An update for the first Destiny game surprisingly appeared on January 5, leaving players baffled. The game’s headquarters, called the Tower, all of sudden became covered in holiday decorations.
This event in the Destiny universe is called The Dawning, which is the game’s version of Christmas. Players were puzzled as to why The Dawning returned to the first Destiny game, considering that developer Bungie stopped supporting it after Destiny 2 was released in 2017. The update is entirely cosmetic, with no new quests, items, or events.
One likely explanation is that this is simply an oversight. YouTuber Breshi dug into the game’s decoration files and concluded that this update was cut content from The Taken King’s Dawning event back in 2016. Breshi theorized that this event was meant to go live on January 5, 2016, but when it was scrapped, Bungie scheduled it to go live on January 5, 2025 as a temporary fix and intended to go back later and remove it.
Despite seven years passing by since Bungie ceased official support, online servers for the first Destiny game are still functional and players are still logging in. It’s likely that Bungie just forgot about this scrapped event, leaving it to suddenly update almost a decade later. Bungie hasn’t responded and it’s unclear whether they’ll take any action such as reverting The Tower back to its original state.
Bungie is still hard at work on Destiny 2, as well as the upcoming Marathon, although it’s unclear when the latter will be released. Bungie reportedly cancelled a spin-off game, codenamed Payback, and it seems like a Destiny 3 is not in the cards. A mobile game, called Destiny Rising, is currently in the works over at NetEase.