Destiny 2020 Director's Cut (Pinnacle Weapons, Faction Rallies, & Weapons Forever) | Destiny 2 News

Luke is talked about twice in the last 24 hours. What the hell do we have? We have a

director

's cut. Yes, we like to read word for word here, but you know a lot of people want a summary, but you'd be surprised how much you miss in these things. and Plus Luke hints at future things within these

director

's cuts, so Luke says Hi everyone, leaving aside the tricks our memories play on us, things are often clearer in hindsight than when we look forward, the recent pass is clearly loaded with learnings from The mistakes we make in the future are confusing, hopeful and unknown.

While preparing last year's Director's Cut, we made a number of changes to the game and we wanted to give everyone an idea of ​​why we made those changes. Each director's cut is an opportunity to recognize and take ownership of the learnings of the past when the wounds are fresh and take a look at tomorrow. This addition will come a little earlier in the development process as we think about Year 4 and beyond and while some of the changes the game needs are being made. We are clear that there are others that we are still thinking about. Last summer's payload covered a wide range of topics that ended up touching almost the entire game.

Today's DC will take an in-depth look at just a couple of topics about our philosophy on the seasons. is evolving and the gun issues that last

forever

with some quick bonus topics at the end this is comprehensive we know there is more going on in the game than next and there will be more to talk about later in the year before we look ahead forward. Look back one more time. 2019 was about a few things for Bungie and Destiny, so we first stated that our vision for Destiny is an action MMO in a single evolving world that you can play anytime, anywhere with your friends.

It's a game we want to continue building on. and do it with creative and work-life sustainability without the talents of our teams there is no

destiny

and while it seems obvious to say it, I think it is quite easy to lose sight of the fact that this was incredible, this is not so incredible, the reactions to the entertainment. As I talked at length last year, the way we built the Annual Pass would not work for us in the long term, we had a lot of help and one-man power from our amazing and now former partners, we needed to find a better way forward while Preserving the player experience and our business because we're now subletting for

destiny

, that was a huge boost for Bungie in 2019.

When I think about the sheer scope of that work in a sheer force of will that the team showed to deliver in 2019, I feel fairly good. about what we usually achieve here is where we list all the pauses, but instead let's use the word count to improve on the past and look to the future as we begin

2020

, much of the existential fear of whether we will make it out of this transition en We have clarified our vision for the destination and are working toward the future with that vision in mind. For me personally, the drive home each night isn't about whether Bungie will survive like before.

Now it's working, listen and see, and how we can get there. I really like that because we don't really know what the fears are that Bungie faces, but it had to be a fear for them last year when they self-published to get those rights, they had to pay up to a hundred million. dollars to buy those rights from Activision, and on top of that, you have hope that Destiny survives and possibly thrives, so I can imagine that Luke Smith and everyone at Bungie probably came face to face with that doubt last year and now it continues.

When I returned from vacation this year, something about the destination seemed strange. Season 9 is also for me the best winter season we've done in Destiny, but I felt like something was missing, that missing element is what I think we need to focus on throughout

2020

. and in 2021, first, aspiration, hope or ambition to achieve something, also the action or process of breathing in the destination: aspiration is what keeps our game of life going, it is the air that fills your lungs, it is the breath that gives meaning to the game, aspiration. It could be about entering the destination for the first time and fulfilling the potential of what you could become, it could be about the activities ahead of you or it could also be PvP players looking towards the horizon and seeing the lighthouse and its treasures waiting for them.

If they pass the tests, aspiration is not something reserved for the elite or the committed, it is for everyone, although when I hear players express the feeling that there is a lot to do and none of it matters, I feel that pain, it is about the potential of a game. Being more than just something that takes your time, it's about having goals and working to achieve something that matters to you. I'm not naive enough to think we can do something that matters to everyone, we all have different values, goals and time, but I do. I think Fate can also do a better job of allowing players to set short, medium, and long-term goals to work toward.

A gamer's aspiration is something I feel so strongly that it's the difference between a game I fall in love with and a game I consume. junk food here we start thinking about aspiration and what is missing in destiny, the huge burning eye shaped hole is something I felt since we left trials aside at the beginning of d2 its return is part of a larger goal for For destiny to move forward into 2020 and beyond, we need to fill the aspiration in destiny as well and much of what we are going to cover in this edition of the director's cut is going to orbit this, that is very true, although aspiration is something that can make you fall in love with the game and while done right, it's not something reserved for the elite, it's the ability to look over the right edge and see it, see what you could become now, moving on to seasons of change with a few seasons in our there is and the shadow to keep us well. going on internal discussions about how we feel about them, we look at these iterations through a lot of lenses, first there is a soft and mushy feeling, how do we feel about the seasons?

These sentiments are drawn from our own experiences and ongoing summaries of information from our community. Also look at how well the seasons are engaging our players, our people returning each week, how long they're playing, how we're looking month over month and how it's performing compared to our historical data, then we start talking about where to take the seasons. in the year. four looking back there are some good things and things we need to work on let's start with what has been working well our seasonal narratives are starting to connect to each other transitioning to season 10 with the community getting involved by donating fractal Lane and 100 counting stacks accompanied by The Long Button holds out a big shout out to the world's top three fractal name givers, Three Jewels, Dathan Warbucks and Josh d29, and shines the lighthouse with a good start for the player to work towards advancing the world, ensuring that every story linked in the seasonal chain can continue. to the next and establishes where we are headed, the element of saving a legend, a season of dawn was a nice deep cut with those who have been with the destiny since the beginning and a way to introduce the smallest pigeon superfan, the guardian ornithologist.

People who hadn't found his grave the first time, seeing your reactions was a highlight and the team had a lot of fun building this one. I'm enjoying the simplicity of leveling up Destiny's version of a battle pass. We want a progression that you can. moving forward by just playing the game, we don't think we have the whole XP thing figured out, going in and out of loss sectors and XP flash farming isn't what we had in mind, but we can continue to tweak it strictly on my own. game patterns I feel the need every season to get all the above universal ornaments and title.

I like knowing that these cosmetics are one-of-a-kind and will not be offered again. However, I find myself personally unless I'm motivated to try to get awesome roles for new

weapons

, which is especially strange considering I like to have a good version of each weapon and fate wants to do some things with

weapons

now there will be more things with weapons later, but let's shake the waters a little. Okay, the interlude begins. I still really like playing this game. I have acquired almost all the weapons in the game, why anarchy my friend, I actually have anarchy. I'm good, terrible, on the other hand, come on Bungie.

I've seen pretty slick roles in some of them and Internet-approved near misses in others. spare rations, quick death clip then full speed and a quick visit to disappoint the city with an alloy charger. Oh, like many of you, I ended up gravitating towards a few weapons and just using them instead of everything else, sure the multi-kill outlaw clears the breach lining farm from It's nice to have the season and the dawn and I love the art of the scent of the dawn weapon, but did it really disappear in this place? My favorite photovoltaic kinetic weapons probably not.

I know I recently sat down with a couple of outsiders who really loved it. glowing neck is the only thing they use, they will never use another main weapon in destiny, because because they don't need to be part of the aspiration is the quest that comes with it and right now the way we are and have been treat weapons in fate - it's not really fueling the vacuum engine now going back to seasons ending early okay, I see some major weapon changes on the horizon, let's move the season forward or stuff, it continues though, on the other hand, we're not delivering The feeling of an evolving world, instead, we are providing the feeling of ephemeral private activities and disappearing rewards.

The abandoned annual pass had its share of challenges, see last year's DC, but it also had this amazing property if I stopped playing for a season when I came. There are plenty of prizes and activities I could catch up on. What we are discussing now and what is early enough that things can still change is how we focus our efforts around the seasons from a development standpoint and at the same time try to create the moments. that create memories and at the same time balance the amount of fear of missing out. This is a tricky balance because these elements do not connect clearly and in many cases work against each other, the wallet takes then how we are thinking about things right now.

We will continue to welcome the feedback that our guts and data provide. Your reactions and comments are part of that data, so please continue to let us know your thoughts on our seasonal model before we get into more thoughts and details. Be extremely clear, this year's seasons version has too much FOMO. We want to fix this next year, the season will have less FOMO, being anxiety. Which means I googled it says anxiety because we are not spending our resources and development time. As best we can, we're talking about moving away from creating custom private activities for the season, rather than using that time and effort to create themes where orange is represented by a marked event that will fade, but rather inject these seasonal themes in more of the light of the game we continue to evolve the narrative of the world we can invest more in the evolving world of our public spaces and make more efforts to evolve the destination to rate activities main activities what those main activities are our way we We think about a player's choices and motivations on a given night of fate, they are destined to be more enduring.

Quest campaign content for example is generally not evergreen, it is usually something made and designed with replayability in mind, either by the properties of the activity itself or the rewards, for example the crucible is fundamentally replayable because the opponents may be different and other players are the ultimate AI, where the trial is fundamentally replayable due to its reward structure rather than random and contrary generation. In fact, we expect the test to be consistent within a given week to create dominance and efficiency in defeating it. argue and say that the best main activity currently in the game is actually the menagerie for me, it's a match made, it has literally the best rewards in the game that you can farm over and over again and for the most part it's Funny, but I know.

Where it comes from, ideally, court activities are convergent points for players' motivations, for example, I want to maximize the experience, hunt for awesome items, and generate an economy that I can use to further my goals. Yes, I know, no one talks this way right now. Our seasonal activities like sunset. Get comfortable with other activitiesMain games have new rewards and give players powerful equipment, but they don't provide much experience. The main activities provide a lot of experience, but we all feel the pain of how many more seasons will I get the Titan Rain to catch? showed pads from The Drifter What this competition means is that it could be very difficult to organize an optimization night at the destination because our design pulls you in different directions, so what could it be like to invest more in core activities?

More rewards are distributed in these activities or it can mean taking a theme for a season and using it to fuel attacks. If we are going to ask players to participate in these activities, we have the opportunity to take advantage of the rewards throughout the season. Imagine the armor sets. or sunset weapons woven into core activity reward posts or imagined experiences like searching for roles for that sweet weapon that can only be found in a certain playlist as a reward at the end of a match like an IIST moon crucible. Oh, Luke is talking dirty to us now too we think. we can invest more development time in a Lance mission right now things like sunset consume team resources and then fade away imagine that seasonal quest lines like saving a legend didn't disappear in the next season but existed until the next one The expansion is released that way, as a player enters and exits the game, a wealth of content is built up for them to play when they return, just as we continue to evolve the narrative of a world in which we can continue to invest in the evolution by Roar'd. of public open world spacesIn case you are not familiar, these are the spaces where you can see other players appear without problems.

We've built a world where players can encounter others, but we haven't built a world with challenging enough fights where you feel like others matter. some MMO lingo aka super public events on the horizon no one in any real note guys he's right some that abandoned hand whether you started playing abandoned on day one or waited three four months , it didn't really matter, all the content was still there when the game returned in its prime it didn't go away Black Armory is still present to this day fantastic content that allowed players to come and go because everyone has a different schedule, everyone It has a different schedule and I would say the biggest thing missing from the current season structure is that everyone has a level of anxiety because they feel like they have to do everything within that season.

Yes, it's good to go after that title or get those divine roles, but having that weight of oh, you have to do it. Now before the next three months go by, it's stressful, which is the opposite of why we play, so if they're really going to restructure this to allow players to be able to immerse themselves throughout the year and I think an entire year between main. expansions in the fall is enough time for people to jump in and do everything they possibly need to do now, moving on to weapons

forever

, problem is fine, let's talk more about weapons and start with how weapons have worked in Destiny 2.

All the way back to destiny in vanilla, every weapon you get is a weapon that you can keep and infuse to increase its power level indefinitely remember that the waters have spoken of friendship before it's time to eat and destiny within the fusion is like having all the cards you own and magic available and playable in all formats forever, it passively creates a power increase and a continuous target problem, which also means that our team needs to spend more and more time re- Trying and supporting old stuff instead of creating new stuff reduces the player's desire for new items, which dismantles aspiration like the post-crucible blue party ritual shard and means we ultimately create a ton of gear that has no value beyond checking the box on the checklist I got it that is not value, it is actually the opposite of value because it is work that we could spend creating new things or improving old things.

Our combat team works very hard to make weapons feel unique. Each legend and mini Blues get their own special sauce flavors. Sometimes it's the way a gun sounds. Sometimes it's incredibly finished. hand budget range stat sometimes it's the recoil pattern sometimes it's the art sometimes it's something indescribable that simply makes an item resonate with our players in an action game my destiny our weapons are full of extensions based on character I've played mmo and a RPG where I get awesome weapons, but rarely do those weapons feel like an extension of my avatar, certainly in an action game like Dark Souls or the weapons become an extension of field of my character instead of a stat like Fang of Coriolis Trois.

I don't know, I don't know, that's what we're going to Google, oh, it's something that encompasses a wider world, damn, man, I didn't play enough. Wow, I wish I could relate, but I played a ton of Dark Souls. I know where you're coming from, I remember a lot of previous DC words when I talked about the collision between action game and RPG cover with our aspirational theme and I think we're approaching a tipping point for weapons, infusion and destination. two friends, I'm getting scared, we've made a lot of magic hearts and we want you to keep the ones you love in your collection instead of taking them, throwing them all in the trash and destroying the tower again and a bunch of those magic cards could be played all over the place. world in free roam or PvP formats, but when power modals or aspirational activities are involved, we will make some changes to legendary weapons.

There's a lot to learn when Destiny launches in 2014, but there were also some really good things in that game. I think of a lot of them. Finally, almost nostalgically, sometimes Volta class weapons could be powerful, unique and rare. If you had a bearer of destiny, you probably had a lot of sentient fragments to commemorate. All the times you didn't get it, I miss those days when the rewards were rare and so special that you either celebrate it or hate it when your friends got one, that's partly because the game design gave them room to be different .

Be awesome, it's hard to create space in the current version of Destiny. Two weapons that are supposed to come from peak activities like anger or trials actually have no room to breathe. The answer cannot be to simply improve them because that approach ends up with a reckoning situation that I described last year. We now have Pinnacle weapons that were largely just talents that had exotic abilities in legendary clothing. These weapons were typically the result of long chases and when they reached your hands they were quite strong. sometimes hilariously strong looking at you recluse, it also meant that the team spent a lot of time developing each one if you imagine the abstract weapons slot as a pyramid, those

pinnacle

weapons were largely located at the top of the pyramid, most of the other weapons Legendaries are down in the group of them. they're not really that different because when every legendary item the team builds will be available forever, profilers will be removed until 2014, the glass weapon vault could be memorable because we knew they wouldn't be in the ecosystem for long.

Things like trials, night falls and forever raids naturally fall by the wayside because light power attack in those days would make them obsolete in the role we are imagining, they will have a slot at the top to create powerful weapons legendary, legendary that are simply better. than other items in the ranking, we will be able to do this because the design space for weapons will expand and contract over time, items will enter the ecosystem and can be infused for a set number of seasons and beyond that, the power will not be Our hope is that instead of having to consider the viability of forever weapons when creating one, it may be easier to let something powerful exist in the ecosystem;

Those weapons entering the ecosystem mean there are more fun elements to chase after Felis. We'll break this down in a moment, but these are huge changes as this also means that legendary weapons or their talents that would be shelved could be reissued at a future date or could be brought back in a fun way by involving our community in the details. more specific. The simplest version of how it's going to work is that legendary weapons will have a fixed value of how high they can go. When infused, those values ​​will project viable weapons over the lifespan of the game, and we believe that lifespan is between nine and fifteen months.

A final note: we are not applying this to exotic weapons at this time, we want to iterate on the legendary ecosystem first. okay, let's look at that first within Destiny one every year, just like we've done now, there would be a power jump, and the big annual expansion we actually do season by season now, but back then, when that big annual expansion The power would increase for everything in the game, but our old legendary weapons could not be infused beyond the previous power limit or light limit, which meant that, for the most part, in-game activities were no longer viable options, We usually just delete them.

However, most of us just put it in our vault and cried until it finally came back to us at a later date. Now this is a double sided sword on the one hand, it's amazing because the weapon having that finite window that is extremely viable means it can be super powerful, it brought a wielder of destiny, which is a perfect example of what they bring to you. , by the way, from our new players. There was a hand cannon inside Destiny, one you can receive from the glass vault, super dope, one of the best PvE. weapons ever made and with a buff called Firefly, which is essentially like a dragonfly, but it was also combined with artistic damage that had like this glowing arc effect every time you got those precision kills, aka result and a lot of shots that die in one shot now.

The other side of the sword is that there is a finite window in which that weapon is actually viable and no matter how beautiful or deadly that weapon may be, if it has a limit of power, that's it, this actually results in a couple of things. If number one happens, it may actually result in us clearing our vaults a bit more, but if you're like me, you'll probably keep everything just in case, considering most weapons come and go from the meta at some point, No. You ever thought we were going to use a weapon, we're not necessarily there, but the sign arms are much better this season and they'll be just as good next season, so all those weapons you kept season after season finally became good in the season.

Adam and for my crazy automatic rifle hoarders, there are plenty of people out there who were simply carrying automatic rifles in their vault knowing that at some point the automatic rifles will be found. A lot of people called you crazy, but you believe and damn it. We're getting an auto rifle upgrade next season and auto rifles are going to be nasty. Now this change will result in your players wanting to really optimize their builds at all times to clear their vaults simultaneously, although this will actually relieve a lot of stress on Sam Hawks' team at Bungie, that weapon comes out and it's super super powerful.

Bundy will probably say, well, it's deadly, but it's only going to be deadly like that for the next six seven months or whenever that season or weapon drops, so I get it. It also makes new weapons more viable in the future. I also like that they're actually applying this to legendary weapons and not exotic weapons. They used to do it in both back in the day which I thought was really shit, let me know in the comment below, however what do you think of these weapon swaps that are now moving in the cosmic gardeners last year we said that Do we want playing destiny to feel like you're playing a game with real momentum, a universe going somewhere, a game where things don't happen? just in terms of new items and activities, but in all terms of narrative, it often seemed like fate was floating in terms of moving the narrative of the world because we want to address this in this third year of two, that statement is still true for us today as you look at destiny up to the fourth year and beyond we start this in your third year but the work is not done by its very nature this is something that really has no end the idea of ​​building a narrative that is moving the story of your Guardians in plural, all of you go ahead, create a universe where permanent change is possible and where players canHaving a significant impact is still something we are pursuing and experimenting with to achieve.

Change will be inevitable. See above where I talked about how to think about Adjusting the Season of the Model we said before that density cannot continue to grow indefinitely. There are many reasons why this is true. Some technical and some creative because the story wants to move into new areas on the technical side. I return to sustainability as new areas. features and event times are added to the target, the maintenance problem grows accordingly for the team, new changes to the system must be compared against all content, new and old life, which introduces risks and a large burden on our team to keep that legacy content in practice.

Generally speaking, it also prevents us from responding to players who are having problems as quickly as we would like. Caesars could do some of the heavy lifting here in the sense of giving players a sense of shared purpose and understanding of what they're working for, but when expansions are ready it's an opportunity to make some more fundamental changes to the game world and its system. . We've made significant system changes to every Destiny game every time we change an expansion, and now we're making more changes to the game as we move forward. Moving on, we're nearing the end here, but before we get here there are some quick teasers on some important topics.

First, shortcut number one,

faction

rounds. Many people have been wondering if

faction

meetings will return. We have no plans to bring back the factions. recovers, the bounty gear hasn't been used much, our cast of characters is getting too big, and most importantly, they didn't generate a lot of engagement with the game saying there are some sweet looks in that gear and they removed the faction around the armor for legendary Engram or studs in season 10 along with some popular faction weapons, well that's very sincere. I appreciate that kind of sadness because I liked the faction meetings, but there probably wasn't a lot of player participation, I mean, just a lot of people. kind of like jumping in, choosing any faction, doing the little things they had to do just to get the weapons and then jumping.

I think the whole design around fashion

rallies

just didn't work here for the destination; Besides that, I don't even know if the narrative really made sense, since I know we have factions permanently within Destiny One and they would say some things like in their dialogue, but in terms of Destiny, I don't know, there just wasn't much expansion there. and what are we going to have like a whole season based on faction meetings, we're fine hey look man I wouldn't mind some tower drama shortcuts, writing rooms number two for season 10 we're doing.away from the Brilliant engrams as purchasable items that we want players to know about some cost before purchasing them, the right engrams do not meet that principle, so we will no longer sell them in the Eververse store, although they will still appear in the free store. season pass hint, that's huge, yeah, you don't really know what you're doing right, it's all about Bungie orange moving away from that motto, great at them, shortcut number three, new lights, new intro, our goals for the new light, last year.

It's about bringing new players into the universe and getting them to the core activity as quickly as possible. We dramatically underestimated how many new Guardians would awaken at the Cosmodrome. We will improve the entry of the new line this fall and see the initial experience. and fate, so they'll probably change this completely, give it a new quest, something for new light players to catch up better and yes we've seen some glimpses of the numbers, it's surprising how many new light players have joined . us, so I know I like to go back and explain things that most of our veteran players already know, but there are a lot of new light players that when we mention things like Destiny Bringer they have no idea what the hell we are.

Speaking of moving on to quest quest shortcut number four, there's another round of changes coming out with season 10 for the quest tab, the amount of quests you have at any given time can be daunting, especially for procrastinators, so What we are adding are new quest tab categorization features: all quests are automatically assigned a category that groups them into a specific area within the quest tab, for example exotic quests get their own category as well. like seasonal missions. The seasonal quests category is useful because it contains all the quests that expire. At the end of the season there are several categories including one for previous releases, for example abandoned quests, this should help players focus on quests that are new and more relevant versus older content that may not be as high a priority as used to be. that's actually very good.

I'm wondering if there was a way to put an icon on it for new light players who know whether or not this is a high priority content quest versus older content, because of some of the questions my friends had when I first started Playing Destiny was like, hey, should I do all this abandoned stuff before doing the new seasonal stuff? Either way, this categorization is great, it has to happen now, finally, exit music, thanks for being here. I appreciate that you're invested in the game or excited enough about trolling to peruse the above text, it's early 2020 and we have some interesting things planned soon, season 10 is coming into orbit and there will be more to talk about.

I see that the calendar continues with a lot of work. from a lot of people every time I or anyone else on the development team talks about how we think about the game, big thanks to them and big thanks to you for being part of this community, see you soon Luke Smith, well done guys . That's the full breakdown. I know it's long. A big thanks to Luke for giving us some insight. However, we like to read it that way because we hear his words directly. I am what will come in the future. Big breakdowns everywhere. The legendary weapons board is limited in power after one year and

rallies

do not return.

New introduction for new light players. Mission logs, as well as design changes for future seasons. We have some big changes on the horizon. Guys, feel free to let me know in the comments. below what you think and guys and ladies, thanks for watching and as always, hit the like button like your mom taught you right.