The next expansion for Destiny 2 is rapidly approaching with Lightfall set to launch at the end of the month on February 28, 2023. Today, Bungie released a new blog post giving players an idea of what to expect from it as well as their intentions for the rest of the year leading up to The Final Shape which is the final chapter of The Light and Darkness saga, the main storyline of Destiny since the first game launched back in 2014. Bungie listed four big goals that they are focused on for the game, expanding players’ imaginations, bring challenge back to Destiny, enrich our content, and connect our Guardians.
Speaking on expanding players’ imaginations, Game Director Joe Blackburn said “In Destiny 2, we want each major update to get the gears inside our players’ heads turning on what’s new and what it means for the way they interact with the game. This wasn’t true for all of our releases last year, and it’s going to take changes across multiple releases to get us where we want to be. We can’t break all the design bones we want to right away, so instead let’s unpack how we will take on this big challenge over the course of the next year. ”
The next season coming to the game is Season of Defiance, which is launching alongside Lightfall. Bungie says that most of the content was wrapped up before they had their new goals in mind, there are some “numerous seasonal quality-of-life changes along with substantial iterations to our current model coming to shake things up, starting with reducing complexity with our progression systems. This means fewer competing currencies to earn.” Umbrals and Umbral energies are going away. Going forward, if players want to focus an engram into a seasonal weapon or armor, all they need is glimmer and a seasonal engram. To make things easier, seasonal engrams will be stored and tracked on seasonal vendors.
Bungie is also changing how players unlock chests for completing seasonal activities. Instead of having to hold onto seasonal currency, players will be getting singular keys throughout their playime. These will allow players to extract better rewards from the chest at the end of a seasonal activity. Bungie wants to make keys a meaningful bonus when you get them, not a requirement to engage in the seasonal playlist. Players are no longer required to play content outside of the seasonal playlist to chase seasonal rewards, keys can drop from seasonal activities by default.
Other changes in Season of Defiance include fewer total vendor upgrades, with each individual upgrade being more potent and some upgrades even offering a variance on the way you interact with the seasonal activity; and changes in the naming of various progression systems and currencies. “We want any player to read the name of something and immediately understand what it does; in short, to spend more time playing and less time trying to understand what they are supposed to do,” Blackburn said.
After Season of Defiance comes Season of the Deep. Season of the Deep and the next season will not feature a vendor upgrade paradigm. Bungie says that those aren’t going away completely. They want to create a more varied experimental frameworks and slowly create a wide array of different systems for players to show their investment in seasonal content. This will also extend to the types of content players experience in the moment-to-moment gameplay. More fresh activity experiences are coming in Season of the Deep and Season 22.
Lightfall sees the addition of Guardian Ranks to the game. For Bungie, its a new way players share their place in their journey with one another. Instead of the number next to a player’s nameplate representing how much they grinded the Season Pass, it’s a representation of their experience as a Guardian and the challenges they’ve faced and overcome.
Weapon Crafting is changing in Lightfall. Fewer weapons will be craftable. More weapons with long term sources will get value from random perk rolls. More and more non-crafted weapons will have the ability to be enhanced. Enhancing allows your dropped weapon to start leveling up, use mementos, and gain access to both enhanced perks and enhanced intrinsic properties, but only the enhanced versions of the perks and Masterwork that are already on the version of the weapon you are enhancing. In other words, enhancing allows players to take the random rolled weapon that they’ve obtained and enhance its existing roll to match the full power of a crafted weapon. Crafted weapons will never see a Deepsight on them unless it’s something you need to make pattern progress on. A mechanism will be added to activate Deepsight on any craftable weapon a player doesn’t have the pattern for. This is targeted for the next season, Season of the Deep.
Talking about bringing challenge back to Destiny, Blackburn said:
“We could have all the variety in the world, and that wouldn’t matter much if we weren’t also making sure that the content our players spend the most time with is engaging and interesting. There’s a lot that goes into making a piece of Destiny content engaging, but at the chewy center, it’s challenge.
Last year, we spent a lot of time bringing all our subclasses up to the Stasis 3.0 standard. During that time, not only did our abilities become more powerful, but their synergy with weapons and gear raised the total Power tide for all boats.
The result of these changes is a game with a more compelling RPG, but at times lower levels of challenge in our core content. With a player base as large as Destiny’s, the right level of difficulty is going to be different for everyone. While we are still committed to offering multiple difficulty levels in content such as our campaigns, Nightfalls, secret missions, dungeons, and raids, we feel like the baseline challenge in most of our content is just too low.”
Bungie believes that bringing challenge back will come with a two-pronged approach. The first part is tuning abilities. Bungie thinks that abilities dominate too many engagements across both PvE and PvP so starting with Lightfall, there will be a moderate increase in ability recharge time across a wide selection of abilities. “Destiny is a game about guns and powers; we want both to shine,” Blackburn said. The second part deals with shaking up enemy difficulty. The difficulty knob used in Season of the Seraph will be used for Season of Defiance. The difficulty setting will also be used for the Vanguard Ops playlist. This approach to Power and difficulty is also going to be present when players are roaming around Neomuna, and while we don’t want the entire game to feel like it’s turned up to 11, we think these changes will help the enemy forces patrolling Neomuna feel dangerous and worth your attention,” Blackburn said. Players can look forward to experiments with the Power settings throughout the year with a big change to the system coming in The Final Shape.
Enriching the content of Destiny 2 includes new modes and a refresh to existing content. For PvP, Countdown is coming back for the Cruicible, along with a respawn variant called Countdown Rush. Bungie will also be testing another variant called Checkmate Control with a series of Crucible Labs. On the PvP side of things, starting with Season 22, Bungie is adding an Exotic Mission Rotator that will feature Exotic missions from the past that rotate on a weekly cadence. Strikes are also getting refreshed. The Lake of Shadows and Arms Dealer strikes will feature reimagined objectives and encounters. Exodus Crash and The Inverted Spire won’t be featured as much on the Vanguard Ops playlist because they haven’t been updated recently. Bungie is also upgrading how Battlegrounds integrate with Vanguard Ops. Alongside Lightfall, the Season 16 and Season 19 Battlegrounds will be added to the Vanguard Ops playlist. “We really like the fast, enemy-filled chaos of Battlegrounds, so this year we will also be adding a selection of Battlegrounds as Nightfalls,” Blackburn said. This process will begin with the Mars Heist Battleground being part of the Nightfall rotation in Season of Defiance, and we expect more Battlegrounds to be following suit each season.”
There are three ways this year that Bungie is doing to connect Guardians. This includes features like Guardian Ranks and the Commendations system which is the first step in creating stronger connections between Guardians this year. Commendations are a simple way of saying thanks to players that you appreciated playing with. With the Commendations system, those at the highest levels of Guardian Ranks will have proven to others that they are consistently appreciated by others in the community. Communication is key to developing a deeper relationship with someone. Bungie thought investing in the overall chatiness in Destiny 2 was a way to open things up for people. Blackburn said “this is not something that’s going to happen right away with Lightfall, but we want to start opening up more lines of communication between our players in the future. Eventually, we want to change our game-wide text chat channels so you have more frequent opportunities to reach out to a fellow Guardian. Over time, we’d like to continue to invest in deeper chat moderation, better filtering, and bigger features like speech-to-text. The last piece is Fireteam Finder. It was supposed to launch in the Summer with Season 22 but will now launch in the final Season of the year.
“We think that a truly first-class LFG system won’t be perfect until we can see how our players use it, but we want to make sure that the initial launch still has a ton of features that will allow players to find a fireteam inside of Destiny.,” Blackburn said. “This means a Fireteam Finder that you can queue up for from anywhere in the game. The ability to tag your posts with keywords to describe the kind of group you’re running and the kind of people you’re looking to recruit. The option to create groups where folks can join automatically, allowing you to get right into the action. And the power to create groups where you as a leader can approve or deny each person trying to join up, giving you tight control over the kind of group you’re putting together. I can’t wait for Fireteam Finder to make its way into players’ hands later in Lightfall’s year and to see how many more of our Guardians will be able to enjoy some of the best content in gaming alongside all of you.”