If there’s a general consensus on the Destiny 2 beta, it’s this: Player vs. Player (PvP) makes you feel great; Player vs. Environment (PvE) makes you feel underpowered. Bungie is hearing all of those complaints. The studio says to expect changes when the game launches for real in September.
Over the past three years, one of the core tenets of Destiny has been that weapons and gear have the same functions no matter where you play. Whether you’re in the competitive Crucible or blasting aliens in story missions, your pulse rifles and shotguns will have the same damage, perks, and rates of fire. This has led to all sorts of gripes throughout the years, as whenever Bungie tweaks Destiny‘s weapon balance for PvP, it can have a negative impact on PvE and vice versa.
The issue is again rearing its head with Destiny 2, which overhauls the traditional “primary/secondary/heavy” weapon loadout in favour of a setup that limits you to one “power” weapon — a shotgun, a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher and so on — and gives you two slots for primary weapons such as auto-rifles and handcannons. This makes PvP feel more fair and pleasant to play, but it’s led to a whole lot of concern about PvE, especially after the beta. How will it feel to have to pick a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher rather than being able to equip both at once? Will bosses be even worse bullet sponges when we’re mostly stuck with primaries? And why do all of the ability charge rates feel so slow?
On Bungie’s website yesterday, the company was quick to explain that the Destiny 2 build we’re playing is pretty old, and that the design team has already made big changes. Wrote the beta’s lead designer, Rob Engeln:
The PVE game tuning has changed pretty significantly since the Beta build was deployed. The nature of a Beta of this scale requires that it’s based off a build of the game that is now months old. So, in many cases, your feedback is helping us validate changes that were previously made based on internal feedback and playtesting. For example, we too felt that ammo (especially power ammo) was too scarce in PvE. In addition to retuning the drop rates, we built a system that guarantees power ammo drops for you and your Fireteam from certain enemies, giving power weapons a more reliable and predictable role in your arsenal. Other areas where we’ve made significant tuning changes include grenade effectiveness in PvE, Boss vitality, and weapon damage against non-player combatants.
Burning questions still remain — such as “why did they nerf hunters so much?” and “will hunters get a better class ability?” and “who the fuck is going to play hunter now?” — but it’s helpful to know that Bungie is already aware of many of these problems. Meanwhile, you can hear Kirk and I talking about our impressions of the Destiny 2 beta here:
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7 responses to “Bungie Promises Destiny 2 PvE Improvements To Grumbling Beta Players”
No mention of adjusting those ability cooldowns tho, which are atrociously slow. Seem to spend 90% of your time just firing your primary over and over. And your second primary is mostly a wasted slot.
And a quick look will show that the cooldown modifying stats from the first game do not exist.
They really need to just accept PvP and PvE are two different things and balance them separately. Because making PvE (which ALL players play) a boring drudge for the sake of better PvP (which a fraction of players play) is a real stupid move.
Especially since modifying the conditions in a pvp match is really damn simple compared to changing the entire rest of the game.
Ill be playing a Hunter so suck it haha poledancer is awesome once you get the moves down and the shadowstep has helped alot in clutches
Wait I find it odd that they would release a previous beta that they have already made new changes to. Wouldn’t that just make this more of a demo to wet the appetite than actually help improve the game? Even then it seems illogical.
Server load testing, environment/map testing for glitches. That sort of thing.
The beta’s also testing their new netcode under real conditions, and letting the community find any bugs/exploits (infinite super glitches, out-of map exploits) they’ve missed, so that they’re fixed before launch. I’d imagine the lengthy cooldowns are also resulting in some detailed data on weapon balance in PvP (given that there’s one of almost every weapon archetype in the loot pool).
“If there’s a general consensus on the Destiny 2 beta, it’s this: Player vs. Player (PvP) makes you feel great…” Oh really? A general consensus you say? Let me guess, you don’t get around much, do ya?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CruciblePlaybook/comments/6ogxh0/mini_rant_does_anyone_not_like_how_slow_d2_is/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CruciblePlaybook/comments/6ojsjn/i_hate_to_say_it_but_the_fact_that_d2_favors/
https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/229203305 (read through the entire thread)
Please, before you make assertions like that, ask around. If anything, myself and a lot of the people I play with think that the strike and mission were pretty well done (minus the ammo issue), it’s the horrible state of D2 Crucible that is making us consider canceling our pre-order.
I’m having a blast as a hunter in pvp with some minor success, for me anyway. Never liked pvp in destiny 1 and getting smashed as my default choice warlock. But golden gun hunter is absolute fun
Problems with Hunters… the crouch on the same button as shadestep (or whatever its called now), it needs to be retweaked sometimes you crouch when you want to dodge etc. And I say that as a long time nightstalker. its super frustrating. The other problem that it offers nothing to the group. The shield wall does, the warlock thingie does as well, but the hunters one, yeah nope. It just helps with melee recharge or reloading.
So many games I have played, even when doing well (winning, positive kd, playing objective) still hadnt got my super by the end of the game. There should be at least two super rounds per game, not just one in the dying minute of the game when it accomplishes nothing.
I want to like the PVP but instead of swinging the nerf bat carefully, they have nerfed anything and everything that can make your character unique. Character classes, no armour perks, no random weapons, slow rechargers, same recharge speeds. In doing so they are removing a lot of the complication that makes people want to keep replaying and retrying things.
I am trying to keep an open mind but this demo seemed like a game developer balance simulator, not the fast and agile game that Destiny 1 was.