weapon.
- Deimosuffusion A Warlock helmet that turns Strand suspend effects into damage over time while also healing you.
- Fortune’s Favor Hunter boots that grant an overshield on kills while at full health, and add more benefits whenever any overshield is active.
- Praxic Vestment Titan chest armor that grants rocket style jumps ending in a knee slam, potentially filling the hole left by the removed Twilight Garrison movement exotic.
- Service of Luzaku A Strand machine gun that turns damaged enemies into nests of threadlings, only the second exotic Strand heavy after Whirling Ovation.
On top of that there are multiple new armor sets across Crucible, seasonal events, and Trials. The Suros themed Crucible set updates the foundry style look for PvP. A Dawning event set lands in Eververse for those who like premium cosmetics. There is also a kendo themed set and new Trials armor that looks stunning and will predictably be painful to earn in high level competitive play.
Can Renegades Fix Destiny 2’s Current Problems?
All of this content is arriving while Destiny 2 is in a messy state. Player counts have been sliding, and Bungie recently admitted that the sweeping systemic changes rolled out in The Edge of Fate were the wrong path for the game. The controversial Portal system that grouped loads of activities into one unpopular hub has been called a complete failure by both the community and press.
Since then Bungie has been slowly rolling out quality of life tweaks, bug fixes, and loot buffs. Progress has been made, but many players still feel that the core framework of the current system is fundamentally flawed. The big question is whether Bungie will rip out those changes or double down on them.
Renegades itself is not going to answer that question. The expansion was too far along in development to fully integrate the massive wave of negative feedback. Instead it is positioned more as a flashy detour a holiday in another sci fi universe while Bungie figures out the long term roadmap. That roadmap is not expected until early 2026.
If you are still invested in Destiny 2 or thinking about jumping back in, Renegades looks like a fun excuse to return for a while. New activities, a kinetic slot lightsaber equivalent, and a pile of exotics all add more toys to the sandbox. Whether that is enough to fix the deeper issues is another story, but as a short term shot of Star Wars flavored chaos, Renegades has plenty to offer when it launches on Tuesday 2 December.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/the-first-thing-bungie-asked-lucasfilm-about-its-star-wars-themed-destiny-2-expansion-was-what-is-the-bad-version-of-this/
