It’s launch day for a new Destiny 2 DLC Season. It’s a little unclear how the classification has changed over the years, but it’s a major content drop nonetheless: we’re now embarking on the story of the Drifter and his wacky experiments with darkness, complete with a new version of Gambit and a new PvE activity called “The Reckoning”. So far, so good: I’ve always liked the arcade-y feel of Gambit, and combining that with Reckoning creates a self-contained little loop that plays this game’s grindy side without getting boring. I’ll have more to say about that later, but here on day one, that’s not the thing I’m most excited about.
The Season of the Drifter comes complete with “power surge” bounties that any player strong enough to complete some basic tasks can level use to level right up to 640, high enough to get going on everything that the season has to offer. This is a godsend for players like me that have been one step behind ever since missing a few weeks during the busy fall release season, and it feels like the first bone that Bungie has thrown to the medium-core player in a long time. No milestones, no waiting for weekly reset, just the opportunity to get running again after about 45 minutes or so of completing simple activities.
This is in stark contrast to Black Armory, which started its run with a quest that essentially nobody could complete immediately, and for which players like me were so dramatically under levelled that it took weeks to actually get going on the thing, at which point I was far behind enough that I was out of the zeitgeist anyways. Bungie eventually took a few half-steps to get me up to speed, but none of them worked as well as I wanted. Those early days left a sour enough taste that it felt like I was just sprinting to behind the pack: when The Last Word quest dropped with a grindy, difficult Crucible quest, it felt like the game just wasn’t that interersted in me playing it. It was a feeling I could reciprocate.
I would hazard to guess that Black Armory was a disaster for Bungie and Destiny 2. It’s hard to tell, because it wasn’t the sort of disaster that hit the most vocal parts of the community very hard. Sure, hardcore players were annoyed that they couldn’t finish the first quest immediately, but many got there in a week or so. What we don’t know is how many players–and annual pass holders, no less–hit Black Armory and bounced right off, some of them for good. No game on the scale of Destiny 2 can survive solely on those players that log in every week to complete milestones, and losing the middle tier of players presents a serious problem.
Destiny 2 spent most of the last 12 months or so doing everything it could to make the game more appealing to hardcore players, and it’s largely done that. But along the way, it neither remembered to be appealing to other players nor provided enough actual onramp designed to get lapsed fans up to speed. These bounties suggest that the developer is aware of this problem, and might be a little more careful about this kind of thing in the future.
