If you’ve been following me for the past year or so, you’d probably wonder how the hell I keep so many games in my rotation.
Well, I don’t know either.
But I always make sure I keep a shooter game in my rotation, and Destiny 2’s Lightfall, along with today's "Lightfall and the Year ahead" post has got me really excited.
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s to come:
Expanding Players’ Imaginations
This section involves a new season: Season of Defiance. This season will consolidate everything involving Umbrals, currencies, and vendor progression. This is a wonderful change, and will make it much easier to keep track of what all you need to get gear and vendor rewards. You’ll also have less vendor tiers in general, but the rewards for each tier will be “more potent”.
After Season of Defiance will come Season of the Deep, and with Season of the Deep, will eschew vendor upgrades. This will give more room to try new and experimental systems, which will also allow for more player interaction. The goal of all of these changes is to give the player more freedom to express their play, skill, and imagination. I look forward to what all they can come up with!
Weapon crafting will also continue on, but with significant changes. Most notably, fewer weapons will be craftable, but random perk rolls will have more value long term. More non-crafted weapons will have the ability to be enhanced. Lastly, Deepsights will only appear on a weapon that has a pattern you haven’t finished, drastically increasing the “Oh snap!” feeling of finding one.
Bring Challenge Back to Destiny
With a new expansion brings new balance changes of course. Bungie feels that abilities in particular are a little too much at the forefront, and they would like guns to be just as much a part of the equation, without nerfing anything. They also feel that enemies aren’t really hitting as hard as they would like. Because of this, they’re “adjusting” the amount of damage resistance that resilience gives, as well as increasing the energy cost of the resilience mods by 1 each. While I remain a tad skeptical, they’ve assured us that this won’t make us feel like sponges. They also want to keep tabs on the difficulty of base battlegrounds in Season of Defiance. They don’t necessarily want legendary difficulty content across the board, but they also don’t want you to sleep through it. They’ve done a fairly good job with difficulty in recent years, and continue to iterate and tweak as fit, so I look forward to seeing just how it turns out that season.
Enrich Our Content
Lastly, revising evergreen content. Crucible will see new twists on existing game modes, while also making sure things like matchmaking and weapon balance continue to improve and flourish. A new map will also be introduced this upcoming season. On the PvE side of things, an Exotic Mission Rotator will be introduced, further enriching the variety Destiny 2 has to offer. Finally, Strikes will receive a bit of tuning as well, with Lake of Shadows and Arms Dealer specifically getting a bit of a facelift. Less frequented strikes will be seen less, and Battlegrounds will have their own section in Nightfalls. Lastly, the match game modifier will be retired as well.
A lot of great changes will be coming our way in Lightfall. I’m particularly excited for the crucible and crafting changes, and Bungie’s willingness to tweak things as they go gives me a lot of confidence in this expansion to come.