Bungie responds to its community…
It’s been a difficult beginning to Destiny 2 for the development team at Bungie amidst bad publicity and unrest around XP scaling, as well as some players being far from happy with Destiny 2’s thin end-game, that left them with not much to do once they had reached a certain point. In a reaction to increasing unrest within the community, Bungie decided to cancel their final publicity stream for the upcoming DLC and replace it with an in-depth blog post detailing some of the systems they’d be working on moving forward into the game’s life cycle. An opening statement penned by Bungie’s Luke Smith and Chris Barrett also acknowledged that communication hasn’t been as good as it might have been.
“Our team has been reading feedback and working on updates to improve the game. We’ve also been reading some tough criticism about our lack of communication, and we agree we need to be more open.”
The abrupt cancellation of the originally planned livestream to exhibit gear in the upcoming Curse of Osiris DLC took many by suprise, but was largely seen as a good move to potentially ease some of the player base’s concerns and expand on the list of improvements the studio had outlined previously in blog post a month before hand. A portion of these changes will be seen along with DLC release on December 5th, some the following week on December 12th. They did however talk lightly about some updates in the works for 2018, but were keen on outlining the direction they want to take.
“Going forward, Destiny 2’s post-launch game systems, features, and updates are being designed specifically to focus on and support players who want Destiny to be their hobby – the game they return to, and a game where friendships are made.”
Upcoming Updates Overview
In December, the focus seems on adding meat to the bone for those more dedicated players with ‘New systems and rewards to give our most engaged players additional, optional pursuits’. This interestingly included a brand new weapon tier; Masterworks. These new buffed legendary guns will feature stat trackers, and random re-rollable stat bonuses. Other additions will be better rewards for prestige activities (which are fun to play but not very rewarding right now), improved vendor rewards and ways to purchase them with Legendary Shards, one of the in-game currencies currently suffering from a lack of coin-sink. We’ll also see a return of armour ornaments that add some visual tweaks as players complete specific challenges.
Perhaps one of the biggest revelations was that the much talked about, but never confirmed, Ranked PvP playlists finally got a solid acknowledgement with Bungie stating ‘We are also moving Ranked PVP to the top of our priority list for next year to support the competitive community’. Although there was no mention of sandbox updates to the player vs player modes, this will be good news to many who have found that side of the game slightly neglected since the game’s release. Private matches, that was mentioned earlier in the year, is also on target for an early 2018 drop.
To see the blog post itself, and the full list of updates you can go here. Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments.
