An Update from Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn

This week, Destiny 2’s Game Director Joe Blackburn sat down in his home office to fill players in on some strategic shifts for the game and expand on the future of Destiny 2. If this is news to you and you want to go watch it in full, here you go: 

Trying something different, yall have 15 minutes to chat? pic.twitter.com/wzB6xqJPGU

— Joe Blackburn (@joegoroth) August 15, 2023

Don’t have time for that? Let’s hit the key points below.  

The Destiny 2 Showcase 

We’re super excited about next week’s Destiny 2 Showcase, and we want to let everyone know that it’s focused on the reveals of The Final Shape, Season 22, and what comes next in Destiny 2. 

• Our Showcase is made for a wide audience of Destiny fans, so we won’t dive into some of the more granular topics, like an upcoming Xûr revamp or HUD improvements planned for the future. 
• We will be discussing how the live service of Destiny 2 will evolve following the conclusion of The Final Shape. 
• Joe, along with Dan, Destiny 2’s General Manager, will be live on the set for a post-show Q&A answering some important questions in a similar fashion to last year. 

Crucible 

Our recent PvP strategy has been focused on the following areas:  

• Foundational sandbox balance – for example, making sure Strand came out in a great place for PvP and lives in harmony with the rest of the Crucible. 
• Putting out two weapon balance updates each Season: one alongside the launch and one later mid-season. 
• Updating PvP ritual weapon pools at the beginning of each Season. 
• Making one new map and additional reprised map ports each year.  

Maps: Ultimately, the above plan isn’t the type of support for PvP that is producing the Crucible experience that players have come to expect from Bungie. For the next year, our plan is to change the map release strategy from a slower rollout to a single map pack that comes in one drop later on in 2024, available to all players.  

• The goal is to get away from single installments where a single map is expected to fit many different modes and gameplay styles, and ends up being a more generalized experience. 
• The new strategy will allow the team to ship multiple maps together, delivering a more refreshing PvP experience all at once. 

Modes: We know new maps alone won’t drastically alter the foundation of PvP – we need to ramp up our strategy on modes as well. There are two new additions coming in Season 22 that we’re excited about: 

• Checkmate is a gunplay-focused modifier for multiple modes that players have been asking for since the original Destiny. This will be rolling out throughout Season 22. 
• Relic, launching at the start of the Season, is a new mode that escalates between core Destiny mastery and wild relic plays as you succeed, until it becomes a crazy Mayhem-type experience. 

Core playlists: There have been a few obstacles (like setting up character voiceover and a handful of bugs) that have held us up from moving some of the new Labs and Iron Banner game modes from the past year into the core PvP playlists.  

• Going forward, we are going to accept there are some minor polish issues that we can't resolve immediately and get these modes into core playlists as soon as possible. 

Competitive Division: The team also wants to change how points are gained and lost in Competitive. Personal MMR is currently weighted too highly, and the points gained and lost are unpredictable. 

• The plan is to move to a simpler system where winning or losing matters more. 
• The Competitive experience should have more modes that players enjoy (like Countdown Rush) and fewer that players don’t enjoy as much (like Rift). 

Armor 

Joe talked about how we look at the armor we make and our plans going forward with creating new sets. Before we get deeper into this section, let’s define the different “visual categories” of armor in Destiny 2: 

• Aspirational armor: raids, dungeons, Trials.  

  • Should be flashy and represent the core of what these experiences offer. Players should feel proud to wear this armor. 

• Eververse armor: armor that you can buy for Silver or Bright Dust. 

  • Should feel like armor that breaks the mold. Eververse is a place to experiment with things that are unexpected in Destiny. People who own this armor should feel like their purchase was worth it. 

• Narrative armor: armor shown in our trailers, Season Pass armor, campaign armor.  

  • This is all thematic and built to drive home a specific fantasy and moment in time. 

• Rituals and blues: Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit earned armor sets.

  • These represent the core Guardian fantasy. What does the Guardian on the frontlines of battle look like? 

In 2022, the team reevaluated our armor priority to focus more on the armor that people earn in aspirational content, like Trials and raids. The requirements to acquire these are hard-earned, and we feel the rewards should reflect that achievement. We believe this focus paid off over the past year, with some really great looks that you can get from completing Spire of the Watcher, Root of Nightmares, and our most recent Season for players who want to fulfill that deep-sea diver fantasy. 

• One of the trade-offs in making this shift in focus resulted in fewer ritual armor sets going forward, and we failed to communicate this with the community early on.  
• As a result, we will convert an Eververse armor set from Season 22 into a ritual armor set reward that anyone can earn before the end of the Season. 
• We also plan to ship a new ritual set along with The Final Shape next year. 

Communications 

We want to talk to continue to have a transparent open line of communication with our community, and our top priority is to keep our team members safe. No one who works at Bungie should have to worry about their personal safety. 

• To protect the team, we will continue to use our branded @Destiny2Team Twitter and Reddit accounts to share more insights with the community. 
• Joe will also be streaming Destiny 2 in the near future, so that you can join in and get more of these types of candid updates. Look for more details on when the first one of these will kick off next Season.