We’re only two days into Destiny 2′s Black Armory expansion, and already Bungie is tweaking it as fast as possible. It’s admirable but necessary: Black Armory launched at a power level that was unmanageable for even top-level Guardians, leading to an anticipation that quickly gave way to disappointment on Tuesday: people looking forward to diving headfirst into new content instead got a single weird, grindy quest and then an assignment to head back to the standard Forsaken grind before they were ready. It’s not a good look, and that’s why Bungie has already lowered the power level requirement for the Volundr Forge–the expansion’s first new activity–by 5. It’s a start.
But I wanted to clarigy something I wrote about yesterday. It’s important to think about what went wrong here, the problem isn’t just that the Volundr Forge requires a very high power level. Any expansion should give us new endgame content, and that endgame content should be hard, because that’s the idea. The problem here is that there’s nothing else to do. The new endgame content for Black Armory takes place maybe an hour into your playtime, which doesn’t seem entirely appropriate for the whole concept of endgame content.
I and other sub-600 power level Guardians will be able to easily get strong enough to play the forge. Easily, I should say, but not quickly: Everything from 550-650 is still governed by weekly powerful gear milestones, and so I can’t get up to the required power level without several weeks of the same sort of milestone grinding I was doing back in September, which I’m not really that interested in doing. I’ve done most of what Forsaken has to offer outside of the raid, and I’ve done most of that many times over dozens of hours. I didn’t do the long grind over the fall because of Red Dead Redemption 2 and a dozen other games, but that doesn’t mean I’m all that jazzed about doing it now.
The best way to have done this would have been to include some sort of set of story missions to keep players busy until they were powerful enough to reach the forges. A perfectly acceptable way to do this would be to increase the soft cap to 600 so that lower level players can jet up to just below the new content on the backs of blue items alone. I’d be fine with having to spend a week or two grinding to get up to 610 or so, but I don’t want to do much more than that. The prospect of going back to those same strikes and gambit matches for a solid month just to be another month behind is not a particularly exciting one.
Black Armory, at the moment, makes me deeply worried about the future of Destiny 2. Plenty of hardcore players will be fine with it and are likely already forging their weapons, but you can’t sustain a game with this sort of budget on hardcore players alone. Tons of Destiny enthusiasts that didn’t manage to hit the level cap over the course of the fall are going to bounce right off this expansion, and inevitably some of them are never going to come back. That is not what this game needs right now. Destiny 2 has been admirable in its accommodations for hardcore players in the Forsaken era, but it can’t do that at the expense of what I might call mid-core players. You shouldn’t need to complete milestones every week for months on end to access the content in a $35 annual pass.
