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Tag: Destiny 2: Beyond Light

  • Destiny 2 Players Convince Bungie To Change Into The Light Weapon Rollout

    Destiny 2 Players Convince Bungie To Change Into The Light Weapon Rollout

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    Late last year, it was reported that Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion, The Final Shape, was getting delayed amidst struggles and layoffs at Bungie. The expansion, which was initially supposed to release by February, was then officially pushed back to June, leaving a tremendous gap of time between what was supposed to be the end of last year’s expansion and the eventual conclusion of Destiny 2’s ongoing saga. In light of this gap, Bungie has planned a pseudo-season of content, billed as Destiny 2: Into the Light, which is bringing new maps, modes, and weapons when it launches on April 9.

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    Into the Light’s weapons are of particular note, as they make up what Bungie has dubbed the “BRAVE arsenal,” a collection of beloved older weapons that have been renewed and enhanced for the current state of the game. When they were first unveiled in the second of three planned developer streams earlier this week, however, they were met with both excitement and a hint of hesitation. The latter was due to the fact that Bungie announced it would release half of the BRAVE arsenal at launch, followed by a protracted weekly rollout for the other half of the armory. Per the initial plan, players who started playing Into the Light at launch wouldn’t be able to get their hands on the full arsenal for a full six weeks.

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in and around the Destiny 2 community for years now, it’s that you should do as little as possible to stand in the way of players and their loot. Fans of the game were none too pleased about the drip feed of weapons, especially considering how many of those weapons are fan favorites whose value deprecated over the years. Crucially, earlier access to the full arsenal would grant players more time to grind them in Into the Light’s new PvE Onslaught mode and earn special variants that are only available for a limited time. On Bungie’s originally intended schedule, this time would be cut dramatically short for the weapons releasing later. Countless players made their concerns and complaints known to Bungie, which despite its missteps is often open to feedback and fairly quick to respond to it, and the team is now (sort of) reversing course.

    A thread on the Destiny 2 Team Twitter account (which shares insights and feedback directly from the developers) responded to fans’ concerns yesterday and announced that Bungie would be tweaking the planned weapon rollout. Rather than six weeks, the schedule has now been cut to three weeks, meaning the team will be dropping two weapons a week after launch. On this timeline, players will now be able to get the entire BRAVE arsenal by the end of April, rather than late May. Though it doesn’t completely eliminate the “timegating” that many players are calling out, the decision is largely a step in the right direction.

    Further down the thread, Bungie outlines many of the ways in which it is making sure that players can get guaranteed god rolls and limited variants of the BRAVE arsenal. According to Bungie, “weapon drop rates during Destiny 2: Into the Light will be among our highest in Destiny’s history, even harkening back to the days of Season of Opulence,” ensuring that folks who spend any time playing Destiny 2 during the next few months will be able to get their hands on the much-desired weapons.

    The entirety of the thread is worth a read if you’re curious about the various pathways to earn loot throughout Into the Light, but the message is clear: you will be able to get the BRAVE weapons no matter what.

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    Moises Taveras

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  • Destiny 2 Players Are Roasting Its New ‘Starter Pack’ [Update: Bungie Deletes It]

    Destiny 2 Players Are Roasting Its New ‘Starter Pack’ [Update: Bungie Deletes It]

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    The hardest thing about Destiny 2 is getting any of your friends to play it. Fans of Bungie’s ambitious and imaginative sci-fi shooter have long hoped for a simple on-ramp that would make it easier to get lapsed players and newcomers back into its universe. Destiny 2’s new “Starter Pack” might sound like exactly that. Instead, it’s a pricey bundle of random items that fans can’t stop dunking on.

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    Season of the Wish went live today with an exciting trailer and new missions revolving around collecting dragon eggs to win over an old enemy. But players also quietly noticed a new DLC add-on on PSN, Xbox, and Steam that went live alongside the latest update. It’s called the Destiny 2 Starter Pack, it costs $15, and it’s one of the more ridiculous microtransactions I’ve seen. Contrary to what its name might suggest, the Starter Pack does not include any expansions, missions, or story content. It’s just a random assortment of stuff meant to “supercharge” players’ arsenals. Here’s what’s included:

    • Traveler’s Chosen
    • Ruinous Effigy
    • Sleeper Simulant
    • Exotic Ship
    • Exotic Sparrow
    • Exotic Ghost Shell
    • 125,000 Glimmer
    • 50 Enhancement Cores
    • 5 Enhancement Prisms
    • 1 Ascendant Shard

    Image: Bungie

    Those first three items are all old Exotic weapons that have been in the game since 2019 or before. They are mostly fine but only synergize with specific builds and can all be acquired from the Tower kiosk without too much fuss. The ship, sparrow, and ghost shell are purely cosmetic and completely dependent on personal taste. In my opinion at least, the ones in the Starter Pack are far from some of the game’s better designs.

    The materials, meanwhile, are pretty stingy. Glimmer is Destiny 2’s main in-game currency, earned by doing anything and everything. Cores, prisms, and Ascendant Shards (what players lovingly call “golf balls”) are for focusing engrams, rerolling gear, and crafting new items, none of which is particularly helpful for new players, nor very meaningful in the quantities offered. It’s not even enough to fully masterwork a new piece of armor. It’s a bizarre array of accouterments to buy for more than the cost of an entire season of the game.

    “I’d say this is pay to win, but really it’s just a waste of money,” wrote one player on the Destiny subreddit. “Pay to lose.” Another wrote, “This is pathetic. 3 mid exotics, a few crap cosmetics and some materials is not worth that much. A real starter pack would be guns and old DLCs.”

    There are three broad obstacles to players getting back into Destiny 2. The first is that most of the story is no longer in the game due to content vaulting. The second is that Destiny 2’s “New Light” campaign remains pretty barebones and offers no real direction with end-game activities. And the third is that despite ostensibly being free-to-play, all of the expansions are paid and unlocking access to everything is still quite expensive. Shadowkeep, the underwhelming 2019 expansion, is still normally $25. The Starter Pack just adds to the noise, confusing players with misleading descriptions like “Fly between destinations in your new Exotic ship.” Narrator voice: Exotic ships are just custom loading screen animations.

    The Starter Pack also comes in the context of layoffs at Bungie amid the delay of 2024’s The Final Shape expansion and reported revenue shortfalls. At a time when the studio is apparently desperate for money, the $15 bundle just underlines the gulf between players and whoever is leading Destiny 2’s monetization strategy. It’s one thing to milk whales, but as Destiny 2 players are pointing out, the new Starter Pack seems squarely aimed at taking advantage of new players who won’t know any better. In the words of one of them, “This is some mobile game shit.”

    Update 11/29/2023 6:09 p.m. ET: Bungie appears to have removed Destiny 2’s controvertial Starter Pack from storefornts, including Valve’s storefront. “Notice: Destiny 2: Starter Pack is no longer available on the Steam store,” reads an update on the Steam listing. PlayStation Store listings, meanwhile, return error pages.

    A screenshot shows Destiny 2's Starter Pack getting removed from Steam.

    Screenshot: Valve / Kotaku

    In addition to roasting the microtransaction on social media and Reddit, some players had also attempted to review-bomb the bundle and change the Steam tags for it to things like “psychological horror.” 

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    Ethan Gach

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  • Destiny 2 Just Had One Of Its Wildest Weekends Ever

    Destiny 2 Just Had One Of Its Wildest Weekends Ever

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    It’s beautiful when video games break. It can also be incredibly fun for players, and a nightmare for developers in charge of making sure everything keeps humming along without issue. Over the weekend, Destiny 2 players discovered a wonderful glitch that let them craft god-like weapons and tear through challenging end-game missions with ease. Days later, Bungie is still trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

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    Destiny 2 is a sci-fi MMO shooter built around collecting rare, magical guns and using them to complete cosmic gauntlets with ever-increasing efficiency and grace. This “grind” can at times feel like running on a treadmill, and Bungie spends a ton of time and resources trying to calibrate the variations in speed and incline to make it challenging and rewarding rather than tedious. Balancing the game’s hundreds of weapons is a big part of that, with minute changes to perk descriptions or numerical values leaving huge marks on the overall shape and trajectory of the experience.

    Destiny 2’s bizarre weapon crafting glitch

    On September 15, a new crafting glitch started making the rounds on social media and various Destiny 2 subreddits. It effectively allows players to create a new weapon with any set of perks they want by slowing down the game and swapping screens quickly. On PC, players put the framerate down to 30fps to increase the window of time to pull off the exploit, while console owners initiated massive file installs in the background to create a similar amount of lag. The result was the ability to create bows that fire grenades and auto rifles that shoot shotgun shells, each with mixes of some of the most powerful perks from standard legendary ones like Chill Clip to unique Exotic perks from guns like the Dead Messenger grenade launcher and Osteo Striga submachine gun.

    These broken builds quickly started proliferating in various modes. In dungeons and raids it allowed players to clear encounters and demolish bosses in record time. In competitive PvP like Trials of Osiris, however, it gave players incredibly unfair advantages, and made it easy to essentially glitch your way into some of Destiny 2’s most coveted accomplishments—like flawlessly going through an entire Trials run (without losing). Many in the community assumed Bungie would roll back the game to remove the glitch and anything players had gained from using it. Instead, the studio gave players its blessing to have fun while it worked on a fix.

    “We’re aware of an issue that allows specific weapon perks to be crafted into other legendary weapons and are investigating a fix, which will result in these weapons being reset in the future,” the studio announced on Twitter on September 15. “We currently don’t have any plans to disable Trials of Osiris due to this issue.”

    How Bungie is fixing the Destiny 2 weapon-crafting bug

    Instead of banning players who gained in-game rewards or achievements using the exploit, Bungie revealed the next day that it would work on deploying two fixes. The first would be a server-side update to disable players from using any crafted weapons. The second would reset the “illegal” weapons back to their defaults.

    “This is a complex issue, and as a result of testing, our original timeline for a server-side fix has been extended,” Bungie tweeted on September 17. It disabled the Osteo Striga, Revision Zero, Dead Man’s Tale, Dead Messenger, Vexcalibur, and Exotic class glaives, but over 72 hours later is still working on the second half of the fix to bring everything back online. “Please refrain from asking your local Destiny 2 triage developers how their weekend was,” Joe Blackburn, the game’s director, joked on Monday.

    Bungie even leaned into the chaos with a Ted Lasso TikTok meme encouraging everyone to go ahead and “live.” In response, the top comment reads, “The biggest glitch in Destiny’s history and Bungie is letting us have…..fun?”

    Word of the loot party clearly spread, because Destiny 2’s concurrent player spiked over the weekend on Steam. Where it had been peeking around 80,000 in the last few weeks, it cracked 100,000, a number usually reserved for seasonal updates. While the glitch has likely sent the team into crisis mode and no doubt ruined several developers’ weekends, the unexpected bonanza has also been a bright spot for a game that’s been caught in a bit of a malaise as its pivotal The Final Shape expansion arrives ahead of Destiny 2’s 10-year anniversary. The integrity of the game and its loot chase may have been fundamentally undermined, but at least for the moment anyway, players had a blast.

            

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    Ethan Gach

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