Destiny ends and Unreal Engine evolves: May 20-26 gaming news

Hey, readers! Thank you all again for continuing to read Autofill, and for all of the kind and helpful comments you’ve provided over the past several weeks.

It’s been immensely fun planning and realizing this project, and I’ve really enjoyed getting in the habit of compiling and summarizing all of these news pieces week after week.

My hope is that Autofill will continue to grow in subscription numbers and scope, and I’ll need help from everyone reading to accomplish that. Many times when describing the premise of Autofill to people, they’ll say some variation of: “Oh, that sounds like it’s just for me.” There are plenty of folks who enjoy video games to some degree who would probably love this too, so please let your friends know about this newsletter!

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And now, as per usual, the news.

Destiny is dead—at least, for now. After more than eight years, Destiny 2 will wrap up on June 9 with the Monument of Triumph update. The online social shooter will still be playable afterward, but that’ll be the end of studio Bungie’s long-running story that began in 2014 with the original Destiny.

Roughly every year since Destiny 2’s launch, the game has added a massive story expansion, followed by seasonal content. The June 2024 expansion, titled The Final Shape, wrapped up what Bungie called the Light and Darkness Saga. But even after closing the 10-year-long story arc, Bungie had plans to continue the story in the Fate Saga. Two expansions launched in 2025: The Edge of Fate and the Star Wars-themed Renegades.

While more expansions were in the works for 2026, those won’t be happening anymore. And to add insult to injury, reports indicate that layoffs at Bungie are planned. It’s also claimed by some that most employees at Bungie were unaware of the news until it was publicly dropped.

Since 2022, Bungie has been under the ownership of Sony after a $3.6 billion sale. The studio has undergone mass layoffs more than once since then, and Sony recently reported that underperformance from Bungie led to a $765 million impairment loss—basically, Sony’s acquisition hasn’t paid off.

Bungie’s announcement mentioned that the studio will “begin work incubating” its next game projects, but reports indicate that a third Destiny game isn’t actively in the works.

Destiny fans expressed frustration that work on a Destiny 3 didn’t begin right after The Final Shape, and players (along with some ex-Bungie employees) have pointed the finger at former Bungie CEO Pete Parsons for alleged mismanagement of the company and the Destiny franchise.

For now, it looks like Bungie (or whoever will be left at the studio) will continue work on its recently released extraction shooter, Marathon.

Unsurprisingly, long-time players are mourning the news, lamenting the apparent end of the fictional universe that had lasted for nearly 12 years. Players have been reflecting on the communities they built, friends they made, and memories they forged through Destiny over the years.

But several irate Destiny players have taken to Steam to review bomb Marathon, blaming Bungie’s new (and reportedly underperforming) title for the demise of Destiny. We seem to be at the “anger” stage of grief.

Over a hundred thousand people have signed an online petition asking Sony to greenlight a third Destiny game, but it’s hard to imagine that moving the needle given Bungie and Sony’s financial predicaments.

During a Rocket League esports event, Epic Games briefly mentioned the next iteration of its Unreal Engine, which is ubiquitous among game developers. Unreal Engine 6 will soon power Rocket League, though it’s unclear when the engine will launch and when the “new era” of the car soccer game will begin.

In case you don’t know much about what a game engine is, it’s basically the software framework or platform in which games are made. While many companies and studios have their own proprietary engines (EA has Frostbite, Capcom has the RE Engine, etc.), Unreal Engine and Unity are two of the most popular engines widely used by developers. If you want to get into game development, those are the two engines to learn.

In other words, Unreal Engine getting a new update is a big deal, but it’s surprising that Epic Games chose Rocket League as the vehicle for this instead of its big moneymaker, Fortnite.

For context, Rocket League is developed by the studio Psyonix, which Epic Games acquired in 2019. Rocket League came out in 2015, and it runs on Unreal Engine 3, so perhaps the game will be the poster boy for UE6 just to show off how big a jump it’ll be.

Unreal Engine 5 became widely available to developers in 2022, and it’s powered popular games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Marvel Rivals, and Split Fiction, just to name a few.

While it’s been widely adopted by developers, many UE5 games have been criticized for poor performance and issues such as stuttering. UE5 has garnered complaints from developers and players alike, though Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney infamously laid the blame on the developers themselves. Whoever’s to blame, fingers crossed that Unreal Engine 6 will be smoother for devs to work with.

As fascinated as I am with roguelike games, I’ve never considered myself to be good at playing them. I occasionally find myself in phases of obsession with certain games of the genre, beating my head over them with a few runs before putting them down indefinitely. But Going Under stuck with me, and I gave in to the obsession—perhaps because it was an uncanny simulacrum of our current society.

Going Under came out in 2020, but its satire of the tech industry is still timely and very much resonant in 2026. The main character is Jackie, a new intern at a startup, and she’s tasked with exploring the basements (i.e., the game’s “dungeons”), riddled with the remnants of failed startups. There’s a gig economy service run by goblins, a crypto company controlled by the undead, and a dating app managed by literal demons.

Your job, as the player, is to beat the living hell out of everything you see in these dungeons. You’ll go from room to room, picking up anything from swords to office supplies to use as your tools of destruction. Meanwhile, every room, every piece of flavor text, every tool tip, even every loading screen, is brimming with irony and disdain aimed at business lingo and corporate cliches. The bonkers combat and the scornful satire complement each other extremely well, and as fantastical and absurd as it was, Going Under somehow became the most accurate reflection of modern workplaces since Office Space.

Yes, like most roguelikes I’ve played, I was also beating my head over it repeatedly. Going Under reminded me, though, that the strategy with roguelikes isn’t just to brute force every run and hope to get a different result by the end, but rather to commence your runs with purpose—have a goal each time that builds up to your larger objective. It’s a lesson that maybe we can take in real life, especially in a hellish economy and job market.

Catch you next week for another gaming news digest. Hopefully, I’ll have plenty of hours of 007 First Light by then.

Peace out,
Chris Compendio