News - This Week At Bungie – 2/15/2018

This Week At Bungie – 2/15/2018

This week at Bungie, we invited you to celebrate Crimson Days with us.

The decorations are up, the rewards are flowing, and teams of two are waging battle in the Crucible. You can get the full details on the event here. The celebration continues until the weekly reset at 9 AM PST on February 20.

When one celebration ends, another begins.

Rally Caps

Faction Rallies is returning next week. The event kicks off at 9 AM PST on February 20. This time, you can knock out Lost Sectors as fast as you can kill the bosses with no timers to hold you back. Start thinking about which faction deserves your loyalty. New Monarchy has won the last two rallies. Can they three-peat? 

New Monarchy

Dead Orbit

Future War Cult

If this is your first Faction Rallies, here is what you need to know. First, visit the Tower and pledge your loyalty to one of the factions. Then, it’s time to set out into the wild to complete various activities. Once you’ve earned enough tokens to qualify for a reward, exchange them for packages full of loot. 

There will be some new weapons added to the packages for this event. Here is what we are adding to the reward pool:

That’s not all that is at stake. At the end of the event, the faction with the most packages redeemed will offer their prized weapon as a reward. Those who were loyal to the winner get a big discount and can pick it up for 1,000 Glimmer. Everyone else can still get it at 50,000 Glimmer. Here is what the factions have to offer in the event they are victorious:

New Monarchy Pulse Rifle

Dead Orbit Pulse Rifle

Future War Cult Scout rifle

Three factions face off again, their fates directly tied to your choices. Will Future War Cult finally win the day?

Fine Tuning

A few weeks ago, Josh Hamrick stopped by to give us an update on Sandbox changes. He mentioned that his visit was the first of many from the Sandbox team and that “This meal will span many courses.” It’s time for the next course.

Senior Designer Jon Weisnewski is visiting us from the kitchen with an update on the Exotic Tuning Pass our team is working on diligently to make Exotics more “Exotic-er.”

Jon: Hello players! I’m here to talk to you about the work going into the Exotic Tuning Pass on the D2 road map.

When Destiny first launched, we built, play-tested, and shipped a batch of Exotic weapons that we hoped would be worthy of your time and hype. Shortly after release, we were happily inundated with a mountain of player feedback. This allowed us to check our assumptions, do some tuning, and push out one of the first Destiny sandbox updates which were solely focused on Exotic weapons. We’re doing this again with Destiny 2 and this time we’re including Exotic weapons and armor. 

Gameplay goals for this pass:

• Tuning pass on Exotic gear focused on adding and/or increasing player Power spikes. 
• Focus on low-usage items, but all items are being considered. 
• Lean into an item’s established gameplay and push it harder. Avoid catch-all improvements that dilute item identity. 

So how does this play out? We can look at Graviton Lance as an example. The functional concept is a weapon that fires two Cosmic Void rounds that create a zero-air-resistance tunnel for a high-caliber precision shot to fire through. The first two rounds have almost no recoil and prime the air, and the third round does high damage with no falloff. A kill knocks the body back with considerable force, it tumbles, and then explodes.

Resounding player feedback has been along the lines of “looks great, sounds great, neat explosion! I can’t get kills in PVP because all the damage is at the end of the burst, kicks too hard for the follow up, and I can’t reliably damage targets with the death explosion in any activity because the body goes flying too far backwards.” 

All spectacle, not enough utility. 

To target the first pain point we reduced the recoil of the burst, added some aim assist, and changed it from three rounds to two. This still plays into the fantasy of a low-damage gravity-neutralizing round forming a projectile tunnel for the last bullet. It also allows us to ensure the damage per burst is at a competitive level for PVP engagements. In fact, it gives Graviton a slight mathematical edge against other pulse rifles.

On the second feedback item, we did some tuning to the ragdoll body. We made it so that rather than violently flying backwards and likely out of range of a potential splash damage opportunity, the defeated opponent floats back and up. Then we made the explosion bigger, increased the damage, and added some void field projectiles that seek out any remaining targets.

This is one of the more exaggerated examples to help describe how we’re looking at our goals and applying them to the gear. At the time of this writing, the weapons that ARE NOT getting an update are Merciless , Telesto, Wardcliff Coil, MIDA Multi Tool, Colony, Legend of Acrius, and Vigilance Wing. Some of the above perform well without needing changes, while others, like the Vigilance Wing Pulse Rifle, are already benefitting from the tuning changes planned for Update 1.1.4. Everything else has had some degree of power or utility increase, whether it’s simply bumping a stat or some deeper plumbing as described above.

We’ll be touching a lot of powerful gear with this update and to truly understand the impact for players requires a lot of design iteration and test time. It isn’t enough to crank up the damage and run one strike or Crucible match with a gun and helmet and move on. Dialing in the right amount of power, testing in all activities with all types of load outs, finding the bugs, fixing the bugs, updating the perk description text to reflect new behavior, and then handing that off to localization for translation—it’s a ton of work, but we’re up to it. We sincerely appreciate your patience. I believe it will be worth the wait.

We’ll be back soon to talk about Exotic Masterworks as well! Until then, continue being excellent to each other.

Crimson Clarity

The Help forum is your one-stop shop for all things help-related. Our Player Support team is constantly searching for any issues and sharing out their findings. 

This is their report.

Crimson Days Clarifications

Crimson Days is live in Destiny 2, and lasts until the weekly reset on February 20. Upon monitoring chatter from players, we’d like to take the opportunity to clarify the following:

• The Burnout Crucible map, introduced to Destiny 2 for Crimson Days, is exclusive to the Crimson Days Crucible playlist only until Crimson Days ends on February 20. From then on, it will be joining existing maps in the Crucible rotation.
• The Undeterred Exotic Sparrow, earned by participating in the Crimson Days Crucible playlist, does not come from the Crimson Engram and does not contribute to the Crimson Engram knock-out mechanic. The Undefeated Exotic Sparrow does contribute to the Crimson Engram knock-out list when obtained, and is only available through Crimson Engrams or Eververse Trading Co.

Hotfix 1.1.2.1

Earlier this week we deployed Destiny 2 Hotfix 1.1.2.1. This hotfix removed timers on Lost Sector rewards, and adjusted Lost Sector chest behavior to only open once per boss defeated. 

Cells

Straight from the Creations page to your device of choice. The movies are here.

Every week, we search for a few community created videos to share with you here. If your movie gets chosen we will send you a special emblem in Destiny 2. To enter, just send your movie to the Creations page. If you do win, make sure you put the names of the creators in the description of the video so we can get you your emblem. Here are this week’s winners:

Movie of the Week: Drop the Mic

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Honorable Mention: Monster

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We still have a few more days of 2v2 action in Crimson Days. And then we roll right into Faction Rallies. I’ve been really enjoying grabbing a partner and facing off against two worthy adversaries. We’re always interested in what your thoughts are as well. We’re collecting some feedback on the Crimson Days playlist here.

I think I might pledge to Future War Cult next week. Starting to feel sorry for them. Who’s with me?

<3 Cozmo