Destiny 2 – Lightfall’s first season, Season Of Defiance, will also launch the same day (pic: Bungie)



A lengthy blog post about Destiny 2’s next expansion explains how Bungie is adding more challenge without sacrificing player enjoyment.



Bungie is just a couple weeks away from launching its next expansion for Destiny 2 , dubbed Lightfall, and it’s set to be one of the most important ever for the franchise.



The studio has already shared plenty of information regarding its new Neptune city setting and Spider-Man like Strand subclass , and there’s now an extensive blog post covering more intricate details, from game director Joe Blackburn.



The thing is over 5,000 words long, so we won’t be recapping everything, but one interesting detail is that the team at Bungie think Destiny 2 has become a bit too easy; something it’s hoping to fix with Lightfall.



Blackburn does stress that Bungie remains committed to offering various difficulty levels across Destiny 2’s content, since everyone’s skill level is different.



However, it believes that the overall level of challenge is simply too low, partially thanks to the changes and improvements Bungie’s made to abilities over the past year.



To counter this, Bungie won’t just make enemies tougher to kill, by increasing their health. It doesn’t want to turn them into bullet sponges (especially as many accuse the game of doing that anyway) or make players feel forced to conform to popular loadouts.



Instead, it will be making further adjustments to abilities, primarily increasing their recharge time, and nerfing the resilience stat slightly so players take a bit more damage from enemies.



‘Destiny is a game about guns and powers; we want both to shine. So, starting with Lightfall, we are moderately increasing ability recharge time across a wide selection of our abilities,’ explains Blackburn .



‘We’ve also noticed that enemy combatants just aren’t hitting as hard as we want them to, especially against max resilience Guardians, so we’re adjusting the amount of damage resistance granted by resilience and increasing the energy cost of resilience mods from one to two for minor mods and three to four for major mods.’



Destiny 2 – Bungie doesn’t want to take away the power fantasy (pic: Bungie)



Other gear driven buffs will be adjusted to be less powerful, but Blackburn makes it clear they don’t want to dilute the role-playing elements too much and make them feel like they don’t matter. As Blackburn puts it: ‘Destiny might start to lose its essential fantasy of being this powerful battle wizard in space’ if the team focused on just tuning player efficiency.



It’s too early to tell what the player reception will be like once these changes are implemented, or how much of a difference they’ll make, but Blackburn seems confident that they won’t cause too much of an upset.



‘We don’t think these changes are going to be a big swing of the balance pendulum. More than anything, this is about reining in some unintentional power creep that we saw over the last year,’ he says.



‘We’re committed as always to making your Guardian feel like the ultimate monster-killing machine, and I’m confident that with Strand, our new buildcrafting updates, and a suite of new weapons coming in Lightfall, you will all be making Zavala and Shaxx very proud.’



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Blackburn is also promising some major changes to Destiny 2’s Power system. Essentially, your Power level determines how much damage you can deal and take, and you increase it by obtaining weapons and gear that have a higher Power level than your current one.



Since Bungie believes the current system holds some players back from accessing endgame content, it wants to keep experimenting with it and iron out the issues.



This will take some significant time, since these big changes won’t come into effect until the next expansion, The Final Shape. That’s not expected to arrive until 2024 and will also serve as the conclusion to the Light And Darkness Saga that’s been running since the original Destiny launched in 2014.



That said, there will be minor tweaks throughout Lightfall, with Blackburn adding: ‘When Lightfall launches, we will have a Power climb that is very similar to that in The Witch Queen, but later in Season Of The Deep, we don’t plan to raise the Power or pinnacle cap at all.’



Destiny 2: Lightfall launches for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC on February 28.









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