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With the next phase of Destiny 2, Bungie is looking to make its flagship MMO a little easier to understand, making big changes to how you find and play its activities and adding additional levels of rewards to make it worth playing and replaying them.
Bungie dropped details about how it will be altering Destiny 2 in a series of blog posts that gave an overview of major changes coming in 2025 with Codename: Frontiers, the next “multi-year saga” for the game. The adjustments are pretty widespread, starting with a move to two “medium-sized” yearly expansions instead of one, which appear to be paid content, alongside four “major updates” throughout the year, which will be free.
Alongside those changes in how new content will be released, Bungie is making adjustments to the core activities of Destiny 2 in ways that should help keep them fresher and more interesting for players to return to over and over again. The first stop on that journey is the Portal, a new menu screen that will lay out more clearly which activities are which, while also allowing you to adjust their challenge level and see what rewards they offer.
“The Destination map, also called the Director, is Destiny’s venerable activity browsing and selection screen. Over the years it has grown to be very unwieldy, making it harder to find specifically what’s current and worthwhile to play, and requiring ever more expert knowledge to navigate to find what you are looking for,” Bungie wrote in its Portal-focused blog post.
The Portal screen divides activities into several different categories, and Bungie hinted at some new activities that will fill out a few of those new lists. Some categories are familiar: Fireteam Ops are three-player matchmade activities that will include things like Strikes, Onslaught, and The Coil, while Pinnacle Ops are tougher three-player matchmade game modes, including dungeons and Onslaught runs through its 50 levels of horde-defense gameplay. New categories, include Solo Ops, activities that support 1-3 players and which Bungie says will include new activities geared at Guardians who are playing alone, and Flashpoint Ops, which are larger six-player activities. Flashpoints will also see new activities created for the list, and can include Offensives, which are larger battles that have appeared as seasonal activities over the years.
Here’s Bungie’s rundown of the Portal’s six categories:
Solo Ops: 1-3 player activities requiring very low time or social commitments. These activities are designed for solo players, yet are still fun with a fireteam, and are easy to pick up and play for a quick session. Solo Ops will also feature a new activity type which will get a deep dive soon.Fireteam Ops: Three-player activities for matchmade or premade groups. Designed for fireteams with more cooperation and coordination, these will feature activities like Strikes, Onslaught, The Coil, and new types in the future.Flashpoint Ops: Six-player activities for matchmade or premade groups. Planned for a future Season, this category will be introduced later next year. It will feature more chaotic six-player combat like Offensives.Pinnacle Ops: Three-player activities featuring some more challenging content, including Dungeons, Exotic missions, and full-length Onslaughts. Pinnacle Ops have an exclusive reward pool to claim, but success is not guaranteed.Crucible: A selection of core Crucible playlists for solo players and fireteams, providing an opportunity to test your mettle against other Guardians. An exclusive reward pool is available to claim, with the same depth of tier as other Categories.
The major focus of the Portal is to make it easier to find relevant content quickly, so it’ll include things like the latest expansion and whatever major update activities are freshest, so you’ll have a clearer jumping-in point whenever you pick up the game. You’ll also find things like a selection of bounties and seasonal rewards on the Portal screen, with the idea being to lessen the amount of time you need to spend completing “chores” like running around the Tower, talking to different vendors, before you can actually start playing an activity.
Some content, like raids, will stay separate from the Portal, and it sounds like how you approach them probably won’t change much. You’ll also have expansion or more recent update content set to its own node so it’s easy to find. And in each category, some activities will dish out bonus rewards, like specific guns, armor with particular stat focuses, or high-level upgrade materials, if you play them, encouraging players to jump into everything Destiny 2 offers. The activities that give out bonus rewards will change each day, Bungie writes.
In addition to the streamlined aspect of the Portal menu, Bungie is also introducing major changes to Destiny 2’s core activities to make them more engaging. For example, Strikes currently offer multiple difficulty settings and some opportunities to earn different rewards based on the difficulty you set. You’ll find even more granular menus on the Portal, where you can set the base difficulty, various modifiers or changes to enemy types and abilities, and more–all with an eye of allowing you to increase the challenge of a Strike and make it fresher.
How those changes will affect matchmaking sounds like it might be a bit of a pain, though. Matchmaking will include several preset difficulties, but if you want to make finer adjustments to the challenge, you’ll need to bring a team of your own. Bungie write that relatively new Fireteam Finder, Destiny 2’s internal “looking for group” feature, should help pick up some of the slack.
Your rewards for those changed activities are then calculated through your performance. You’ll get a team score, which might be similar to systems like your Nightfall score in some cases, but which won’t have you competing against your team. Added to that will be an individual score based on your own performance. Together, that’ll dictate your reward score, which then determines what kinds of drops you get.
The rewards themselves will also see adjusting. Legendary weapons will offer more tiers, similar to the way you can currently get either base versions or Adept versions of some weapons. Right now, Adepts offer some stat bonuses and specialized perks that make them worth chasing, and you can expect multiple tiers of Legendary guns that add more possibilities and encourage you to play activities at higher difficulties. Other reward possibilities include armor that’s tuned toward specific stats.
Finally, weapons and armor for the current season in which you’re playing will be marked with a visual flair, making it clear that those items are New Gear. The marking is meant to show what loot is current in the game, taking advantage of things like the season’s Artifact mods and bonuses, and it sounds like “old gear” won’t do that, making it worthwhile to chase whatever loot is current to the season you’re playing. Bungie clarified that New Gear won’t replace any older weapons or armor, so it sounds like this stuff will just be part of whatever is happening currently in the game, and the system will make it easier to identify so you can create builds and choose weapons that take advantage of the current season.
For the most part, Bungie’s changes sound like they’re meant to shore up the more confusing elements of the game, particularly for new or returning players who might struggle to find which activities are current and what they should be focusing on, or what rewards they need to chase to improve their characters. Taken together, though, they may well greatly shake up the experience of Destiny 2, especially when taken alongside the new approach to expansions that sounds like it’ll focus on non-linear stories and experiences that could mix new gameplay genres into Destiny 2, like roguelikes, metroidvanias, or survival games.
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