It seems the Crucible Strike Team have been hard at work and continue to do so even amidst troubles at Bungie. Thankfully, Season 23’s massive list of crucible tweaks and changes are a step in the right direction for the PvP community.
Bungie’s Crucible Strike Team has continued to work diligently to satisfy the needs of their community. Part of all that they’ve been working on is coming in Destiny 2’s season 23, Season of the Wish. That said, Bungie is still iterating on the changes they made in Season 22 and so we should expect back-and-forth adjustments. It’s good to see that after Bungie’s layoffs that the Crucible Strike Team seems to still be in a healthy enough position to still deliver on their vision of a better, healthier Crucible.
Image Source: Bungie
The biggest changes coming in season 23 involve the addition of new playlists and alterations to current ones. Part of those new playlists includes a new 3v3 unranked — I like the idea of having a new smaller unranked mode with gameplay that’s like Competitive and Trials, but with matchmaking that suits the more casual crowd. I know myself and a good amount of Crucible enjoyers will appreciate the extra options here.
Beyond the unranked trials-like 3v3 option, the 6v6 mode’s matchmaking will be tuned to be less skill-based and more equal between, skill, latency, and connection. Matchmaking in Destiny 2 is pretty divisive with a lot of people liking purely connection based matchmaking so that unranked is less sweaty. While others like skill-based matchmaking so that they aren’t always stomped on by players who are that much better.
Here, Bungie seems to have found a middle ground where they blend the various kinds of matchmaking to keep skill balanced involved but not so much so that every match is a sweatfest. This I approve of since the best matchmaking is also the most nuanced, while at the same time ensuring the most amount of people get to enjoy every mode at every skill level.
Image Source: Bungie
For a long time now, many have been wanting a larger variety of Crucible nodes to be available more often. With Season 23 having seven PvP nodes to choose from with varying gameplay and matchmaking, each node destination represents a very unique style of Crucible gameplay. Did I forget to mention the 6v6 Unranked node will also feature Sparrow Control? What used to be a bug, is now a feature! Good on Bungie for listening and embracing what players enjoy. Here’s hoping we can get Sparrow Racing from Destiny 1 next!
It’s a shame that Rift is being benched, but I can understand why Bungie may be worried about splitting the PvP community too thin between too many different matchmaking nodes. That said, it will be refreshing to see Checkmate Control graduate from Crucible Labs to become the primary Control gametype for a few weeks after Season 23’s launch.
The playerbase seems to have really enjoyed the longer time-to-kill, wider skill gaps, and earnable Special ammo that you don’t lose on death. It is really cool to see Checkmate being applied to more Crucible modes and I applaud Bungie for creating a new style of Control that feels so fresh with meaningful gameplay.
Bungie also seems to be working on the matchmaking backend too, with changes to the way matchmaking determines your skill versus other players. The changes will allow for more variance between how matchmaking judges your current skill from match to match because not everyone is going to be using a meta build all the time or wants to play at their best constantly. After all, some of us have weird builds that don’t get us lots of kills but are still really fun to play.
Image Source: Bungie via Twinfinite
Now, Trials of Osiris is getting some expanded weekly rewards that should entice some more players to give it a shot. Trials is certainly for the sweatiest of players but that doesn’t mean people who struggle going Flawless shouldn’t be rewarded for getting as far as they can for each week. Where the real rewards now lie in Season 23 is Competitive with Bungie’s big brain move to let players focus and earn very competitive weapons like Rose and Mercurial Overreach.
The ability to reacquire some of the strongest weapons from Competitive Crucible’s past is a nice quality of life feature for the many players who likely missed out. Bungie seems to be going all out for Season 23 in many ways. Here’s hoping it will be enough to weather the extra few months Bungie needs to polish The Final Shape.
Part of the Crucible’s biggest issue over the years has been stagnation in one form or another. Whether it’s maps, modes, or the sandbox itself, players can feel when one has been present and unchanged for far too long. After reviewing a lot of the changes coming in Season 23, it looks like Bungie’s Crucible Strike team is successfully tackling every part of PvP that was beginning to stagnate.
I know a lot of what I’ve talked about here will bring me back into the competitive fold. So, I imagine this update will do the same for many more players and that’s always a good thing. Beyond Season of the Wish’s sweeping Crucible changes, the true worth of Bungie’s Crucible Strike team will be in how they are able to continue their delivery of fresh modes and maps to the PvP ecosystem. If they can pull that off up to and through The Final Shape, then Destiny 2’s Crucible may live up to and exceed when it peaked in Destiny 1.
About the author
Ali Taha
Whether its new releases, or a new Destiny 2 season, Ali will flex his gaming and freelancer skills to cover them extensively. He started off writing features for Game Rant but found a better home here on Twinfinite. While Ali waits for the next Monster Hunter title, he enjoys publishing his progression fantasy novels as an indie author.
Destiny 2 recently had an update that implemented quitter protection for Trials matches that start with missing players. While we will cover that more in a bit, Bungie still needs to address its PvP quitter issue.
So, in the game’s recent 7.2.5.3 update, quitter protection was implemented for Trials at the start of the match. What this means exactly is that if you have a missing member or two at the start of the match, you will be allowed to quit and matchmake again without incurring the normal penalty for quitting a Trials match. This is fantastic news for all those players who suffered and still do suffer from a connection error named after a particular animal.
Image Source: Bungie via Twinfinite
However, this update is only for Trials of Osiris and does not stop quitters from leaving matches early. Just in my experience alone with lots of Control and Competitive playtime, this is still a rampant issue. One that would be fixed, if players were properly incentivized to stay in the match until the end or punished more severely for leaving a match early.
Nothing is more demoralizing to be PvP-ing in the Crucible and are winning, until about halfway through. When suddenly, you or your team starts doing poorly, losing some one-on-one engagements and slowly watching the enemy team’s score pull away from ours. So, of course, your teammates start to leave, and now you’re losing almost every gunfight. The act of leaving a match before it’s over ruins it for everyone else. So, let’s fix that and show Bungie some things they could try to accomplish that.
Now, it’s important that Bungie do their best to try and differentiate innocent connection loss and rage quitting. I’m not entirely sure how they would go upon doing that, but it would certainly help if Bungie were to implement harsher penalties for quitting matches early. I used to play a lot of League of Legends, and I found their leaver penalties quite effective.
So with that in mind, harsher penalties like quickly escalating tiers of punishment. For example, first offense would be a single five-minute Crucible queue delay. The next offense in the same 24 hours could be a 10-minute queue delay for the next five Crucible queues. As the player continues to rage quit, the longer the queue delay, the more matches it lasts for, and the longer the effective window for gaining such punishments would last.
While increasing the punishments for making unsportsmanlike choices in the Crucible is sound, it could be as equally effective to also implement a system that rewards players based on X number of games they finish in a row. With the right incentives, this could help put and keep Destiny 2’s PvP playerbase in the right state of mind while playing. You catch more flies with honey after all.
Image Source: Bungie via Twinfinite
One of the best ways to do just that would be to make sure said incentives are above all worthwhile to a majority of players. As a Crucible player myself, I rarely rage quit outside of the most brutal stomps after most of my time has quit. However, I would certainly be persuaded to stay if say after playing five matches in a row, there was a rare but slowly escalating chance to earn Adept Legendary weapons or Artifice Legendary Armor. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who would turn down such rewards just to rage quit from a tough match and feel their actions justified for that one moment.
Visual cosmetics like rare shaders or interesting ornaments that have appealing colors or other visual traits may be the way to go as well. Although, I don’t believe those rewards would be as inciting enough to keep people from becoming upset and choosing the easy way out. Either way, with the right rewards for staying and playing and the appropriate punishments, it’s harder to imagine people ever leaving mid match again.
About the author
Ali Taha
Whether its new releases, or a new Destiny 2 season, Ali will flex his gaming and freelancer skills to cover them extensively. He started off writing features for Game Rant but found a better home here on Twinfinite. While Ali waits for the next Monster Hunter title, he enjoys publishing his progression fantasy novels as an indie author.
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.
Ever since John Wick and The Wire actor Lance Reddick suddenly and unexpectedly passed away earlier this year, Destiny 2 fans have been wondering what would become of his iconic character, Commander Zavala. Today, Bungie announced that veteran actor Keith David, beloved for his video game work in Halo and Mass Effect, will take over in 2024’s The Final Shape expansion.
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“Lance’s iconic voice led us through the most intense moments in Destiny’s history and his impact on our Guardians, our community, and Bungie as a whole will never be forgotten,” Bungie announced on August 10. “Keith David, a prolific actor on the stage and in television, film, and games, will assume the English language voice of Zavala in The Final Shape and beyond. Separately, Lance’s existing lines in-game will remain untouched for the upcoming release.”
David’s appeared in a ton of movies, including The Thing, Platoon, and Nope. But he also has a long history of voice acting in games where he’s best known for his performances as the Arbiter in Halo 2, and Captain David Anderson in Mass Effect. “I am honored to continue the great work of Lance Reddick as Zavala. Lance captured the character’s sense of integrity so wonderfully,” he said in a press release. “It is my intention to continue that work.”
“One of the great qualities of Zavala that really attracts me is his integrity…and his sense of family,” said David. “And I thought Lance [Reddick] captured that wonderfully. And it is my intention to continue that work and continue to bring that kind of integrity to the role.”
Reddick was beloved within the Destiny 2 community not only as a great talent but also a massive fan of the game himself. He was found to have been playing shortly before his untimely death, and players flocked to the sci-fi MMO’s main social hub to pay their respects in the days that followed. Bungie has promised that The Final Shape, where David will first make his debut as the new voice of Zavala, will be the climactic expansion campaign and raid players have been waiting for as the live-service loot shooter finishes up its first big story arc, a conclusion 10 years in the making.
Update 08/10/2023 6:29 p.m. ET: Added video commentary from David.
“I just realized Bungie took inspiration from my piece for this week’s cutscene”, they tweeted last week. “Certainly took me by surprise when I watched the cutscene”. As you can see below, the similarities between Faylona’s piece (green, on the right) and the art in Bungie’s trailer (black, left) show that the word “inspiration” is being used very generously:
“We discovered that an external vendor that helped to create this cutscene mistakenly used this art as a reference, assuming it was official Bungie artwork. We are currently waiting to hear back from the artist to take the necessary steps to remedy this situation.”
“To be honest, I’m genuinely excited and happy that the piece I made 2 years ago—which, even back then, I fully acknowledged is based on the Destiny franchise—made it into the cutscene,” they said to PC Gamer in a statement. “It was totally unexpected and completely caught me by surprise. So much so that I wanted to make a shoutout about it.”
A new glitch in Destiny 2’s Season of the Deep makes it easy to farm infinite Legendary Shards through unlimited Exotic drops. It’s super simple and easy and probably won’t be around for long.
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I came upon the exploit via theDestiny streamer Leopard, though it’s been spreading like wildfire throughout the community because of how fast and generous it is. Season of the Deep added new class-based Exotic quests for existing gear that’s been reworked over at Ikora Rey in the Tower. One simple trick allows you to take the single Exotic reward and multiply it indefinitely. Here’s how it works:
Go to Ikora and pick one of the Exotic quests.
Get to step four
Go back and speak to her but don’t collect the reward
Instead back out and open your quest log and abandon the quest
Now talk to Ikora again and pick up as many copies of the Exotic as you want
You’ll want to make sure the inventory slot for the relevant armor piece is empty, otherwise space will fill up quickly. But once you get going you can just start deleting all of the extra Exotic pieces and then grab more without ever leaving Ikora’s quest screen. Each broken-down Exotic will net you seven Gunsmith reputation, 500 Glimmer, and five Legendary Shards.
Shards are used for focusing Engrams, buying other resources like upgrade modules, and grabbing new weapons and gear from various vendors. They’re easy to run low on, especially if you’re a new player. And you never know which way the wind is going to turn in Destiny 2’s economy, so it’s always a good time to stock up.
Bungie likes to patch these exploits quickly, however, so who knows how long this one will remain viable. For now it’s nice to have something to fill the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom duplication glitch-sized hole in my heart after that game’s most recent update.
Update 5/26/2023 7:05 p.m. ET: And it’s already gone. Bummer.
Rarely do I watch a trailer for a video game more than once. Yet with Bungie’s Marathon reboot/sequel/whatever, I’ve found myself looping its slick and stylish announcement trailer. It’s not just because the trailer slaps, but because Bungie is teasing looks to be one of the coolest shooters released in years.
On March 24, shortly before a Spider-Man 2 trailer would set off a whole new “puddlegate,” Bungie (Halo, Destiny) revealed its next big first-person shooter: Marathon. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because this is actually Bungie returning to one of its oldest franchises, the Mac-only shooter trilogy, Marathon. You can read more about those old games, their beloved lore, and how it connects to Halo and modern extraction shooters in this piece from our very own Claire Jackson.
However, I’m not here to talk about Marathon’s lore, history, fandom, or anything involving the Bungie mythos. No, instead, I want to just gush for a few paragraphs about how damn refreshing and awesome this game’s look and announcement trailer are compared to most other shooters and games out there today. And I don’t seem to be alone in loving this trailer as it has hit 18 million views on YouTube already.
PlayStation / Bungie
Marathon has one of the best game trailers of 2023
Anyway, the running character breaks out of the darker tunnels and enters an incredibly bright world where we see that they are also rocking vibrant colors, including a bright, neon-pink helmet. The music builds as the camera zooms in closer and closer to the runner. Things feel tense as the music builds into a digital mess and then BAM! That’s all she wrote for this runner as they are sniped from afar by a slick-looking and white-as-paper android. Our runner, now dead, is seen collapsing in slow motion into what appears to be a milk-like substance, their blue-inky blood mixing and swirling into the water around their corpse. As the robot sniper rips out something from the dead runner the music builds again, glitches out, and BAM! Bungie reveals that this vibrant trailer was for a new Marathon.
“Vibrant” is really the keyword here. Everything in this trailer pops in a way that I’ve not seen in most other shooters released in recent years. A lot of modern shooters seem focused on realism, which can look lovely, but also a bit drab. The popular color scheme we typically see on shooters also starts to make shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield blend together. Or they all look a bit too much like Fortnite, which while colorful, isn’t visually distinct anymore. I enjoy a lot of these modern shooters regardless. But with Marathon, things are different.
Actually, it’s beyond colorful. It’s almost garish with all of its pinks, yellows, greens, and blues clashing in nearly every frame. Yet it’s all balanced by hyper-realistic lighting, materials, textures, and models. The color palettes are incredible to look at and a few of us at Kotaku couldn’t stop gawking at the trailer.
Marathon’s new art style is fresh and bold
Bungie calls Marathon’sart style “graphic realism,” as mentioned in a recent behind-the-scenes video about the rebooted shooter. Bungie dev Emily Katske further elaborates on the game’s art, saying it’s “bold, colorful [and] stylized.”
The game’s director, Christopher Barret, in the same video, also says that the team wanted the art to be “beautiful” and “vibrant”, “mysterious” and “familiar,” “but also, strange.”
Bungie
Normally, I’d roll my eyes a bit at this kind of talk, but after seeing the trailer and concept art of this new take on Marathon, yeah, I get it. Balance is key, though. Bungie has to carefully balance when and where to “dial [things] up to 11” and when to pull back a bit so folks don’t get overwhelmed while trying to play.
It’s a risky option, taking a beloved franchise and reworking it into something bold. It’s also quite a departure from the original Marathon games, which featured more subdued or grimy textures and Doom-like sprites. I’ve already spotted some longtime Marathon fans upset about this new, more colorful, and stylized direction. And until we actually play the final game, we won’t know if any of this will actually work out. Was this a big, expensive mistake? Or a huge gamble that lands perfectly? No idea!
But Marathon’s trailer, concept art, and overall style has me more excited than I expected to play this upcoming extraction shooter. I’m not even a fan of that genre of online FPS, but I want to see more of Marathon so badly that I’ll give it a shot. As long as I can waddle around Bungie’s new incredible-looking world for a few minutes before getting killed, I’ll be happy to play and explore Marathon whenever it comes out.
As Bungie continues on its warpath against Destiny 2 cheaters, the studio has won $12 million in the lawsuit against Romanian cheat seller Mihai Claudiu-Florentin that began back in 2021.
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Claudiu-Florentin sold cheat software at VeteranCheats, which allowed users to get an edge over other players with software that could do things like tweak their aim and let them see through walls. Naturally, Bungie argued that the software was damaging to Destiny 2‘s competitive and cooperative modes, and has won the case against the seller. The lawsuit alleges “copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), breach of contract, intentional interference with contractual relations, and violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act.” (Thanks, TheGamePost).
You can read a full PDF of the suit, courtesy of TheGamePost, here, but the gist of it is that Bungie is asking for $12,059,912.98 in total damages, with $11,696,000 going toward violations of the DMCA, $146,662.28 for violations of the Copyright Act, and $217,250.70 accounting for the studio’s attorney expense. After subpoenaing Stripe, a payment processing service, Bungie learned that at least 5848 separate transactions took place through the service that included Destiny 2 cheating software from November 2020 to July 2022.
While Bungie might have $12 million more dollars out of this, VeteranCheats’ website is still up and offering cheating software for games like Overwatch and Call of Duty. Though, Destiny no longer appears on the site’s home page or if you search within its community.
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According to the lawsuit, Bungie has paid around $2 million in its anti-cheating efforts between staffing and software. This also extended to a blanket ban on cheating devices in both competitive and PvE modes earlier this month.
While Destiny 2 has been wrapped up in legal issues, the shooter has also been caught up in some other controversy recently thanks to a major leak that led to the ban of a major content creator in the game’s community.
Bungie is cracking down on Destiny 2 players using third-party peripherals to cheat in the game’s competitive and cooperative modes.
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The studio is following Call of Duty: Warzone’s example, which implemented a similar ban at the beginning of April, and is now monitoring when players use devices to get the leg up against others. Bungie outlines its policy in a blog post on its website, but stops short of naming any specific software or hardware because it “simply [doesn’t] want to offer a bigger spotlight than necessary.” But broadly, the post lists things like “programmable controllers, keyboard and mouse adapters, advanced macros, or automation via artificial intelligence” meant to let the user use inputs in a way that goes beyond what the game or player is typically capable of.
Bungie makes a distinction between things like external accessibility aids that make the game playable as intended for people with disabilities and third-party peripherals maliciously designed to give the user an advantage over others. Because Destiny 2’s PvE content also affects things like races to finish the game’s raids at launch, Bungie is extending these rules to cooperative modes, as well.
“Simply using an accessibility aide to play Destiny 2, where a player could not play otherwise, would not be a violation of this policy,” the post reads. “Using these tools to mitigate challenges all players face, such as reducing recoil or increasing aim assist, would be a violation.”
Moving forward, Bungie says it will be monitoring for violations, with plans to issue warnings, restrictions, or outright bans depending on the situation. Cheating in online games is as old as the medium, but what that means and how it’s detectable varies from game to game. Valve recently caught and banned over 40,000 cheaters from Dota 2and then publicized the move as a threat to would-be cheaters.
While third-party software and peripherals are one part of the conversation, some competitive communities are deciding for themselves what cheating looks like. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate competitive scene has been dealing with an in-game strategy that was deemed unfair involving the character Steve. Since then, some tournament organizers have made the decision to ban the character outright, rather than having to vet suspect players at events.
Destiny 2 has gotten a bunch of hotfixes since the Lightfall expansion launched several weeks ago, but none like yesterday’s update. A fix not mentioned in the patch notes secretly changed the game’s newest Warlock armband armor to make it look less like a vagina.
Bond of Detestation is a class item that drops from Destiny 2‘s new Root of Nightmares raid that went live on March 10 and focuses on Nezarec, an old disciple of the game’s arch antagonist, The Witness. Up until Thursday it could have been mistaken for an alien fleshlight, mostly because of a small horizontal slit across the front of it.
It sort of looks like an eyeball, maybe, not really. Its resemblance to a vulva was especially noticeable when certain shaders were applied. Players suggested all sorts of names for it–Witnussy, Nezussy, Nezzylight–but “Bondussy” was the one that stuck.
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As first reported by Forbes’ Paul Tassi, Bungie has now stepped in to take the horny down a notch. This week’s hotfix addressed a number of bugs. The biggest change from the patch notes was a fix for the infamous Thresher gunships that had been murdering players throughout the solar system. Completely unmentioned was the fact that the hotfix also removed the Bondussy’s slit to make it look much less suggestive. It’s sort of now just a giant space pearl.
Stealth content changes and visual adjustments like this are rare, in part because the Destiny 2 community is hyper sensitive to every little shift in its sci-fi universe. Bungie removed a piece of armor back in 2017 because it had an alt-right symbol on it with Nazi origins. Bondussy wasn’t hate speech, though it clearly must have run afoul of Bungie’s broader artistic intentions for the raid armor. Or maybe the studio just didn’t like the nickname “Bondussy.”
Lance Reddick, the actor who’s been lending his voice to games ranging from the Horizon series to Quantum Break, passed away Friday. He was 60 years old. While he’s been in films and TV shows such as John Wick and The Wire, Destiny players know him best as the commander of The Last City, the Awoken Guardian Zavala. Now, folks who’ve heard the news of Reddick’s death are flocking to his in-game character to honor him as their forever commander in a wholesome display of gamer solidarity.
Zavala is a mainstay in the Destiny universe. One of the first characters you meet after waking up in the original game and blasting your way through an alien-infested planet, Zavala could be found in the Tower’s war room alongside Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey. A kind of stoic blank slate in the beginning, he would primarily sling a variety of Titan armor in silence. However, he’s been given a lot of emotional backstory in the years since, with the character evolving in significant ways—he’s more talkative when you see him in the Tower now, standing alone and looking out at the Traveler, pontificating on the state of the world and his role in it in Reddick’s dulcet tones.
In last year’s Witch Queen expansion, he grappled with his faith as cosmic forces challenged it, which gave Reddick even more room to flex into Zavala’s character and personality. Subsequent seasons revealed a familiar tragedy from his past that still haunted him. Infamous lines memed into oblivion like, “We’ve stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars,” also gave way to intimate personal tales of grief and struggle.
So, with the news that Reddick has suddenly passed away due to what police are saying is natural causes, many Guardians are now paying their respects to the beloved Titan Commander, heading to the Tower to pay tribute to him as best they can. Games journalist Saniya Ahmed shared a picture of gatherers at the Tower, writing that some players were giving each other emote hugs.
Kotaku senior editor Alyssa Mercante jumped into the game and confirmed there were folks gathered around Zavala. Several players deployed the Peaceful Rest emote, which surrounds them in neon-colored tower candles. Another held a shield and sword made of light. A few just sat.
Folks are heartbroken over this loss, including many Bungie employees, who shared their immediate reactions to the shocking news on Twitter. Artwork of Zavala has already been drawn up and sent out. Content creator Uhmaayyze shared an older image of Reddick holding a Destiny gun, beaming. Zavala quotes are circulating online, their meaning holding even more weight in light of this loss. Some players are even planning a “community-wide silent sit-down event” in front of Zavala to pay tribute to Reddick’s stellar performance, while others are trying to organize a shared color scheme to honor him. Reddick’s impact on the Destiny community cannot be understated, especially since the last tweet he liked was about the game.
It’s never a good feeling when a beloved figure passes, especially someone as influential and prolific as Lance Reddick. But thanks to the community’s adoration and his immortalization across mediums, Reddick will live on forever. So, eyes up, Guardians, Commander Zavala is forever watching over you.
There was a lot of hype going into Lightfall, Destiny 2‘s big cyberpunk expansion. The reality has been much more muted, full of ups and downs, fun discoveries and tedious chores. Live-service games are unwieldy creatures to try and examine under a microscope, and Destiny remains one of the toughest of them all.
Free-to-play sandbox changes are launching alongside the paid campaign, and separate seasonal story missions will be dropping week to week as hotfixes continue rolling out. Below fellow Kotaku writer and Destiny 2 glutton Zack Zwiezen and I discuss the highs and lows of Lightfall’s initial kick-off.
Zack Zwiezen: Eyes up, Guardians. We will be talking about Destiny.
Ethan Gach: Okay, let’s start with the Lightfall campaign. What were your most and least favorite parts? The high point for me was obviously the opening cinematic that shows The Traveler confronting The Witness and everything going sideways. The low point was crawling through air ducts while Osiris barked at me to quit wasting time and become one with the green space magic (Strand).
Zack: My favorite part was also the opening bit and the ending. It felt like stuff was happening and actually seeing the Traveler do something was amazing. Finally, the orb is helping us. My least-favorite part was how much the rest of the main campaign feels like season three of Lost, just spinning its wheels until the big finale.
It’s ironic that Osiris is so angry about us wasting time when this whole campaign feels like a waste of time.
Ethan: I felt extremely torn throughout most of it between the gravity of the story Bungie is telling at this moment and the lightheartedness of the ‘80s tropes littered throughout the campaign.
Neomuna feels like a cross between a Saturday morning cartoon and an afternoon at a futuristic space mall. The training montage with Strand was cute but also felt like a complete waste of time. Nimbus has grown on me over time, but I think they suffer from being the loan representative of an entire new civilization.
Zack: I kept wondering, as I played through the campaign, what the point of this expansion was. And the weird mix, as you mention, of ‘80s tropes and serious storytelling, didn’t help. With Witch Queen, I really liked how the narrative developed the idea that the Light isn’t some inherently good thing. That it can instead be used by anyone and how that really shook up Zavala and others. This time around the Strand was just a fun Darkness power we got via a Rocky-like montage, beat Calus (again) and I was left going “Okay…cool?”
I really enjoy exploring Neomuna and Nimbus has also grown on me. And I do like how the post-campaign quests seem to be expanding more on the lore of the planet and its people. But compared to last year and Witch Queen, I mostly felt disappointed by Lightfall.
Even the Vanguard have no idea what the hell is going on.Image: Bungie
Ethan: Yes, Witch Queen felt like a very tightly calibrated story with a beginning, middle, and end that built out the lore and stakes of the larger story while still focusing mostly on expanding on Savathûn’s backstory and motivations. No characters really provided that in Lightfall.
The end-game quests are much stronger than many of the campaign missions, I think, and probably would have provided a nice middle point to help the expansion breathe a bit more. I think backloading finally getting Strand, learning about Neomuna’s history, and also what Rohan was up to prior to our arrival, only served to make the campaign feel even more rushed and underexplained.
Zack: Yup. And I’ll also admit now that I still don’t fully understand why The Witness couldn’t just pop down to Neomuna and get his fancy Veil thing and do what he needed to do. And I also found it weird that Bungie—which is usually good about seeding stuff long before it becomes a big part of the story—just invented this whole Veil thing outta nowhere.
It just added to the feeling that this was rushed or not planned out as well as past expansions and seasons. Ethan, where did The Witness go? And will we find out before the next expansion via the upcoming seasons?
Ethan: I’m sure there will be hints of it throughout the upcoming seasons. But as tends to be the case with the expansion/season divide, my guess is the plot won’t move forward until The Final Shape. Which is fine, honestly. I get why some people felt like Lightfall needed to deliver more than a couple cutscenes, but I would have been completely satisfied if it felt like Neomuna had been properly fleshed out and had more tension.
I do think it’s been much more successful as a patrol space and launching pad for new exotic missions, however. What have you been thinking of the post-game and the broader content changes and additions in Lightfall?
Terminal Overload is a great public activity, if you can find enough players to help out. Image: Bungie
Zack: I like the quality-of-life stuff! The loadout manager is cool and actually works. The way red frame weapons work now, where you just get the plan right away, is nice. But it’s not all great. I hate the new guardian rank system. And the commendation stuff, which could have been cool, just sucks.
Commendations seem so generic and everyone is giving them out all the time, regardless of how I played, and it all feels pointless at the moment.
Ethan: Yea it feels very caught between wanting to incentivize good behavior and also not lead to negativity. Also since matchmaking is reserved for the easiest activities, I’m also rarely ever paying attention to who I’m playing with.
By the end of a Defiant Battleground or Nightfall I rarely remember who was the person that went out of their way to revive me or kept us from wiping. I do see who is the best dressed, and yet there’s no style commendation. It also feels moot when you can assign one to both people, and a chore considering the number of button presses. How do you feel about the overhauled mods?
Zack: All of the mod changes are solid and much needed, I feel. The mod manager helps a lot too. I really like how much easier it is to play how I want without having to worry about costs or energy types as much. I also like that the artifact mods are now active perks. Overall I now enjoy messing with mods and my build more than before. And I was someone who barely cared about that stuff before because it was such a chore.
Ethan: It definitely feels like the builds have less personality around them. Warmind mods had a very specific flavor, and I miss elemental wells a ton. Overall I think the changes are good to great on average, though I think the way mod benefits are communicated is still a little obtuse, especially for newcomers.
It’s clearly part of the design philosophy at Bungie to slap “+10% kinetic damage” on something, which I admire, but the current system requires learning a lot of keywords to break down what are, at the end of the day, numerical trade-offs. Speaking of which, man it’s rough out there for legendary primaries.
Calus is the Sol System’s favorite lush, but his character arc is more than played out. Image: Bungie
Zack: I’m still mostly using stuff from the last two seasons, which is often a bad sign. I’ve not liked most of the new Neomuna-themed legendary weapons. Which feels like a change from past seasons, where I would often end up swapping out most of my stuff for the new toys and having a good time!
Ethan: The Neomuna weapons haven’t been super exciting, and it’s a pain that the Terminal Overload ones aren’t craftable. I’d almost rather have it be reversed, with Nimbus’ engram weapons being RNG rolls only, since Terminal Overload is a much more targeted farm.
If the Queensguard weapons didn’t also roll out alongside it, I think there would be a lot more talk of Lightfall lacking loot on par with some of the criticisms of Beyond Light, though the exotics are head and shoulders above other expansions (with the exception of Witch Queen’s Osteo Striga, which remains undefeated).
One complaint I have is that I’m over 30 hours into the new content and still don’t have a new crafted weapon yet, with the exception of the Vexcalibur exotic. As with Strand, the campaign would have been a great time to level one of the new guns up and grow attached to it. Now, I almost don’t care anymore. Crafting in general, while less painful, still feels under-developed. It was the key feature of last year’s expansion, and it feels like a footnote now.
Zack: *Looks off into the distance, dreaming of Osteo Striga. What a gun…*
But yeah without the Queensguard weapons I’d be pretty damn bummed about the loot this time around. And about crafted weapons, I too lack any still. And I often forget about the whole system now that I just hit a button to get the plans. It really feels like a misfire, and keeping it around in this current half-baked form feels bad. Rip it out and just let us have generic plans that can be used to craft stuff, or something.
I do think it’s maybe telling that we’ve talked so much about the new expansion and neither of us seems excited about Strand. I don’t hate Strand or anything like that. I enjoy using it. But it’s not as exciting to me as the other subclasses after the big 3.0 overhauls.
New Exotics are the highlight of Lightfall. Image: Bungie
Ethan: It’s definitely very powerful, and I like that it can be utilized very effectively in both offensive and defensive ways, sometimes even in the same build. The grappling hook, like every moment-to-moment action in Destiny 2, feels great. Sorry though, not trading away my grenade for it. I mostly find myself using it now when I want to speed through lower-level grinds. I also don’t find it quite as visually and auditorily satisfying as Stasis, which, as evidenced by the stellar Verglas Curve exotic bow, remains so satisfying every time. But the damage output on Strand is wild. Players bemoaned the boring-sounding Titan Strand subclass, but I think it turned out to be the most fun version of it.
Zack: Oh the grappling hook feels soooooo good. But yeah, giving up a grenade for it and the long cooldown compared to the campaign makes it far less enticing to use regularly.
I think your comment about it not being as visually or auditorily satisfying is accurate and it leads me to the other problem with it: It just doesn’t seem as unique. The other subclasses being mostly elemental worked well to make them stand out. Strand is the first new subclass that seems less obvious to explain to someone. It’s like green space strings…I guess?
Are you excited about the rest of the year? Or has Lightfall dampened your Destiny 2 excitement for 2023? I’ll admit that I came into this new expansion and year very excited and pumped after Witch Queen and the last two seasons. And this has definitely made me a bit less excited for the rest of the year.
Neomuna is full of beauty that never gets its due. Image: Bungie
Ethan: I was extremely burnt out after last fall, and didn’t play a ton of last season. So far, I’ve actually been playing more of Lightfall than Witch Queen, which I loved it, but which I ended up dropping off pretty hard. We haven’t mentioned the Root of Nightmares raid yet, but I think while not as spectacle-driven as some past ones, it will get a lot more play because of how much shorter and more straightforward it is to grind. That’s especially surprising considering how the more general ramp-up in difficulty this season has completely turned me off of doing Lost Sectors and Nightfalls, which just feel like more trouble than they’re worth right now.
Zack: Yeah it’s interesting to see the raid be so much simpler than past raids. I wonder if Bungie wants more people playing raids or is just trying to shake things up and not always do some complicated beast for each new raid. Yet, meanwhile, other parts of the game are harder than ever. I imagine Bungie has data to back up these choices, but then again, as I write this, I see the hotfix patch notes for the game mention increasing rewards on solo Lost Sector runs. So maybe this is more evidence that this expansion and update didn’t get as much time in the oven as it needed
Ethan: As we look forward to the rest of the year—and to be clear, a Destiny expansion really is a year-long $100 commitment at this point (both for Bungie and the player)—there are definitely some things coming that I wish could have arrived alongside Lightfall. An in-game looking-for-group tool is one of the big ones, but the biggest of all is an end to the Power grind. It’s tedious. It gates content. And it’s just not fun.
RPG leveling has always been an uncomfortable fit for Destiny, which is a shooter at heart and fundamentally about chasing guns. Without skill trees or stats to pour points into, there’s really no reason, besides padding. to have to hit an arbitrary number before being able to participate in new content. It’s always been a fundamental tension in Destiny, but I don’t think any of the solutions have ever fixed it. And on a more optimistic note, I’m more confident than ever that the fundamentals of the game are strong enough to survive without it.
Pick an Engram, any Engram.Image: Bungie
Zack: More so than ever, this expansion and season I feel the Power grind and I’m excited to hear Bungie isn’t going to raise it again next season. It feels like the beginning of fully removing it completely. The game can live on without it.
Reading back through this chat, I worry I sound super down on Destiny 2. But I’m still ready for the rest of the year and I’m excited to play more. I think, for me, this expansion just reminded me of how damn good Witch Queen was. It was always going to be hard to compete with that.
Ethan:Lightfall is definitely a slow burn. I can’t recommend it to people who aren’t already invested in the game in some way, unlike The Witch Queen,which was arguably the best shooter campaign of 2022.
But I think, or at least I’m hopeful, that it will bear more fruit over the long run. Season of Defiance is already off to a really strong start compared to other expansion-adjacent seasons, quality of life is improving, a lot of the currencies and grinding is getting streamlined, and there’s room to tie up a lot of interesting loose ends before The Final Shape.
Zack: Agreed. The future is still bright for Destiny 2. We just have to get there.
Like Destiny, a game that, thanks to its huge and devoted playerbase, regularly shouts out the creators among that crowd by highlighting their movies and artwork. Sadly last week one of those artworks turned out to be an AI-generated image:
Upon being showcased and instantly called out as an AI-generated image by fans, the person uploading it (“hebb”) is quoted as saying “Woah, I just thought the picture was really neat so I posted on the creations page. I’ll take the post down”. At time of posting the image has not been taken down, and can still be viewed here.
It’s not the most alarming example of this, I know, but Bungie’s response is interesting because it highlights the struggles that people involved in curating and using artwork are currently facing the world over, whether they work for a video games studio or in an international newsroom. In a blog post called “There’s Nothing Artificial About This Week’s Picks”, Bungie say:
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Art
Last week, an A.I. art submission was mistakenly featured in our blog. The process of choosing these involves a team effort and with this technology being so new, we don’t have a foolproof way of knowing what submissions are A.I. art.
We want to keep this celebration of our community for those that work hard to bring their creative selves to the forefront when creating works that the Traveler would find joy in. Because of this, we will not knowingly ever feature A.I. art submissions as a potential #Destiny2AOTW or #Destiny2MOTW winner. That being said, this is still new. We ask for grace if we mistakenly feature a submission generated by A.I., and a respectful heads up should it ever happen again in the future. Appreciate the assist!
G/O Media may get a commission
While there’s no definitive guide—especially in cases where the vast majority of a piece is conjured by AI then touched by in PhotoShop—there are already plenty of tips out there for spotting AI-generated imagery that go beyond the obvious, like (as in this image’s case) “counting fingers”. As this Wired guide points out, some other key tells—for now, at least!—are dead, lifeless eyes, misshaped ears, a lack of composition and general acts of weirdness, like someone’s hair extending out of their collarbone, or jewellery/accessories that smoosh into each other.
Two days ago, Bungie turned off the Destiny 2 servers while the studio looked into a problem that had players apparently losing progress on in-game challenges. This outage lasted a bit longer than everyone expected, with the free-to-play loot shooter remaining offline for nearly 20 hours. So what happened? Today Bungie pulled back the curtain and explained exactly what went wrong and why it had to roll back the game, erasing a few hours of folks’ quest progress in the process.
On January 24 at around 2:00 p.m., Bungie tweeted that it was taking Destiny 2 offline while it investigated an “ongoing issue causing certain Triumphs, Seals, and Catalysts to lose progress for players.” A few hours later, at 5:51 p.m., Bungie tweeted that it had possibly found a fix for the issue and was testing it, but was unable to specify when or if Destiny 2’s servers would come back online. Nearly four hours later, Bungie tweeted for the last time that night, announcing that Destiny 2 would not be playable that evening. Nearly 12 hours later, at around 9:55 a.m, Bungie announced it had finally solved the problem and servers would be coming back online following a hotfix. The nearly 20 hours of downtime had some players worried about the game’s health, and its future. After years of bugs and broken updates, it was really starting to feel like the seven-year-old shooter was being held together with duct tape.
So what happened during those 20 hours and why was the game down for so long, seemingly with little warning? Bungie has explained what broke, why, and how it was fixed in its latest blog post. And surprisingly, the developer is more transparent than you might think, going into technical details of the issue.
According to Bungie, shortly after releasing a previous update for the game (Hotfix 6.3.0.5) players began reporting that many Triumphs, Seals, and catalysts had vanished. Bungie realized that this was being caused after it moved some “currently incompletable” challenges into a different area of the game’s data. To do this, Bungie used a “very powerful” tool that lets the studio tinker with a player’s game state and account. Apparently, due to a configuration error, Bungie accidentally “re-ran an older state migration process” used in a past update. Because of this error, the tool copied old data from this past update into the current version of the game, which basically undid some players’ recent in-game accomplishments
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“Once we identified that the issue resulted in a loss of player state,” wrote Bungie, “we took the game down and rolled back the player database while we investigated how to remove the dangerous change from the build.”
After creating a new patch that removed the mistaken change the issue was fixed, and following some testing, Bugnie deployed the update. However, as a result of this patch, all player accounts had to be rolled back a few hours before the troublesome update went live. This means any player progress made between 8:20 and 11 a.m. on January 24 was lost. Any purchases made during this time got refunded, too.
While it sucks that the game was down for so long and that the team was forced to spend what sounds like many late hours trying to fix their mistake, it’s refreshing to see a developer be so open and honest about what happened and how it was fixed. In a time when games feel buggier than ever and players are fed up with delays, outages, and broken updates, it’s smart to pull back the curtain and show everyone just how hard it is to make, maintain, and sustain video games as complex as Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 is fixing a bunch of stuff for the month and change ahead of February’s massive Lightfall expansion. Players won’t have to grind so much to get into Grandmaster Nightfall missions. Iron Banner will be much more generous with armor drops in the weeks ahead. And armor mods, one of the most fun but esoteric parts of Bungie’s loot shooter, are finally getting unlocked for everyone.
Destiny 2sucks for new players. You can have plenty of fun, but some of the most interesting parts of the game are locked behind dozens of hours or more of grinding, unlocks, and luck. One of the things that new players have difficulty accessing is armor mods, which drastically change the ways you can play the game, but which are only sold on a rotating basis by a single in-game vendor named ADA-1 who is hidden in the far corner of the main social hub. While longtime players have access to all of them, new players can get stuck with huge holes in their arsenal when it comes to crafting fun builds. No longer.
Yesterday, Bungie unlocked all standard armor mods for all players. While raid mods and artifact mods will still need to be earned, Warmind, Well, and Charged with Light and other powerful mods no longer need to be found. Even if you just started playing Destiny 2, you can start experimenting with different synergies or, more likely, copy the best builds making the rounds online.
Screenshot: Bungie
“With big changes coming to buildcrafting in Lightfall, we want to give everyone a chance to enjoy all of the standard mods in their current state for the rest of the Season,” Bungie wrote in Thursday’s This Week At Bungie (TWAB) blog post. The studio will outline how mods will work differently in next week’s preview. In the meantime, however, players can enjoy some other quality of life improvements.
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Grandmaster Nightfalls now unlock at 1580 power and only require you to hit 1595 to reach the difficulty ceiling. Focusing costs for Trials of Osiris, Crucible, and Gambit weapons and armor have also all been reduced to 25 Legendary Shards. And most importantly, the remaining Iron Banner events this season will make it almost twice as easy to hit the rank reset and earn a full set of the hot new vintage Iron Banner armor.
Things have been extremely touch-and-go in Destiny 2 recently. While Season 19 has been applauded as one of the more fun and less grindy updates in some time, there have also been plenty of technical bugs and multiplayer complaints getting in the way. Last week’s Iron Banner session had all sorts of issues, not the least of which was players grinding tons of matches without managing to complete a set of armor. The upcoming changes should help earn some good will back ahead of Lightfall when Destiny 2 will likely once again start to feel like a completely new game again.
While a Horizon multiplayer game felt all but inevitable, Guerrilla Games finally made the news official on Friday by way of a new job advertisement. The Sony studio behind the open world RPG series wants to take the post-apocalyptic robot combat online with an upcoming project featuring new characters and a different art-style.
“A new internal team is developing a separate Online Project set in Horizon’s universe,” Guerrilla Games wrote on Twitter. “Featuring a new cast of characters and unique stylized look, friends will be able to explore the majestic wilds of Horizon together.” So don’t expect to teaming up with Aloy and her other friends this time around.
Job listings for the new game include character, quest, and combat designers, as well as “stylized” world artists and character animators. From the descriptions, it sounds like what you’d expect from the creators of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, but with a multiplayer twist. The references to a new art direction, meanwhile, might hint at a different set of visual tradeoffs from a studio traditionally at the forefront of visual fidelity, in order to accommodate the new cooperative gameplay.
Guerrilla also makes clear that it’s still working on a new single-player installment in the Horizon series, in addition to the PSVR2 spin-off, Horizon Call of the Mountain, and Forbidden West DLC, Burning Shores, the latter two both due out early in 2023. There are also job listings for an external project, though it’s not clear exactly what that is.
Rumors of a Horizon multiplayer project have been swirling around for a while now, including a report of a Horizon MMO being licensed out to Guild Wars publisher NCsoft. The multiplayer push comes as other major Sony first-party franchises have made the jump to online, including Ghost of Tsushima’s co-op raid update, and an upcoming multiplayer-only Last of Us spin-off.
Following its $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie, whose successful MMO shooter Destiny 2 has become one of the gold standards in live-service gaming, Sony revealed plans to release over a dozen more live-service games by 2025. If the past few years have been any indication, not all of them will succeed, and few if any will reach the levels of Apex Legends, Genshin Impact, and other recent breakout hits. With a growing majority of all gaming companies’ revenue coming from microtransactions and other “recurrent player spending,” it’s easy to see why Sony would try.
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