The current game director of Destiny 2, Joe Blackburn, spoke about the state of Destiny 2 in a personal blog post. In a concrete 5300 words, he teased many upcoming changes to the loot shooter. He revealed concise details about how players are expected to be challenged without getting bored.
What did the head of Bungie announce? On the evening of February 13, 2023, Destiny 2 revealed to its players in the official “State of the Game” blog post a huge outlook into the future, marking the end of the great light and darkness saga.
Joe Blackburn, the game director of Destiny 2 himself, wrote 5300 words about where the loot shooter is planned to develop in Year 6. Bungie not only laid out its content plans for the new DLC.
- It was revealed how they plan to solve the problem of “There’s just not enough to do” in the future.
- Why Guardians will have to be significantly weaker again after Lightfall.
- What will specifically change in PvP and how they plan to keep this mode alive.
- How they plan to enhance weapon random drops compared to crafted deep sight versions.
Additionally, the Destiny 2 head revealed the names of 2 Lightfall seasons.
- The first season 20 will be the “Season of Resistance”.
- The following season 21 will be called “Season of Depth”.
Destiny 2 wants to bring back strong challenge
Bungie has recognized this problem: A huge problem in Destiny 2 is that players quickly get bored with the content. They rush through the content and are already fed up with it after a few repetitions.
Bungie’s game director Joe Blackburn believes that this problem cannot be solved with another strike or an additional map. Because Destiny 2 already has an incredible amount of content.
The core problem, he sees, is that not all content in Destiny 2 is as challenging or engaging as one would like. Additionally, it often seems to be the solo players who lose interest twice as fast because they lack an entertaining team.
This is the plan against Guardian arrogance and boredom:
- Various activities will become more challenging. For this, Bungie will adjust a difficulty level regulator that determines how strong players can be compared to the enemies they fight.
- This difficulty level regulator will also be present in the Vanguard Ops playlist. However, it will not be set as strongly there.
- The new destination Neomuna will also receive this difficulty adjustment so that the patrolling enemies feel more threatening and deserve your attention.
Big changes for the Nightfalls: Additionally, Joe Blackburn announced big news for the Nightfalls.
- The currently easiest strikes in the game, “See the Shadow” and “Weapon Dealer”, have been revamped for Lightfall to match the level of “The Light Blade” and “Trial Grounds”. This should provide a proper boost for these old challenges.
- A selection of battlegrounds will be converted into a Nightfall.
- Here Bungie will let you find out in Season 20 how the hardest loot battleground on Mars feels as a Nightfall with the escalation protocol. This will also change the pinnacle challenges that you need to complete for the gold title “Conqueror”.
- In each season, more battlegrounds are planned to be added to the Nightfalls.
For balance, Guardians must also become weaker: To prevent the changes mentioned above from being swallowed by the overly strong space abilities of the Guardians, Bungie’s plan also includes further weakening the players.
Don’t worry, you will still remain an ultimate monster-killing machine in the future. Only the power creep will be contained, as you can read in detail in this MeinMMO article by our Destiny author Christos:
The grind should no longer be so annoying starting from Season 20
The changes in Lightfall will also go in a direction that makes it easier for you to decide what to play. If you were frustrated in Witch Queen every season that you had to painstakingly scrape together Umbral Energy only in certain seasonal activities, you can soon skip that in Lightfall.
- In the future, no one will need to farm Umbral Energy starting from Lightfall.
- Destiny 2 will introduce season keys. They will drop randomly and allow openings of the bonus chest in seasonal activities.
- Those without a key will benefit from improved loot from the base chest.
- Umbral Engrams will be replaced by seasonal Engrams that are stored with the seasonal vendors. This gives your inventory more space.
Destiny 2 receives “Best of” mission rotator
More diverse and old content: With all these changes, Destiny 2 should first be more pleasant to play but still offer tough challenges.
Over the seasons, as before, further experiences will come to Year 6 in Lightfall, which will be related to different themes. Pirate or cowboy seasons in Witch Queen were apparently just the beginning.
This is how Bungie plans to tackle the “There just isn’t enough to do” problem:
- Within Lightfall, Bungie plans to create new, exotic missions. How many new ones have been left open by the game director.
- Starting from Season 22, there will also be a rotation for already known exotic missions, just like currently seen with the legacy content for raids and dungeons.
Will the Whisper return as well? With the rotator for classic missions, many players have wondered if the option for activities like “The Whisper” or “Hour Zero” will return. These two exo missions are considered absolute highlights of the community. It is certainly not entirely excluded. But currently, it does not seem that way. Technically, the reintegration of these popular missions into the game also doesn’t seem to be the easiest task.
PvP players will remain guinea pigs for now
How Lightfall will change PvP: A fresh breeze has long been missing in PvP, and this breeze does not seem to refresh with Lightfall either. Although Joe Blackburn believes that player-versus-player combat must remain a core part of the Destiny 2 experience.
This is what Bungie has planned for PvP in Lightfall:
Season 20 – “Season of Resistance”.
- Bungie plans to introduce a mode with the provisional name “Checkmate Control”. It is supposed to drastically change the sandbox of the Guardians, such as weapon damage, ability duration, and even ammunition.
- The mode “Countdown” will return to PvP as a respawn variant called “Countdown: Rush”. In this mode, players must detonate or defuse both bombs on the map before the round ends.
- The PvP modes “Rift”, “Outbreak”, and “Fortress” are coming to the ritual list.
This is what the remaining seasons will bring for PvP: Season 21 – “Season of Depth” will bring the map “Core Meltdown” into PvP in the second Lightfall season. Season 22 will introduce a brand new vex network map for PvP players. And the final Season 23 will bring back an old PvP map called “Citadel” into the Crucible.
Anyone expecting more should keep an eye on the PvP labs. As Joe Blackburn revealed, they plan to bring back more classic and new modes there later in the year.
Furthermore, Bungie wants to achieve a balance between fair matches and good connections in Lightfall. Here, the feature “Dynamic Skill Tiers” has been mentioned, ensuring that players of all skill levels always have high-quality connections in their matches. Ultimately, this should also lead to a more balanced skill distribution among Guardians in PvP matches.
Destiny 2 pits weapons crafting against random drops
This problem arose with weapon crafting: With the Witch Queen DLC, Bungie introduced weapon crafting. Players could now create selected weapons and not only determine their perks themselves but also enhance them.
This system added some extra space in the vaults. Moreover, it enabled Guardians to react flexibly to any meta by simply reshaping their weapon.
However, these advantages also had disadvantages. Why grind for another weapon when I can easily build one that also has enhanced perks? Thus, the new weapon crafting system gradually killed the joy of a great perk random drop.
To stop the crafting downward spiral, Destiny 2 plans to change the weapon crafting system in the Lightfall year as follows:
- A weapon with random perks can now also be enhanced in Lightfall so that it can reach the full power of a crafted weapon.
- By enhancing, you can level up your dropped weapon, use mementos, and gain access to enhanced perks and traits that have dropped on that weapon. You will start with the new raid master weapons from Season 20.
- Red borders of deep sight will only be seen if that weapon is useful for you. So if you still need it to complete a blueprint.
- Completing blueprints will also become easier. Starting from Season 21, deep sight can be activated for any weapon for which there is no weapon crafting progress.
What else was announced? Besides these changes, Joe Blackburn also mentioned some smaller details. For example, they will expand the text chat a bit and aim to connect the Guardians better with each other.
The biggest option that could have allowed this has been scrapped. The LFG system will not be available to players immediately at the start of Lightfall. This initially sounded different, but apparently, they had to change their plans for it.
- The fire team finder as an integrated LFG system in Destiny 2 will only be available to players later in Lightfall. When exactly remained open.
This has revealed many plans for Destiny 2 by Joe Blackburn. This open disclosure will also be a significant strategy for Bungie moving forward. Players will be informed more often and earlier about upcoming content so that everyone knows what will broadly happen. Surprises will thus be somewhat rarer and will, in a way, give the Guardians back the old roadmap system.
Which change did you like best in the “State of the Game” blog post? Or what disappointed you the most? Feel free to leave us a comment here on MeinMMO.
Today, Destiny 2 will also experience a server downtime. Here you will find all the important info regarding that:
Destiny 2: Server Down for Hotfix 6.3.0.9 on 14.02. – All times and info
