Eyes up, Guardians! Lightfall is almost upon us and not only will it change the world as your guardian knows it, it will also change the way you as players interact with that world. Last week, Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn posted a new blog on Bungie.net fittingly called Lightfall and the Year Ahead. The post not only got Guardians even more hyped for the pending expansion release, it gave a road map of the changes that the Destiny 2 team wants to bring to the game over the next year. In short, it’s a guide to how the game will continue to grow and evolve during this next year. Joe broke it down into 4 goals: expand players’ imaginations, bring challenge back to Destiny, enrich our content, and connect our Guardians. Let’s dive into each of them.
Expand players’ imaginations
The world of Destiny 2 has captured the hearts and minds of Guardians since its inception. Set in a broken future with more questions than answers about what happened, year after year more is revealed with new questions taking their place. That’s the goal of the dev team, to make each year something new and memorable. Coming into Lightfall and Season of Defiance, some changes are coming to refresh the world from a player standpoint and make things new again. Gone are umbral engrams and umbral energy. Here now are seasonal engrams held at the seasonal vendor. Vendor upgrades will be fewer and more meaningful. No more seasonal currency to keep track of either, just random keys to open chests at the end of the seasonal activity. Season of the Deep is up next and won’t feature vendor upgrades and neither will Season 22. Weapon crafting is also getting a refresh. Not every gun will be craftable. Now some guns can only be obtained through random drops but will be able to be Enhanced to match the power of crafting weapons to be exactly what players are looking for. Along with that, Deepsight weapons will only drop if a Guardian does not have that blueprint unlocked so seeing red will be a good thing.
Bring Challenge Back to Destiny
Joe talked about the challenge of balancing all the systems in Destiny 2 to make it both challenging and accessible. The common consensus right now is that the world as a whole just isn’t challenging enough and simply increasing the powers of enemies won’t have the desired effect. To approach this, ability tuning is getting an update. Resilience mods are getting a little more expensive per armor slot and the total resilience per mod is getting reduced. If you played Season of the Seraph’s Battlegrounds, that’s the base level of difficulty the team wants to achieve by giving players more control of their loadouts to counter any situation.
Enrich Our Content
You can’t talk about Destiny 2 without talking about the Crucible, aka the PvP arena. PvP is an integral part of the Destiny 2 experience that needs a little love. Countdown mode and Countdown Rush will be returning in Season of Defiance. Checkmate Control is a new mode coming as well. There will also be several new maps over the course of the year: Meltdown, a new Vex network map, and the Citadel will return as well to the Crucible. Trials of Osiris will continue to be tweaked and improved as well as transparency in the Competitive mode. For PvE, Destiny 2 will bring in rotating exotic missions to allow players to tackle different challenges each week. This enables past missions to potentially come back into rotation as well. The Lake of Shadows and Arms Dealer Strikes will get a facelift. Battlegrounds from past seasons will join the rotation and even become Nightfalls.
Connect Our Guardians
Your fireteam is your lifeline in Destiny 2 activities. To grow those connections, Destiny 2 is adding a commendation system. This will allow players to recognize fireteam members after each activity. Certain activities will have commendations exclusive to them. Text chats will change from opt-in to opt-out making it more likely that Guardians will see and engage in those messages. Fireteam Finder is coming too! This feature will allow Guardians to join in desired activities from anywhere in the game world at any time. There will be many filters and options to make this work for you exactly like you want.Lightfall launches on February 28th on PS4/5, Xbox One and Series X|S, and PC. As with each expansion, this is a great time for new Guardians to jump in on the fun or for old Guardians who may have gone missing for a while to make their grand return. These changes sound like the game will be clean, simpler, and more approachable. Get in as deep as you want or just play it casual and have a blast. How you do it is up to you, but either way the Earth needs Guardians. Eyes up.
Image from: Bungie
