Destiny 2 has been seeing some turbulence these past couple of weeks with a lot of players being extremely disgruntled at the game and at Bungie. There was the whole XP gate disaster where players found that Bungie was intentionally throttling XP gains, they did deactivate the XP system that was in place but this essentially doubled the amount of XP required before you can level up and earn a bright engram. Needless to say, the XP fiasco was not Bungie or Destiny 2’s finest moment.
Aside from the XP situation, players have become increasingly frustrated and angry about many aspects of the game, from lack of content and lack of endgame to meaningless rewards and just a general feeling that Destiny 2 isn’t that good of a game, with many in the Destiny community feeling that Destiny 1 is the superior game in the franchise.
Another thing that has pissed off the community is Bungie’s lack of communication and transparency regarding future updates to the game. Thankfully, Bungie seem to have realised the error of their ways and have released a blog post which details a fairly comprehensive list of updates and features which will be coming to Destiny 2.
Some of these features will be available on the 5th of December when Curse of Osiris is release and some will be come available later on the 12th of December.
One of the highlights of these updates and features is the addition of a new weapon tier called Masterworks. Masterworks weapons will feature stat trackers, random, re-rollable stat bonuses, unique item tooltips, and item details screens.
Masterworks appear to be somewhere in between a legendary and an exotic, kind of like an upgraded legendary. Masterworks weapons will have some advantages such as the ability to generate orbs for you and your allies on multi-kills, weapon stat bonuses that are selected randomly from a small pool and are re-rollable and track and display the number of kills with the weapon with a choice between total count or crucible only count.
Masterworks will drop from any source of legendary weapons for characters above 250 power level. If you dismantle a Masterworks weapon it will give you materials which can then be used to upgrade an existing legendary weapon to a Masterworks. Raid and Trials weapons will have a very high chance of dropping as Masterworks.
The addition of the new Masterworks tier seems like it will be very welcome, a lot of players, especially the hardcore players, have been complaining that Destiny 2 has no grind, this should hopefully give people something to grind for.
As well as the Masterworks weapons tier there will also be updates to vendors and the general investment economy. On December 5th you will be able to dismantle rare quality mods into Gunsmith materials, this will have a chance to produce legendary quality mod components. Banshee will offer a selection of legendary mods for direct purchase, these will rotate daily. This will be good for people who are seeking legendary kinetic mods.
Master Rahool will also start selling legendary engrams on December 5th for players who are seeking legendary or the new Masterworks weapons.
There will also be changes to reputation tokens coming on December 5th including strikes and daily challenges rewarding more tokens. Coming on December 12th will be a fix to stop vendors wanting you to hand in tokens unless you actually have a enough tokens to earn an engram.
Xur will have have some changes from December 12th. Yes, Xur will have new items for sale including the new Fated Engrams which you can buy using Legendary Shards. These fated engrams will decrypt as exotics that are not already in your collection. Three of Coins will also be returning but in a simpler form with no obscure stacking mechanics and no need to re-apply before a boss fight. These new, improved Three of Coins will cost some Legendary Shards and will boost exotic drop rates for 4 hours and you can buy as many as you like.
Be sure to check out the State of Destiny blog post for the full list of features coming to Destiny 2.
The updates that are coming are indeed very welcome, Destiny 2 was certainly in a bit of a state and desperately needed some attention from Bungie. The updates and features announced by Bungie do seem to have quelled the rage of most of the community, for the short-term at least. Whether these changes will be enough to raise people’s opinions of Destiny 2 and Bungie remains to be seen.
Many people seem to have fallen out of love with Destiny 2 and Bungie recently with a recent IGN article on Curse of Osiris absolutely slating the expansion and Bungie.
The changes listed in Bugie’s blog post are certainly a step in the right direction but a lot more needs to be done to bring people back into Destiny 2. The sad fact is that Destiny 2 just doesn’t have that certain hook that kept us playing Destiny 1 for thousands of hours. Bungie really needs to make substantial changes and provide substantial new content to keep people interested in the game.
