We are days away from what arguably should be Destiny 2’s biggest patch so far, something that should buff Guardians generally in terms of both speed and power. But as always gets pointed out, Destiny 2’s problems are vast, it seems like a monumental task to build the game up to where it needs to be.
Bungie has their own “roadmap,” something they’re sharing with fans in an effort to be transparent about what they’re working on. I applaud the effort, and understand certain tasks take longer than others, but I, like many fans, are a bit concerned about some items that appear to be left off the list entirely.
Here are what I think are the five most important fixes for Destiny 2 to make, in order of how much they would alter the current state of the game and get people (hopefully) playing again. I recognize that these alterations can’t probably be completed in this order, but some are things that don’t appear to be on the roadmap at all.
1) The Sandbox
This is the patch that is coming in just a few days, and I genuinely believe it is the most important issue facing the game. The problem with Destiny 2 from the start has been that the game just doesn’t feel as good as Destiny 1, you feel slower, less powerful thanks to a combination of damage values and cooldown timers. I do expect this new patch to address some of this, though I still worry about things like grenade/melee recharge which are relying on mods instead of actual buffs. And I maintain that as part of sandbox/balance changes, Bungie should also give players the ability to select individual nodes in their subclasses rather than just choosing two disparate trees. First and foremost, Destiny has to feel like Destiny again, and then we can move on to other issues.
2) Weapon Slotting
This is something that may be on the “fall” part of the current D2 roadmap, but it’s been a pressing issue from day one. The dual primary/overloaded power slot system is just not working. Solutions involve either reverting fully back to the D1 primary/secondary/heavy system, or my preference, four slots, with dual primaries, secondary and heavy slots. Regardless of either option, the point is that snipers, shotguns and fusion rifles at the very least need to be pulled out of the power slot and given a chance to be used more frequently. Grenades, rockets and swords, with hopefully the return of LMGs to follow, could stay in power. The current system just does not work, and seems entirely designed around making PvP less secondary focused, at the expense of everything else (and clearly PvP still has its issues). Some sort of change is required here sooner rather than later.
3) Random Rolls
While I did not mind the fixed roll experiment at first, it’s become painfully clear that it’s making Destiny 2’s endgame suffer, and setting it apart from other looters like Diablo and Borderlands which rely on random rolls to keep the most dedicated hunters hunting. The promise was that we would be trading random rolls for more frequent updates and balancing of fixed roll weapons, but that has not come to pass, so…what’s the actual point? Masterworks in and of themselves are not a good enough fix to this problem, though they could stay and be added on top of random rolls all the same, like Ancient Diablo gear. Randomizing everything now would be a bit chaotic at first, but it’s simply what the game needs.
4) Secrets
Moving past how we play and into what we do in the game, like everyone, I really miss Destiny’s various secret hunts. I recently listened to Kotaku’s Destiny Secret Hunters podcast, which recalled how everyone scrambled to find the sixth Vault of Glass chest, Black Spindle, Sleeper Simulant and Outbreak Prime. But mysteries, great and small, are nowhere to be found in Destiny 2. It’s like they simply didn’t have time to add them in. It’s weird because it would be simple to repeat some of the old tactics, yet Bungie just…doesn’t. We don’t need something totally insane like the Outbreak Prime hunt, but creating a secret Black Spindle-like encounter? That cannot take that much time, and it would inject life in the community almost immediately. With the next DLC being Warmind-focused, I’m hoping we’ll see the return of secrets, and to aid secret hunters, I think it would be a good idea to make it so we can play/replay any mission/strike manually in order to hunt for clues.
5) Story
Fundamentally, all of this other stuff is just….stuff. Making you stronger, making our loadouts better, giving you things to find. But there has to be something tying it all together, and that should be story and lore, which is something Destiny feels like it’s lost, but also, that it really never fully had. Unlike these last four points which are more or less “make things like Destiny 1 again,” I want the story to be better than anything we’ve seen so far. As expected, Bungie tripped over themselves hyping up Destiny 2’s story, which was…competent, but ultimately generic and relatively uninteresting compared to other stories in the genre. Then came Curse of Osiris which was flat out bad, and made us think maybe they hadn’t learned anything at all. I have spilled zillions of words on how I think Destiny’s story could get better, but I just wanted to roll it all up in one point here. To some degree, we need to care about our character and the characters we’re saving and the characters we supposedly want dead. That means more than just a joke-filled script and some obvious arcs (“get the team back together!”). Again, I’m hoping for more in future DLC.
These are my five fixes in order of priority. I know there’s more to talk about, but I can’t shake that these are the most important issues that D2 needs to address, and it’s such a bummer that most of them are simply reverting back to what D1 already had right.
Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook. Pick up my sci-fi novel series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is now in print, online and on audiobook.
