Destiny 2: Massive Changes Are Coming

Destiny 2 is going to be a lot better in the future. Bungie said the loot shooter would change in many ways over the following few expansions and seasons. The studio plans to make content harder, starting with the release of Lightfall at the end of this month. By the time the subsequent development, The Final Shape, comes out in 2024, the power grind might be gone for good.

In a long, 5,000-word blog post, game director Joe Blackburn talked about all this and more. It showed upcoming changes that will make many of Destiny 2’s complicated and hard-to-use systems easier to use and a future goal for the sci-fi MMO. Bungie’s big plans for Destiny are to get players to use their imaginations again and make the game more social. They also want to eliminate recent feelings of player burnout by making the game easier to play and less predictable. And it will also be harder.

Starting with Lightfall, it will take longer for abilities to cool down, and enemies will hit harder. “We don’t want the whole game to feel like it’s turned up to 11, but we think these changes will make the enemy forces patrolling Neomuna feel dangerous and worth your attention,” Blackburn wrote. Also, it seems like Destiny 2 will move away from the power grind at the heart of the game since the first one came out in 2014.

At the start of Lightfall, you’ll still be able to slowly raise your overall power by getting more and more copies of loot you already have, but the power cap won’t go up in the next Season of the Deep. And by 2024, it might not be there at all. “We think there are some big problems with how power works in Destiny 2 and how it keeps players from seeing some of our best content,” Blackburn wrote. “We’d like to change the way power works in The Final Shape.” There is hope, but it’s still a long way off.

What to expect from Destiny 2 Lightfall

Players can look forward to several smaller changes in the next few months. Here are some of the things that will happen in Season of Defiance when it goes live on February 28, along with Lightfall:

• No more Umbrals and Umbral Energies to bring seasonal engrams into focus.
• Seasonal chests can be opened with a single key that can be gathered from seasonal activities.
• Fewer but better holiday upgrades for vendors
• Deepsight weapons only drop if you still need to get the pattern.
• A Vanguard Ops playlist with more complex songs
• Countdown, Rush, and Checkmate Control are the three new Crucible modes.
• The Lake of Shadows and Arms Dealer strikes have been improved.
• Nightfall now includes Battlegrounds missions.

All of these changes and additions make it clear that the year of Lightfall will be much better than the year of The Witch Queen, at least in terms of reducing bloat and reskinning the seasonal progressions. At the same time, there are a lot of big questions about how large systems like crafting and modes like Gambit will fit into the future of Destiny. Still, much of what Bungie showed goes to the heart of what players have been saying about how easy and repetitive the game has been this past year.

“We want any player to be able to look at something’s name and know right away what it does,” Blackburn wrote. “In short, we want players to spend more time playing and less time trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do.” Anyone who has played Destiny 2 or tried to get a friend to play it with them knows exactly what he means. But as the last eight years have shown, this is easier to say than to do.