In a surprising move, Bungie canceled their 3rd livestream in favor of a State of Destiny
2 blog post, discussing some of their priorities moving forward for the game.
We got a lot of stuff to talk about, so go get something to eat, sit down and let's go
over the future of Destiny 2.
My thoughts are at the timestamp on the screen (6:06).
There are 4 things that Bungie wanted to target for the December update, some stuff coming
on the 5th, some of the 12th.
They want to deepen rewards for advanced players, provide more player control over getting rewards,
make shards useful by adding things to use them for, and then just provide fixes where
possible.
We'll talk about that first, then the overview.
First up is the Masterwork weapon system, slated for December 12th.
Masterwork weapons are basically in between legendary and exotic, an upgraded legendary
weapon.
Legendaries can be dropped as Masterworks, but they can also be upgraded to Masterwork.
It'll give you some benefits: 1) generate orbs of light on multikills, 2) grants some
sort of random, rerollable \b stat \b0 bonus from a small pool of stats, and 3) tracks
and displays total kills with the weapon, you can split that between total or just Crucible
only.
If you dismantle a Masterwork weapon, you'll get materials that can be used to upgrade
another weapon into Masterwork.
Raid and Trials weapons have a high chance to be Masterwork when you earn them.
Finally, there are plans to extend this to other gear and expose your kill counts in
more places.
Next are armor ornaments, slated for December 5th, so that's the expansion.
Armor ornaments are being added to the game for Vanguard, Crucible, Trials, Iron Banner,
the 3 factions and the raid lair armor.
Ornaments are unlocked by completing objectives and are account wide, like weapon ornaments.
Then, on the 12th, you'll be able to buy faction armor with legendary shards on most faction
vendors, with slots unlocking as you rank up, aka, get packages, and you will get credit
for engrams you may have already claimed since launch.
Certain weapons will be available for purchase, rotating weekly.
Next up is Xur.
If you've ever thought, man, exotics really need to be even easier to get, then I have
some good news for you.
Xur will now have a Fated Engram for 97 shards that will produce an exotic you do not have,
available once per week although I dunno if that's per account or character, hopefully
account.
Then, everyone's favorite from Destiny 1, Three of Coins, is returning, although thankfully
without all of the stacking nonsense.
They'll basically work like a Fireteam Medallion, pop one, lasts 4 hours, if it lasts longer,
talk to your doctor.
Next, The Gunsmith, on December 5th, will have a few specific legendary mods for sale,
rotating daily, for some legendary mod components and shards.
Rare mods will dismantle into gunsmith materials and you have a chance at legendary mod components
from them as well.
Rahool will sell legendary engrams for shards on the 5th as well, like we had in Destiny
1.
Also on the 5th, a lot of reputation token changes: daily challenge token rewards are
increased, caayde's treasure chests now guarantee at minimum a payout of destination tokens,
strikes drop more tokens, destination resource tokens, aka plaentary materials have had drop
rates increased 100% and value when turned in increase by 50% for the regular and 250%
for the rare ones.
However, they did bump up the amount of rep required to level up for destination factions
by 37% and gunsmith by 50%.
Last for this, Leviathan tokens can be redeemed without a raid clear, BOO.
On the 12th, almost done, Zavala and Shaxx will sell consumables for shards that can
be used in strikes or crucible to give bonus rewarded to EVERYONE in the activity, which
can include anything from faction tokens to a ROUND OF EXOTICS FOR EVERYONE IN THE MATCH.
Next, also the 12th, explot safeguards on chests and resource nodes have been relaxed,
you shouldn't see it as much.
Next, we'll go to the overview, so we'll address some things not talked about just now.
First, Bungie is targetting January for an update to provide better incentives to complete
Prestige activities.
Next, Private matches for Crucible are slated for early 2018, we'll get better timing after
the New Year and Ranked PvP has been moved to the top of Bungie's priority list for next
year.
Crucible tuning and sandbox updates will be coming soon, I know sandbox stuff was supposed
to be talked about soon, those notes are coming with the update.\par
Under-performing exotics will be getting buffed, and duplication protection will be added for
exotics in the new year.
Finally, the most important news for last, emote interface improvements are still on
the way, and they'll have updates on this system in the new year.
Ok, so that was mostly everything in the update that was news related, we're gonna talk thoughts
on this and we'll basically go in the same order as we just did, starting with Masterwork,
but I'm gonna give some overall thoughts quickly first.
I went into this news with basically zero expectations and that's mainly because that
I know Curse of Osiris was not gonna be able to greatly address player concerns.
Bungie was not gonna be able to make sweeping changes to the game, to game or reward economies
or anything like that.
But, the thing that I really want Bungie to latch onto is this sentence right here: "Going
forward, Destiny 2s 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."
Too often have I felt like the game was being developed for the people who will leave the
game the quickest or for the people whose feedback Bungie never hears, the one and dones.
I get that Bungie's gotta sell units, but you gotta keep those invested players attention,
otherwise you end up with exactly what has been happening.
Veteran players, the people who keep the game going, were neglected and you ended up with
riots.
What the majority of this update is going to do is actually make the game even easier
to get stuff, which is probably something that needed addressing the least, which we'll
talk about it when we get there.
Alright, Masterwork system, pretty simple in theory, basically better than a legendary
weapon, gives a little stat boost, NOT random rolls like I've been seeing, it's a random
STAT.
I don't NOT like this or anything, I certainly don't think these are going to be very hard
to get, at least for the players ravaging Bungie on reddit.
I like that they're at least TRYING to put depth somewhere in the game, but this doesn't
have that much depth to it in its current form.
The game is so basic right now, so I'll take whatever I can get.
I don't think it's much of a long term thing unless it's stupidly hard to level them, which
it probably won't be, but it sets some groundwork.
I think this is Bungie's potential short term answer to getting duplicate weapons, but you
only get masterwork materials from other masterwork items, so it doesn't acknowledge it completely.
As it stands now, it'll just be another thing to make sure your weapon has, the same weapons
are still gonna be good, this is not gonna improve bad weapons.
That being said, the orb effect can be pretty potent if there's no cooldown, which is definitely
a positive with regards to it affecting gameplay.
Next up, ornaments for armor from vendors, uh, I like this, but this is something that
I think should've been around from the get go.
We had ornaments back in Rise of Iron and in Age of Triumph, they were pretty cool then
and I was kinda hoping they'd be more prevalent at the launch of the game.
The ornament system put in place seems to be pretty close to what Holtzmann and I suggested
back in my Iron Banner token video, where you unlock ornaments by ranking up, or in
this case, completing objectives.
It's a system that shows off the time investment you have put into the game or your character,
which is something I've been an advocate for since forever.
So, this whole armor/ornament buying system is basically what we had in Destiny 1 with
Iron Banner, where as you ranked up in Iron Banner, you were able to unlock the ability
to buy more items, they've now seemingly applied this to multiple vendors.
This is something people have had a massive problem with in Destiny 2, specifically with
Iron Banner, where RNG dictated whether or not you got stuff, there wasn't a set path
to getting the stuff you wanted.
Now, we have that back, hooray, but again, I dunno how much I can praise something for
going back to the way we used to have it, I guess I can praise Bungie for listening
to feedback or realizing the old system was better or.. something, that's not really saying
much.
It's an improvement to Destiny 2 specifically, it's not an improvement to the history of
the game.
I mentioned earlier that this update is going to make things even easier to get and this
is part of why.
This is a double edged sword: give people a set path and they can just get the stuff
pretty quickly, but then they run out of things to go do, so they're mad, or don't give people
a set path and they get mad that they're at the mercy of RNG to get the things they want.
You need to have a mix of both.
We sort of needed this system to return for better things to maybe happen.
So, yay, we got back to where we were.
Here's the one thing that confused me and that's with the Xur changes.
Now, a very long time ago, I actually suggested in Destiny 1 that Xur should sell all exotics
for a drastically increased price for people looking for their final exotics and essentially,
that is what they've done here.
But the reason I suggested it back then was because exotics were much harder to get.
In Destiny 2, they rain from the sky and the only things we really needed with adjustments
to exotics are 1) buffs to some of them, which we're getting eventually, and 2) the duplicate
drop protect, which we're also getting eventually.
The Fated Engram does solve the problem of getting that final couple of exotics, so I
guess it's ok, but Three of Coins returning doesn't need to happen, on top of the other
item that Shaxx and Zavala will be selling.
Three of Coins does not need to exist in Destiny 2, I do not like that at all and it feels
like these two additions were added to drain shards from the economy and fill Xur's empty
UI screen.
Didn't need to happen.\par The mod adjustments, being able to buy specific
mods and making mods slightly more consistent to earn is a good change as the system is
right now.
If you're anything like me, you're desperate for arc related mods and getting them is an
inconsistent slog at best, so I like that.
It's a short term fix for a current problem.
The long term fix for mods is going to be making them significantly more interesting,
because the system itself is boring.
Was I expecting them to overhaul the mod system in this update?
No.
But that's what I'm going to want to hear going into the future: how are you making
mods more interesting or more important to gameplay?
That's the kind of roadmap I'm looking for and hopefully it's one Bungie will continue
to talk about.
Also, one quick thing that I found funny was that they're relaxing the exploit safeguard
on chests and materials.
I just found it funny that the ONE exploit that this was supposed to safeguard, the faction
token situation with a specific lost sector where people could farm thousands of tokens
doing nothing, it didn't protect against, but it protected against just getting lucky
and finding a bunch of items together in the wild.
As for the more minor stuff, plantary materials needed a huge buff, they were completely worthless
to gather, so that's nice, but again, all of these adjustments just make even more loot
drop on us and we don't need more loot, we need more things to do with the loot.
Or, if you're gonna get more loot, grab the dudes who did Loot 2.0 in Diablo 3 and bootcamp
for a little bit with them.
These are all short term things that aren't going to affect the major issues people have
with the game.
People are gonna Masterwork a bunch of items pretty quickly, people are gonna get all the
ornaments quickly.
You gotta start somewhere though, I get it, and again, not expecting huge changes with
Curse of Osiris or these updates.
But this kind of communication needs to continue moving forward otherwise we're gonna be ranting
about the same stuff.
We need long term roadmaps, things like mentioning that ranked play is now a priority for Bungie
for the next year, that's what I wanna hear about.
I wanna hear about what's gonna be happening to the mod system, I wanna hear what's gonna
be happening with new PvE activities, I wanna hear about chat and social systems, I wanna
hear about the stuff you're gonna be doing to keep people more engaged in the day to
day life of the game, not the 2 hours on Tuesday part of the game.
And even then, hearing about stuff isn't enough for people, they won't care until it's in
game.
The earliest we're going to see any sort of huge system revamps, if any, is Spring 2018
for DLC2 or Fall 2018 for whatever the Taken King style expansion ends up being.
So, in closing, these changes do help some short term issues that people have, but the
long term changes are what we care about the most, so until we start learning more, I will
stick with my same cautious optimism attitude that I usually stick with.
I don't think these changes make the game WORSE in any way though, the quality of the
game isn't gonna go down as a result of these changes, but it's not skyrocketing up the
charts either.
Waiting sucks, but it's all we can do right now.
Most of the changes aren't bad or anything, but much like Curse of Osiris, it's maybe
not what we needed right now.
It sets up groundwork for the future.
Should Destiny 1 have been the groundwork for the future?
Uh, yeah, it should've.
And it's obvious by the update that we're basically just reverting back to Destiny 1
in certain ways.
But what're you gonna do, just gotta wait some more.
I'm just getting tired of the waiting.
A positive rating is appreciated if you enjoyed, thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.
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