ArcheAge Chronicles used Destiny 2’s “What We Fight For” during its public network test, and players caught the track in recorded gameplay footage.
XLGAMES put ArcheAge Chronicles in players’ hands on September 12 for a six-hour Steam network test in the United States and Canada. The studio said the build existed to stress server performance and network stability, with content limited to the early game.
XLGAMES also asked players to avoid livestreaming when possible, though it explicitly allowed streams if viewers were told the footage came from a network test.
ArcheAge Chronicles is often talked about as an MMO, although executive producer Ham Yongjin has called it a “discovery-driven online action RPG” rather than a traditional MMORPG.
Now, it appears some Destiny 2 players have found something rather unexpected in that public test build: music straight from Bungie’s looter shooter.
Destiny 2 Music Was Playing in the ArcheAge Chronicles Test
On September 13, Reddit user JayJet4 posted footage from the ArcheAge Chronicles test in the r/DestinyTheGame subreddit after identifying the background music as “What We Fight For,” specifically the Tower ambient arrangement from Destiny 2.
The post compared the ArcheAge recording beside a Destiny soundtrack of the same cue. Along with this, a separate thread in r/archeage identified the track too.
In the ArcheAge Chronicles footage, the Destiny 2 music begins playing as the player enters an area called “Sunken Ruins.” The cue continues in the background as the player moves through the location, which makes the match much harder to dismiss.
Check out the first clip below.
“What We Fight For” appears on the Destiny 2 Original Game Soundtrack, released in 2017, with Michael Salvatori, Skye Lewin, C Paul Johnson, Rotem Moav, and Pieter Schlosser credited. Spotify also lists “© 2017 Bungie Music Publishing” and “℗ 2017 Bungie Music Publishing” for the release.
What isn’t public is how the track ended up in ArcheAge Chronicles. XLGAMES has not announced a Destiny collaboration or music license, and we couldn’t find a public response from XLGAMES or Bungie addressing the footage as of September 14.
Bungie’s published IP guidelines say the company reserves rights to Destiny music and requires permission for commercial uses of its assets, so there is no basis for treating “What We Fight For” as an open-source track as many users jokingly said in the Reddit thread.
Check out the second clip below.
Archeage Chronicles Playtest is using music ripped from Destiny 2
by u/novumzero in archeage
XLGAMES did warn players that the test used unfinished material. “This test will be conducted using an early development build,” the studio wrote in its September 3 announcement. You can listen to the actual Destiny 2 soundtrack here.
Temp music is therefore a plausible explanation, but the client wasn’t sitting on an internal developer machine. XLGAMES distributed it through Steam to outside players and explicitly allowed them to broadcast footage under stated conditions.
Leaving a recognizable Destiny 2 track in that build is a sloppy miss even if XLGAMES replaces it before release. The footage proves the music was there.
The Game Post has reached out to both XLGAMES and Bungie for comment on the use of the Destiny 2 track in the ArcheAge Chronicles network test and will update this article if either company responds.
Do you think this was temp music that slipped into the public build, or should XLGAMES explain how a Bungie track got there? Let us know in the comments.
