One of the most pervasive complaints among those who play a lot of competitive Destiny 2 is that the game is too slow. Players don’t move around fast enough, and it takes too long to defeat an opposing player. It sounds like that’s going to change.
This screenshot is from this one time I loaded into Crucible alone against a team of four. It still cracks me up.
Today on the ol’ Bungie blog, design lead Josh Hamrick explained some of the changes to the game’s “sandbox” that are currently in the works. The changes he listed focus largely on increasing movement speed, buffing weapons and speeding up cooldowns.
The term sandbox relates to the overall balance of weapons and abilities in the game. Destiny 2‘s sandbox has come under sharp criticism from players over the past few months, yet has remained largely unchanged since Destiny 2 first launched last September.
“Our goals for this round are to provide individual players with more hero moments by increasing overall speed and mobility, increasing the amount of supers you charge to demolish your enemies, and increasing the frequency and impact of our most montage worthy power weapons, especially in the Crucible,” wrote Hamrick.
Hamrick detailed the following changes (which will also affect PvE), saying that they’re part of a game update that will arrive in “the next few months”. He prefaced the list by saying that the changes aren’t all guaranteed to make it into the game, but that “the outlook is good at this point”.
∙All three glides plus Catapult and Strafe Lift have been retuned and buffed to make them more unique and faster.
The mobility stat has had its range expanded and been completely retuned as well. In short, everyone gets faster and the high end is higher.
The players’ ground speed cap has been increased, allowing for faster total movement speed, regardless of how you may get there.
Arcstrider, Sentinel, and Striker all move faster, and at the same speed as one another, while in their Supers.
Arcstrider, as a whole, is performing well in PvP but mostly due to its neutral game perks. We’ve made the following changes in an effort to get the Super to be a more competitive option:
– Faster Attack Animations.
– Faster Dodge Animations.
– Increased range of all attacks.
Supers recharge faster for everyone!
We’ve buffed several weapon archetypes (including, but not limited to, Hand Cannons, Pulse Rifles, Sniper Rifles, and Shotguns) and a few specific perks, as well.
– A key goal here is to make Shotguns, Snipers, and Fusion rifles more prevalent in the game.
We’ve also been working side-by-side with our friends on PvP to increase the pace of PvP combat and the frequency of power play. Here’s a sneak peek at their hard work:
– Player respawn times for all Quickplay modes have been decreased.
– Power Ammo respawn timers for all Quickplay modes have been reduced ~30%.
– Power Ammo respawn timers in Survival have been reduced ~40%.
– Power Ammo respawn timers in Countdown have been reduced ~25%.
– Ammo counts have been adjusted in relation to these timers, and in relation to weapon type.
– Enemy players now drop their power ammo on death. The dropped brick is available to anyone until picked up or 30 seconds have passed.
He closed by noting that the Titan shoulder charge was being reverted to how it worked before its recent distance nerf, explaining the reasoning behind the nerf while acknowledging that it didn’t work out how they wanted.
Quick take on this: These changes all sound aimed at bringing things closer to the faster-paced, more deadly Crucible of Destiny 1. That should make a lot of players happy, though I say that as someone who doesn’t actually hate Destiny 2‘s overall PvP philosophy and weapon balance. It remains to be seen how all those changes will work in practice, of course, but I could see a more ability-focused, faster-paced, more deadly D2 Crucible being plenty of fun. As with many of the changes Bungie has announced will be coming over the next year, only time will tell.
Furthermore, beyond any one specific change, it is nice as ever to watch Bungie continue to open up and share more information with players. You can find the rest of the Destiny 2 weekly update over at the Bungie blog.
Comments
14 responses to “Bungie Explains How It’s Speeding Up Destiny 2 PvP”
Yeah, because what Destiny needed is fucking twitchy CoD PvP…
Can’t wait to drop the nuke!!!!!!!!!
All of the changes Bungie and specifically Josh Hamrick began making towards the end of D1’s life were decried; the special economy nerf, the removal of special ammo on death, the essential promotion of side arms as the only way to be competitive. Changes combined to slow the game’s movement and time to kill.
And now we’re seeing them revise all of those changes in a new game where the same negative sentiments were held.
Only this time, it’s come off the back of widespread player exodus.
It’s too late though, the competitive player base–the same people that kept coming back to Destiny when the PVE content dried up–have moved on.
onto monster hunter right now..
Anjanath kicked my ass for the 20th time last night and im BACK FOR MORE> WTF
Those whom were once Guardians are now Hunters.
Yup too little too late. My entire clan has moved on and so have I. Uninstalled it the other day and the only thing I felt was a profound sensation of ‘meh’.
Buy buy bungle may you finally remember how to make fun games again. Destiny 2 will never regain the number of players it once had, the faith has been lost.
Mmmhmm, I’m listening.
Franchise is dead.
Wouldn’t trust a single thing these guys said ever again.
yeah just like that terrible Diablo III and its awful marketplace and loot issues, there is no way Diablo franchise will ever survive such terrible dev decisions… oh wait…
Unfair… because Destiny 2 has 2 at the end of it while Diablo 3 recovered still within the prime number 🙂
I don’t believe that the destiny Devs have the foresight nor the courage to enact changes like the ones blizzard made for d3
Ah the Destiny community. “Whaaa they dont talk to us” so bring on the hate. They have spent the last last 6 weeks or so constantly talking to us, focusing on all the big points of concern, and guess what they get, of yeah you guessed it, the hate and the “it should have been there at launch”. Yeah possibly it all should have been, but it wasnt, those decision are now history. Harping on those mistakes and not the fact that they clearly are doing a massive course correction for the better, is why some of this community doing more damage to the future of the game than any of the awful decisions by the devs.
D1 only got good when the deadwood and the unsatisfiable left, leaving a smaller, stronger community, that actually wanted to see it succeed in spite of terrible decisions before launch.
“A key goal here is to make Shotguns, Snipers, and Fusion rifles more prevalent in the game.”
Step 1) move them back to the secondary slot so they aren’t competing with the superior rocket launcher
Step 2) relax and pat yourself on the back for a job well done
On reverting the shoulder charge nerf:
We believe there are a number of gameplay atoms like this that perform or are used differently than we expected but are thoroughly enjoyed nonetheless. In the future, we want to embrace the state of gameplay atoms like that and balance around it, not against it.
If this is the direction they’re heading, they may have finally figured out that their relentless pursuit of balanced PvP has dulled Destiny’s mechanics across all game modes.
See you in May, Bungie… Bring your A game – you’ll need it if you’re going to convince people to come back.
I really don’t think filling Survival mode with an even easier way to slam the other team in seconds with an all power weapon team will improve it.
I’ve enjoyed the longer time to death. Not being constantly killed in half a second by someone who was standing behind you as you spawned has been nice. Pretty happy about movement and special timers being sped up, though.
Is this stiff that normally gets fixed in open betas?