Destiny 2 Is Now Down For 24 Hours Ahead Of Shadowkeep Launch

If part of your daily routine involves coming home from work or school and shooting aliens in Destiny 2, we have some bad news for you. Destiny 2 is now down for scheduled maintenance ahead of the Tuesday launch of the game's next expansion, Shadowkeep. And that maintenance is going to last a rather astounding 24 hours.

This is by far the longest amount of time any Destiny title has ever spent in maintenance, and you may be wondering: what's the deal? Why does Bungie need to shut its game down for an entire day? The answer: it's complicated. But let's just say there is more than an expansion coming tomorrow when Shadowkeep arrives, and the Destiny 2 you'll experience tomorrow will look dramatically different from the one we've played the past two years.

For instance, PC players will no longer be launching Blizzard's Battle.net to start the game; instead, they'll be firing up Steam. That change for PC players has required a lengthy migration process to ensure that those who purchased Destiny 2 and its various content drops on Battle.net still have those same pieces of content on Steam. All of that work — which spanned the summer — will come to an end with Shadowkeep, and likely with the folks at Bungie crossing their fingers that everything goes off without a hitch.

There's also New Light to consider. New Light is the free-to-play version of Destiny 2 that includes the base game, the first year of expansions, and a bunch of Year 2 content from the title, all at no cost. That'll be available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One when Shadowkeep goes live tomorrow, and that comes with its own headaches in terms of making sure content that once was premium can now be downloaded and accessed for free.

And it's easy to forget that, over a month ago, Bungie managed to get Destiny 2's Cross-Save feature out the door. From what we've experienced thus far, it's worked flawlessly to sync progress between Battle.net, PSN, and Xbox Live. But there's a chance Bungie wants to make sure the feature also works with Steam, and that it'll also work properly with Google Stadia when Destiny 2 launches on that platform later this year.

When you account for all of that, plus the launch of an entire new expansion and new season of content, you can start to understand why Destiny 2 might require such a substantial period of downtime. Hopefully when tomorrow rolls around, it'll all have been worth it.

Destiny 2: Shadowkeep comes to PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4, and Xbox One tomorrow, Oct. 1.