Published , by Sam Chandler
Published , by Sam Chandler
The challenge has slowly started to come back to Destiny 2 with Heist Battlegrounds in Season of the Seraph, but Lightfall looks to expand this into other areas of the game. In the latest State of the Game, Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn went into great detail about how Bungie will be adjusting, changing, and improving player experience over Lightfall and beyond. There are a lot of great elements here, but one of the highlights is that Destiny 2 is about to get harder.
For a long time, players have become increasingly powerful, able to smash through most content in the game without breaking a sweat, especially with Subclass 3.0, mods, and ability cooldowns. The February 13, 2023 State of the Game outlined a few of the ways that Bungie will be adjusting the difficulty to provide not just tough content, but meaningful challenge.
To start with, Bungie will be adjusting Guardians’ power by tuning ability recharge rate and making Resilience more expensive. Additionally, the Heist Battlegrounds treatment will be applied to more areas of the game. For Battlegrounds in Season of the Seraph, Bungie limited the player Power cap, ensuring Guardians were just slightly below their foes. This system will be applied to Vanguard Ops and the world of Neomuna, albeit at varying levels.
Both of these changes will see players meeting some resistance when fighting foes. This should drive players to engage with the Loadouts and buildcrafting systems, which is again another area where Destiny 2 has really started to shine.
There was a lot of other information to digest from the State of the Game, including insights into Power, Nightfalls, and Exotic missions:
Beyond this, weapon crafting will have an interesting change in the coming seasons. Non-crafted weapons will now be able to compete with crafted weapons thanks to a system that allows said weapons to receive enhanced perks. A random drop of a non-craftable weapon can be leveled up and have its perks increased to their enhanced versions. This will be available at the launch of Season of the Deep, and at firstly only for Lightfall raid Adept weapons. The goal will be to extend this to most of the non-crafted weapons.
Blackburn wrapped it up by offering details about how players can connect with one another using the new Commendation system. It’s a neat way to show your appreciation by giving your allies accolades. But the real standout is the upcoming Fireteam Finder. This system sounds like it will replace Guided Games, which never really got off the ground. Unfortunately, Fireteam Finder won’t be present in Destiny 2 until the final season of Lightfall, one year out from the end of the Light and Darkness Saga.
With Destiny 2 set to become more challenging, it would have been great to see Fireteam Finder enter the game and give more players a way to connect with the difficult content. For now, players will still likely need to rely on third-party sources to conquer Destiny 2’s new, harder content and its most difficult end-game activities.