Bungie hears you loud and clear: Destiny isn’t perfect. In fact, Destiny is far from perfect, but now that the game been released to the public, all that Bungie can do is fine-tune the final product until it stops making everyone angry. On Thursday, the Destiny development team took to Bungie’s website to discuss all the issues that been irritating and mystifying players over the past two weeks, from the infamous “Loot Cave” to the endless health bars of the bosses.
The team has broken each of the issues into categories. I’ll hit the most important ones below, beginning with loot, one of the most hotly contested aspects of the game.
“Long ago during development, the Cryptarch decoded engrams of a given color into gear of that same color,” the team writes. As anyone who has played Destiny knows, this is no longer the case. Late in development, Bungie decided that adding randomness to the decoding process would be a positive addition. Most player would disagree. The team doesn’t explain how it will remedy the engrams, but plans to address the issue soon.
As for the Loot Cave (an endlessly exploitable monster-spawning cave in the Cosmodrome which allows groups of players to stand in place while farming for rare equipment) — it’s gone. In it’s place, Bungie plans to tinker with the loot drop rates from the activities that they actually built for players to participate in.
Another key component missing from Destiny is the ability to socialize. Other than a few goofy emotes, there’s no way to meaningfully interact with the players who surround you. Bungie’s “near-term solution” is to allow players to opt-in to voice chat during matchmade missions.
For players who have reached the endgame, this should come as welcome news: the bosses aren’t supposed to be that strong. Apparently, Bungie uncovered an issue that was making player attacks too weak and boss attacks too strong during Strike missions, so expect to be able to take more than two shots from Phogoth before taking a dirt nap.
Finally, Bungie is working to balance all of the weapons, from the overpowered shotgun that keeps ending your killing sprees in the Crucible to the underpowered exotic weapons that have dedicated players up in arms.
It’s great to see Bungie doing what it can to make Destiny a more fun, balanced game, but unless these changes are swift and impactful, casual players might not find many reasons to stick around after the story comes to a close.
