Responding To Bungie’s Comments On My ‘Destiny 2’ Edge Of Fate Article

Earlier this week, I wrote an article about what I felt were some problems with the upcoming Destiny 2: Edge of Fate expansion, namely the livestream content shown in both the new Kepler destination and mainly the Portal presentation that followed, a new staple of the Frontiers era.

In a rare move, Bungie comms posted a lengthy tweet saying there were some “misunderstandings” in my piece. My response is way too long to fit into a non-blue checkmark tweet, so I figured I’d write a rebuttal here.

To make it clear, neither I nor Bungie are being combative here. On their end, this is just good comms, and I know all these guys writing these tweets. No hard feelings. But I still want to respond! I’m going to go through each point:

Bungie: 1) Solo Ops and Crucible Ops are completely separate. Solo Ops has new activities set in familiar locations and Crucible Ops supports various fireteam sizes and lets us surface reward bonuses and events modes when they’re active.

Me: This is something I said about how I thought there were both Solo PvE Lost Sectors in that playlist but also Crucible nodes that allowed you to play PvP modes without premade teams in the mix. This was a mistake. What happened is that I saw the nodes labeled as “Quickplay,” a term I usually associate with Crucible, but I saw it too quickly to understand that they were playlists for the Lost Sectors (which is sort of odd). I was wrong about that, but I do think a solo-only Crucible playlist would be good (there is likely not the player population for this).

Bungie: 2) We chose an existing activity during our stream to specifically focus on new modifiers. We wanted to focus on the modifiers we made in that segment over anything else.

Me: This is in response to me saying that it was kind of bad that Bungie used a five-year-old Empire Hunt to showcase the new modifier system, sort of confirming the community’s fear that this entire idea was reshuffling old content. Some say repurposing old content is a good thing, others do not want to play things from five years ago, and I was hardly the only one making that Empire Hunt commentary. I also don’t think it was a great focus on the modifiers, as it sort of just seemed like a mess of Champions and Banes that were hard to parse. Hands-on will feel different, I’m sure.

Now the big one:

Bungie: 3) Fireteam Ops will have rotating activities and selected modifiers that support matchmaking and playing immediately – you can leverage matchmaking here, or hop in to Fireteam Finder with pre-selected goals (like “new players welcome” or “looking for experience.

If you choose to customize the modifiers and dial in the challenge/rewards you will need a premade Fireteam. The Fireteam leader has full control over the activity and its customization. As mentioned above, Fireteam Finder offers various tags to pre-communicate goals for a given session, and we’re hopeful that in-game chat (whether it be text based or opt-in voice chat) will be leveraged here for fireteams to come to an agreement on modifiers and score targets.

As long as you’re running the hardest configuration your Fireteam power supports, everyone will get their best rewards!

Me: They seem to be saying this is a misunderstanding I had, but I maintain this was not a misunderstanding at all. This is a system built heavily around pre-made fireteams, as that is really the only situation where teams sitting around picking specific modifier combos makes sense outside of Solo Ops Lost Sectors. The idea that the best option for what is supposed to be the core mode of the game now is a pre-made fireteam is contrary to all the ritual activities we’ve had so far, almost all seasonal activities, etc.

The idea that you can make a team using Fireteam Finder and Bungie is “hopeful” in-game chat will solve the modifier picking problems where everyone will have to agree with the leader seems far-fetched. It’s a rarity Fireteam Finder players are on comms (almost always they don’t need to be) much less random players working together coherently for something like this. I’m picturing a best-case scenario of a group spending ten minutes picking modifiers before each run of something, and that seems unlikely to happen often.

The alternative to all this is running a playlist with a set group of modifiers that make difficulty easier or harder, modifiers which will rotate. This is…just what we have now, albeit with some new modifiers. In short, I don’t really love how this system feels geared toward the 5% of players who will head in with pre-made fireteams or the 5% who will use comms in Fireteam Finder. Otherwise, it’s just random stuff applied, which minimally different than what we have now. Also, none of this feels especially new player friendly, which is Bungie’s stated goal with the new Portal system.

On this last point especially, I will see how it works in practice, but I don’t think I’m wrong about a lot of these challenges and how people will react to this. I guess we’ll see.

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