In Destiny there will be game content delivered even in 2016, not just events.
Bungie has relieved the waiting community in the Weekly Update.
Eric Osborne, the Marketing Director of Destiny, said: Players expected Bungie to announce “Darkness Lurking II: Darker and More Lurking” last weekend, but instead there was an event, the Sparrow thing.
This, and the lot of talk about events lately, has made players nervous, that now nothing will come to Destiny besides events. Osborne disagrees. They have quite a bit planned for 2016: Besides events, also things that can be found directly in the “Director”, in the activity map.
“2016 is going to be great, we are working on stuff!” Osborne had already tweeted on Tuesday. Somehow that wasn’t enough for everyone as reassurance, so they will now be clearer.
The biggest thing you’ve seen since the Taken King
There is a big whiteboard in a conference room at Bungie. There you would find in scribbles and sticky notes the planned development for Destiny’s “near future.” Events, activities, game content, and features are listed there – designed to entertain and reward the player base in 2016.
The first thing they will do “early in 2016” will be about as big as the “Halloween” event. But the second planned thing will be much bigger than anything seen since “The Taken King”. At the time of the second “thing”, they are also planning a noticeable update to the world and sandbox in Destiny.
In year 2 they don’t want to wait 5 months between game content anymore, but deliver “new experiences” significantly faster.
What all this exactly is, they are not revealing yet, they want to let the Sparrow event first have an effect. However, much is already planned from winter to spring – they have prepared announcements across various channels. Osborne also speaks of quarterly “sandbox” updates.
Sandbox updates are likely to refer to balance changes. It is also interesting that Osborne speaks of “winter to spring” – indirectly confirming what the birds are singing from the rooftops: an expansion, code-named Destiny 2, is planned for fall 2016.
What does Bungie say about the 0.04% thing
We reported this afternoon about what was going on with the number chaos during the patch. It was all up and down, patch notes had to be updated, the numbers were not reflected in the game.
Weaponsmith Jon Weisnewski commented and said: This has all gone very badly. They had “outdated numbers” in the announcement and in the patch notes due to an error, but were using completely different ones. The developer team was already thinking about the next big thing – and nobody noticed what exactly was in the patch notes until the community raised the alarm.
And the numbers players see in Destiny are not the “raw numbers” that developers work with – it is modified by activity, light level, difficulty, crit hits, and much more. A small change might not be enough to change a displayed damage value, but the decimals could add up significantly.
The latest patch notes say: Auto rifles slightly improved, pulse rifles significantly nerfed
They have now revised the patch notes from Tuesday evening a second time.
And indeed: The auto rifles were barely noticeably strengthened (under 1%), but the pulse rifles were significantly weakened between 14% (the slowest) and 3% (the fastest). The most popular pulse rifles like Iron Sorrow, Red Death, or No Time to Explain have lost about 10.69% damage, while Bad Karma lost 8.17%.
Auto Rifles
- Small increase to base damage
- Low RoF (Suros Regime, An Answering Chord): 0.30% increase from previous base damage
- Med RoF (Zhalo Supercell, Paleocontact JPK-43): 0.78% increase from previous base damage
- High RoF (Arminius-D, Necrochasm): 0.04% increase from previous base damage
Pulse Rifles
- Reduced base damage
- Low RoF (The Messenger, Spare Change): 14.23% base damage reduction
- Med RoF (Hawksaw, No Time To Explain, Red Death): 10.69% base damage reduction
- High RoF (Bad Juju): 8.17% base damage reduction
- Highest RoF (Grasp of Marok): 2.97% base damage reduction
My MMO says: Yes, again a few snippets of information. Even if one generously overlooks the patch notes chaos, it is a bit puzzling why Bungie isn’t revealing more information about the new game content. Maybe they have a cover story like before The Taken King, promised someone an important interview. Maybe they just want to stay on PR schedule and announce nothing “great” now when the next content is more of a cosmetic event. That would be the most banal and likely explanation.
There was one for insiders: The now also scruffy community DeeJ praises, as he says, “for inexplicable reasons” the lush facial hair of his boss Eric Osborne. Maybe DeeJ is hoping to get a career boost from the lumberjack look.
Instead of a beard, Xur has facial tentacles. He will appear on Friday, December 11th, in the Tower (they probably won’t let him into the Reef anymore). We will be there at 10:00 AM on December 11th to welcome Xur.
More on the tedious “What is Bungie doing if they don’t make paid DLCs” topic can be found in this article: No paid DLCs for year 2
