After an overwhelmingly positive response to the difficulty scaling in Season of the Seraph’s Heist Battlegrounds playlist, hardcore Destiny 2 players have been hoping that it represents a shift in the game’s challenge level going forward.
In a lengthy state of the game post penned by game director Joe Blackburn released today, those hopes have been proved correct. In the Lightfall expansion and beyond, Bungie wants to focus on “bringing challenge back to Destiny,” tweaking both core and seasonal activities to provide a greater sense of difficulty and reward.
Making the game more difficult is not a simple task, however, and the 3.0 updates to the Light subclasses during the year of The Witch Queen have not helped with making most activities feel legitimately challenging to the majority of players.
“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,” Blackburn said. “The result of these changes is a game with a more compelling RPG, but at times lower levels of challenge in our core content. We feel like the baseline challenge in most of our content is just too low.”
A two-pronged approach to fixing difficulty
To address Power creep and make Destiny 2 a more engaging experience, Bungie will be using a “two-pronged approach” for Lightfall and its seasonal releases.
“If we just tuned up our enemies across the game, we would start to encounter issues where combatants frequently one-shot players and would feel super spongy,” Blackburn said. “On the other hand, if we were only to tune the player’s efficiency, the RPG elements would start to feel like they matter less, and Destiny might start to lose its essential fantasy of being this powerful battle wizard in space.”
To Bungie, the answer then is to make smaller-scale adjustments in both areas that can be in conversation with one another. We already got a preview of the changes coming to abilities thanks to a preview blog on the topic released last week, where the team went into detail about its plans to moderately increase ability recharge time across a wide selection of abilities.
On top of this, the resilience stat will be getting nerfed. It was recently buffed to feel like a more impactful stat to build into, but the damage resistance that Guardians are now capable of having has meant that enemies “just aren’t hitting as hard” as Bungie wants them to. In Lightfall, resilience will provide less damage resistance, and the cost of both minor and major variants of its armor mod will have their costs increased by one.
But nerfs to our Guardians alone aren’t enough to make Destiny 2 a harder game since the enemy combatants faced in PvE are also not as intimidating as the team would like them to be. Blackburn notes that the team has been “happy” with the level of challenge present in the Heist Battlegrounds playlist during Season of the Seraph and that it will serve as the foundation for their plans going forward.
Heist Battlegrounds uses a Power cap modifier. This modifier limits how much a Guardian can be over-leveled against enemy combatants, giving Bungie an adjustable dial to make various content easier or harder with ease. In Season of Defiance—the season launching with Lightfall—this same Power cap will be placed onto its base Battlegrounds playlist as well.
Not only that, but the core Vanguard Ops playlist will now have this same difficulty tweak as well. The difficulty won’t be as aggressively dialed up as it is in the seasonal Battlegrounds playlists, but a softer cap on Guardian Power will allow strikes and legacy Battlegrounds content to still feel “a lot more engaging to the average Guardian.” Even patrolling Neomuna will benefit from this system, although Blackburn admits they don’t want the whole game to “feel like it’s turned up to 11.”
The future of Power
“You may have noticed that we have been experimenting a lot with our Power settings over the last few seasons,” Blackburn said in a concluding statement for this section of the post. “We are planning on taking on even more experiments this year.
“We think that there are some major issues with Power in Destiny 2 and how it prevents players from seeing some of our best content, so we’d like to make a big change to the system in The Final Shape.”
Power has long been a point of contention in the Destiny community. While its purpose seemed clear in the old model of yearly expansion releases, Destiny 2’s transition into more regular seasonal releases has led to Power and Power level increases feeling effectively meaningless. Content such as Nightfall strikes don’t get meaningfully harder but require players to re-grind Power levels again just to access them once more season over season.
While the Power climb coming with Lightfall will be very similar to The Witch Queen, this won’t remain the case in future seasons. In Season of the Deep—the season following Defiance—Bungie does not plan to raise the Power or pinnacle cap whatsoever for the first time in the game’s history.
The major changes to the system coming in The Final Shape are still under wraps, but Blackburn says that they will be consistently evolving in development based on how tweaks to the current Power settings are received throughout the year of Lightfall.
All of these changes sound perfect on paper to achieve their intended goal of bringing challenge back to Destiny 2, but it remains to be seen how much their impact will be felt until Lightfall launches later this month on Feb. 28.
