Destiny 2: The Missing Manual
An unofficial guide for Bungie's Destiny 2

Destiny 2 Buyer's Guide

Last updated: August 14, 2025

Free-to-play Destiny 2 provides a decent amount of content: the New Light, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light campaigns are free, as well as a handful of Raids and a Dungeon.

That said, treat it as a demo, not a complete game. Yes, technically, you can grind in it, and you can also play all the PvP your heart desires (in my case, none, but you do you). But really, it’s there to get people in the door and bolster the matchmaking pools for the grind activities.

If you decide you like this game after playing it, there’s two things to consider buying: the newest expansion(s) and the legacy expansions.

New expansions

Destiny 2’s new content model is to put out two yearly expansions as well as a seasonal update in between them. There are also “Rewards Passes,” which are time limited bonus rewards tracks: four a year, changing over when the expansions and seasonal updates come out. Here, check out this definitely-not-at-all-confusing roadmap:

Roadmap image

So that’s:

  • Edge of Fate expansion (July 15) - Rewards Pass 1
  • Ash & Iron update (Sept 9) - Rewards Pass 2
  • Renegades expansion (Dec 2) - Rewards Pass 3
  • Shadow & Order update (Mar 3) - Rewards Pass 4

If you buy a single expansion, it comes with the active Reward Pass for free, which is a little awkward if you purchase it right before an update or new expansion hits.

An individual expansion is $40, and an individual Rewards Pass is $10. A bundle, the Year of Prophecy, contains both expansions and all four Rewards Passes (though you can’t go back and do past Rewards Passes). This is $80 sticker price.

Personally, I would recommend going for the Year of Prophecy. It’s usually discounted a bit on GMG if you’re on PC, currently $68. That gives you a bit of a discount over the individual expansions and you don’t have to worry about all the Rewards Pass nonsense.

Legacy expansions

For the legacy content, there’s four “packs” and three “expansions” in play. The Forsaken Pack, Shadowkeep Pack, Beyond Light Pack, and 30th Anniversary Pack contain new Raids & Dungeons, additional Exotic quests, and additional Exotics that can be retrieved at the Monument to Lost Light (a grind target, but a relatively easy one). The expansions - Witch Queen, Lightfall, and The Final Shape - all contain those things as well, plus additional campaigns. Lightfall and TFS also unlock the Strand and Prismatic subclasses, respectively.

All of this is available in a single pack - the Legacy Collection (2025). This has a sticker price of $70, which isn’t the worst if you have the money to spend, but the legacy bundles go on sale fairly regularly down to $20 or so, so it might be worth waiting to see if you can get a discount. I would not recommend buying the pieces of this collection individually. Also note that if you go to comparison shop for the Legacy Collection you’l see super cheap keys for old versions - make sure you’re getting the 2025 pack specifically.

If you choose not to buy these expansions up front, you will be locked out of a lot of the tools people use for buildcrafting in this game (various Exotic armor and subclasses). However, this stuff really only starts mattering when you get into high-level content, and even if you decide to embark on a Raid or Dungeon, you can probably get through it just fine with the free subclasses and Exotics.

Dungeon Keys

There is one, additional, annoying content purchase for this game: Dungeon Keys. There are three Dungeon Keys that each get you access to two Dungeons:

  • The Witch Queen Dungeon Key: Duality & Spire of the Watcher
  • Lightfall Dungeon Key: Ghosts of the Deep & Warlord’s Ruin
  • The Final Shape Dungeon Key: Vesper’s Host & Sundered Doctrine

Originally, these Dungeon Keys were bundled in the big “year of content” packs these expansions had (since they were added after the initial expansion releases), but for some reason they’ve stuck around as individual purchases.

They’re $20 (or 2000 Silver) each. That’s a lot! You can buy 6000 Silver for $50 and save a bit if you buy them all at once, and they’re at least cross-platform entitlements rather than per-platform like the expansions, but I’m not going to pretend that $8-10 per Dungeon is a good price. And unfortunately, they seem to never go on sale.

That said: the Dungeons are really fun, and all have a unique Exotic associated with them you can spend some time grinding for, plus a lot of bonus challenges and stuff. Normally I’d recommend buying them once you get deep enough into the game that they sound fun.

As of August 13, I don’t recommend buying these until we know how Bungie plans to integrate Dungeons into the Portal. Adding Dungeon content to the Portal is something Bungie announced last year with the announcement of the Portal, and are supposedly following up on for the September 9 Ash & Iron update.

My cynical assumption is that the Dungeon Keys will stick around as the only way to play “complete” Dungeons with the original(ish) difficulty and gear pools (possibly including the exotics), while individual encounters or simplified versions of the Dungeons will be added to the Portal for free. I would love to be wrong and for Bungie to put complete Dungeons in the Portal for free with their original gear pools, but, well, I’ll believe it when I see it.

I’m a past player - how do I know what I own?

Great question!

You should be able to see from whatever platform you’re playing on whether you own the expansions, as these are not cross-platform. For Steam, I know this is on the Steam DLC page; I assume there are similar pages for Xbox and PlayStation.

Where this gets a bit weird is the “Packs.” When Forsaken’s base campaign was removed from the game, and when Shadowkeep and Beyond Light’s campaigns were made free to all players, their corresponding DLC were retitled as “Packs.” If you owned those expansions, you own those packs. But, at the same time, just because you have access to those campaigns does not mean you own those packs!

Finally, Dungeon Keys. I honestly don’t know any way to see whether you own these without booting up the game and seeing if you can launch the corresponding Dungeons.

I changed platforms, do I have to rebuy everything again?

Destiny 2 has cross-save and cross-platform play, but only a small subset of DLC is cross-platform.

Anything you can buy with Silver - Reward Passes and Dungeon Keys in particular - is cross-platform. Everything else is not. So you would theoretically need to rebuy any expansions that can be bought on platform stores (including the 30th Anniversary Pack) to access their corresponding content on your new platform.

The game will function perfectly fine with you just booting it up and logging into your existing character on a new platform without owning anything though. You’ll have access to everything you already owned. Some things might get weird - I could not tell you, for example, whether Xur would let you buy a new roll of a Shadowkeep armor piece already in your collection if you don’t own the Shadowkeep Pack on that platform - but if you’re mostly just interested in new content, it’s not so bad, and you can just wait for one of the cheap Legacy Collection bundles on your new platform to fill in the missing bits.