Part Of Destiny 2: Shadowkeep Trailer Leaked Years Ago

Bungie rolled out a new Destiny 2: Shadowkeep trailer during Gamescom yesterday, and it looked great. For some hardcore fans of the game, though, it also looked familiar.

The trailer — which teases Destiny 2's Season of the Undying — makes clear that the time-traveling robot race known as the Vex are once again a threat. This makes sense: we've heard that the raid coming in Destiny 2: Shadowkeep will take place in the Black Garden, which is where Guardians battled Vex enemies at the close of the first Destiny's campaign.

But we've also seen some of this trailer before. In early 2017, footage leaked out of Bungie that was reportedly from a planned Vex expansion for Destiny. That expansion — marked on a leaked version of Destiny's content roadmap — never saw the light of day. But the Gamescom trailer reuses some scenes from it in order to weave a tale about the imminent Vex invasion.

Recycling work isn't something Bungie tends to shy away from. The entire Shadowkeep expansion takes the Moon location from the first Destiny and doubles its size, and there's been talk that other Destiny 2 areas were intended for the first game and were either scrapped or weren't quite ready.

It's unclear at this time if more content from that canceled Vex expansion will make it into Destiny 2. But we wouldn't be totally surprised if Bungie went digging into the first game and brought more areas forward, or decided that something cut in the past could be used elsewhere. The studio no longer has outside help like Vicarious Visions and High Moon to help out, and doesn't have Activision money bankrolling the franchise.

Destiny 2 is a Bungie-developed, Bungie-published product going forward, and that means the company will have to be smart about how new experiences are made and introduced.

Destiny 2: Shadowkeep arrives on Oct. 1 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. A Google Stadia version is set to launch later this year.