Destiny 2 developer Bungie has announced plans to temporarily disable players from using crafted weapons in a bid to get on top of an in-game glitch.
29.08.2023 - 18:51 / gamesradar.com / Joe Blackburn / Up On
Laying out Destiny 2's long-smoldering Crucible woes, game director Joe Blackburn says the studio was at one point unsure of the viability of PvP altogether because it hadn't "seen it move the needle."
Speaking with PC Gamer, Blackburn recounts his return to Bungie in 2020 and describes the general mood around PvP at the time. "I'm not so sure about this thing in the long run," he recalls. "We haven't seen it move the needle. Have we ever been able to satisfy the PvP audience? How do we deliver players what they want?"
This read wasn't exclusive to 2020, either. "Throughout Destiny 2 – for maybe its first six years, including Destiny 1 – there was a sense of: 'Hey, we're putting a bunch of effort into [PvP], but it's not what the community wants," he adds. "Or we're not making them happy'. Even when we put out maps, people would say: 'I don't like these maps, and I wish they were different.'" (Destiny 2 infamously went almost three years without a new PvP map, though it now has some more maps coming soon.) Oppositely, the director says PvE content like the Menagerie was consistently well-received, and that sort of feedback inevitably incentivizes devs to make more well-received things like it.
Blackburn says he himself always regarded PvP as a core tenet of Destiny 2, and one of his first decisions as game director was to affirm that, "Hey, we have to support this thing. We have to figure out how it makes sense."
Fast forward to today and Blackburn has, on the heels of Bungie's disastrous State of the Game blog post, just promised the formation of a new PvP "strike team" explicitly built for more and bigger updates to the Crucible, including a proper map pack. For PvP enthusiasts, this follows multiple years defined by varying degrees of neglect broken up by inconsistent weapon balancing and largely unsuccessful game modes.
Here's some good news for PvP diehards: Blackburn says Bungie is done with the "sit on the fence" approach for the Crucible. "We don't want to say, 'hey, we're going to try to make every single person happy,'" he tells PC Gamer. "There are really divisive camps, so the way we want to really change our strategy is to be clear about saying: 'This is the PvP audience for Destiny, this is what they want'. We're going to center PvP around our players that enjoy playing Crucible for 20 hours a week. And we're going to make it more optional for players that don't."
"I think that if we are clearer with who we are trying to make PvP for, we can make the right decisions for that group and we can build a thing that people enjoy," Blackburn concludes. "It's definitely a new take, and if this one doesn't work, we'll try something else. We're not afraid of being wrong here. We're not going to
Destiny 2 developer Bungie has announced plans to temporarily disable players from using crafted weapons in a bid to get on top of an in-game glitch.
Put those Tractor Cannons away, Guardians. The Crota’s End contest mode has come to a close, and players can now go back to using the full extent of their abilities and armory. The 48-hour contest mode for the returning Destiny Raid addressed Bungie’s former promise to bring difficult content back to Destiny 2 . And it didn’t disappoint. That said, with contest mode ended, players should once again have little trouble toppling the son of Oryx.
Expect weapons to be more than just DPS machines when The Final Shape expansion launches in 2024.
Recently, my Destiny 2 clanmates and I took the healthy and responsible decision not to participate in the next raid race. The way things work in Destiny 2 is that for the first 48 hours of any new or reprised raid a modifier called 'Contest Mode' is active, during which time player power is capped 20 levels under the enemies in each encounter. Result: you deal less damage and take much more. For those who don't have a well-drilled fireteam and meta loadouts, the experience is bracing—particularly as fatigue creeps in, and the tempers of old gamers with decaying thumb skill begin to fray.
Though the reveal of Destiny 2: The Final Shape certainly could’ve done with an extra banger or two, Bungie is now seemingly on a bit of a path toward redemption with the Destiny community after the failures of the Lightfall DLC. The studio’s hype machine for the 2024 DLC is already ramping up, though, and an all-new interview held by the Game Director, Joe Blackburn, shed additional light on next year’s grand release.
Titans have never had a hard time in Destiny 2 , per se, but it’s been a while since they’ve felt as good as a new Strand Aspect makes the class feel. Season 22 debuts the Banner of War Titan, and it’s a force to be reckoned with. Not only does the Aspect lock in a constant stream of healing and buffs, but it is also almost infinitely customizable. Players can easily combine the Banner of War effects alongside their favorite Exotic weapons and armor. And, best of all, it fulfills the Titan power fantasy, encouraging Guardians to get right in the face of their enemies.
The original Destiny storyline opened following the collapse of a vast Terran civilization at the hands of an invading, amorphous Darkness and its various alien accomplices - an advance stymied only by a benevolent Big Dumb Object known as the Traveller. It cast you as an ancient warrior, resurrected by a flying robot to reclaim humankind's old dominions together with their antique, storied weapons and gear. So much of its appeal for me, back in 2014, was the mystique of that reclamation process, bolstered by alternately zany, obnoxious, fragmentary and/or intriguing writing that expanded upon the viral mythological element in Halo.
It's been two weeks since the mood music in Destiny 2 got so bad that game director Joe Blackburn took to his personal Twitter to deliver a video message addressing various community complaints and concerns. For a studio that tends to deal in lengthy blog posts, such a personal approach only underlined the perceived urgency of the situation. Ironically, the latest meltdown had been triggered by one such 'State of the Game' post, which, rather than allaying concerns, had air-dropped petrol onto them.
Bungie appears to have done something very, very right with Destiny 2: Season of the Witch, according to the community. After a number of fumbles stemming from Lightfall‘s release onwards, it looked like the studio just couldn’t catch a break with Destiny 2. Now, thankfully, things appear to have settled down, and players seem pretty happy with Season 22’s key novelties.
By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.
Bungie officially revealed the details for its upcoming Destiny 2 DLC The Final Shape today, the conclusion of its “Light and Darkness” saga that started all the way back in 2014. The Final Shape will debut on Feb. 27.
At the 2023 Destiny Showcase on Tuesday, Bungie announced (and launched) a brand new season of the game.