This Week In Destiny - 09/21/2023

This week in Destiny, we’re talking... The Craftening. We’re also chatting about the awesome new Jumpmaster campaign with the Bungie Foundation and Team Rubicon, diving into deterministic recoil changes, treasuring the treasure that awaits, and more. But first, let’s do a quick recap of what we talked about last week:

• The reasons for Legendary Shard depreciation in The Final Shape. 
• How many Guardians completed Crota's End? 
• Crota’s End’s first challenge and Master difficulty starting. 
• New PvP Strike team previews for Seasons 22 and 23. 
• Checkmate entering the Crucible Labs. 
• Improved Trials weapons drops for wins. 

Topics for this week:  

• Jumpmaster campaign has landed. 
• Crafting shenanigans: What happened?! 
• Deterministic Recoil: What is it and why is it so heckin’ cool?  
• More secrets in Savathûn's Spire await
• So, we heard you wanted a Thorn Catalyst... 
• The Pale Heart awaits.  
• The team had a little too much fun with the new Supers coming out in The Final Shape. 
• A little bit of lo-fi makes everything better—now with Eris!  
• Prime Gaming update. 
• Yeet the smollen (fun clip).

For Veterans, By Veterans 

On Tuesday, the Bungie Foundation launched a veteran-focused campaign in partnership with Team Rubicon to showcase support for those who serve and help provide humanitarian aid to communities facing crisis. The campaign, which runs until the end of Season 22, features an all-new emote designed in collaboration with veteran Bungie employees, called Jumpmaster. All profits from the emote, available now in the Eververse, will be split equally between the Bungie Foundation and Team Rubicon. 

In addition to the emote, the Bungie Foundation premiered their Clearing the Path film. This emotional story highlights the partnership with Team Rubicon, a special wildfire mitigation operation that Bungie employees and veterans took part in, as well as the personal story of one of our own veterans.  

Take seven minutes to watch the video and learn how Team Rubicon and the Bungie Foundation are supporting veterans and helping rebuild communities before and after disaster strikes. Watch the full film and get more details on the campaign in last Tuesday’s blog post. 

The Craftening: A Larger Problem Than Anticipated, Ammit-rite?  

Hey, Guardians. This week has been a week, Ammit-rite? As some members of the community have dubbed it The Craftening, the issue that allowed Exotic and Legendary via weapon crafting to be Frankenstein’d into something ungodly and powerful was certainly a doozy. While fun for a while, our priority will always be to ensure the long-term health of the game. Our teams worked hard to not only get the appropriate fixes in place, but also to communicate with you each time strides toward a fix were made. We saw a lot of players ask, “Why not just do...?” And we thought this might be a good opportunity to show why issues like this aren’t always as simple as they seem.  

To continue the transparency, we’ve got folks from various departments that worked on this issue here to give a little peek behind the curtain. Let’s dive right in:  

A previous bug allowed stale data from other crafting recipes to bleed over, which allowed crafty players to move traits from one recipe to another. We learned about this problem on Friday and worked over the weekend on both a short-term content fix and longer-term code fix. At Bungie, we say that teams are stronger than heroes, and that was exemplified in this weekend’s work. Engineering, Design, Test, and Leadership were all involved every step of the way.

For our short-term fix, we have a Live Update (LUP) process, which we can use to modify content in the live game. However, content and code are two different things, and the bug itself was in code. While we worked on both solutions in parallel, we prioritized possible content-only solutions that would fix enough of the issues to give us more time to work on the code solution. 

Other than only supporting content changes, LUPs also have other limits: 

1. LUPs have limits on the amount of content that can be changed; however, we do not have a method of predicting the size of each element of the content fix. This required us to build a live update which contained the changes, and then see if it was above or below the size limit. 
2. LUPs only allow us to modify existing content. They do not allow us to add new content objects as part of the fix (i.e., we can update existing text in an Excel sheet, but cannot add new rows). 
3. LUPs only support changes that affect the UI in very specific ways.  
4. Only a single LUP can be active at once and we have to include all new and previous LUP changes as a whole.

Due to limitation #1, we knew we needed to constrain the size of the LUP. However, the scope of the problem was vast. All crafted perks were potential problems, as well as every crafted weapon. 

We obviously could not disable every weapon in the game, so we decided on two options: 

• Disable crafted or enhanced weapons. 
• Disable perks from being active on crafted or enhanced weapons.

The first step was to create gating logic that would only apply to perks on crafted and enhanced weapons and could be easily toggled on and off in case something went awry. Since we can only edit existing content and not add new content objects, and we needed to support both crafted and enhanced weapons (which are quite different in their internal construction), this logic took a while to create and test. 

After a number of false starts, we landed on a working set of logic that incorporated both options and began to evaluate them in a test environment before pushing them to the live game. 

We started by testing the first option that disabled equipping the weapons, but quickly ran into issues. 

1. Weapons that were equipped appeared to be disabled in the UI, but some behaviors of the weapons were still active. 
2. We didn't have time to test whether leaving those behaviors active was safe or not.  
3. There is an unequip functionality that exists for items, which we then attempted to use, but discovered it simply did not work. Fixing this would require a code change, which LUPs don’t support.

With disabling equipping weapons not being a viable path, we began investigating the second option: disabling the perks themselves. 

• Again, while we knew there were LUP limits, we did not know if modifying all the weapon perks would hit this limit. We threw a Hail Mary and decided to gate every intrinsic and trait perk. We didn't look at other perks like barrels and magazines, since we didn't consider them as much of a problem for the short term. 
• When disabling the perks, we also set the tooltip behavior of the perks to appear disabled, so that players would see a visual indication in-game. As stated earlier, LUP does not support changes that modify the UI in certain ways, but we did not know this when we were building this LUP. 
• This initial LUP attempt failed early. We exceeded some size limits (some of which we only found out at the point of failure), and we failed completely due to having changes that modified the UI.

At this point we had to start from scratch. 

• To avoid the UI failure, we would simply not modify any existing visibility settings of the perks. 
• Since we didn't know how much we exceeded the LUP limits, and we were running out of time for new attempts, we targeted a far more conservative scope of perks that we would gate. 
• Among other issues with this approach, the main problem was that, while we had examples of bad combinations of perks, we did not know all of them, and we didn't have time to gather more information. We knew we would miss some, and we also knew that if we disabled the most popular perk combinations, players would simply move onto other combinations. We agreed that this was an acceptable risk, as this was not designed to be a permanent fix. 

The limited perk disabling LUP went fairly quickly. We already had the gating logic and were editing a much smaller scope of content. This LUP was successful, and we prepared to deploy this fix to the live game on Sunday. 

Although it was an option to kick players from the game when we applied the LUP fix, we chose not to. While the LUP deployment succeeded without major issues, we found that weapons that players already had equipped still had their perks active in certain scenarios. We did not cexperience that in our internal testing.We then did a rolling restart to get players out of this state, and we considered that the LUP was effective enough to let us concentrate on continuing to help the team who was working on the code fix.

For our code fix, we broke down the process into four major parts: 

1. Stop the exploit, so that new weapons cannot enter the system. 
2. Determine how to sieve through all the crafted weapons our players have made and separate the affected weapons from the rest. 
3. Determine a good state to move irregularly crafted weapons to, so that the player is left with a valid crafted weapon. 
4. Find ways to validate that these fixups made sense on the many combinations of weapons that are out there and that we didn’t erroneously modify other weapons.

As we investigated the issue, team members would join a work chat and provide us with reliable reproduction steps and more insights on the scope of the issue. (Did I say how much I love our team?) As some focused on the fix, others started to develop our test plan and test cases for validation and developing backup plans. 
After our initial fix was written, we ran it through many testing scenarios and searched our library of weapons for edge cases to put our fix through. The team would chime in with a scenario, and we’d go through and make sure we handled it appropriately. Our fix would grow and shrink in complexity as we fine-tuned the sieve that we sifted every weapon through. 

After we had the fix in a good state, we needed to thoroughly test it using weapons copied from tens of thousands of accounts. On top of that, we needed a way for our team to catch cases where the result did not look correct. We did a significant amount of manual testing, but also leaned on recent updates to our automation tools to drive reports of all the fixups we’d make to weapons and generate summary tables that our experts could comb through. This allowed us to reach a higher confidence level sooner. Finally, we repeated the process until we understood every questionable behavior and scenario and felt confident in moving forward with the fix. 

There is a fix deploying this week that will target this crafting issue. As always, please report any issues you are experiencing following the rollout via @BungieHelp, @Destiny2Team, or the Bungie Forums.

Deterministic Recoil: What Does It Mean, and How Is It Changing? 

We’ve got Senior Design Lead Chris Proctor here with an update on deterministic recoil and why players should definitely learn more about this change. “But Bungie, why wasn’t this included in the Season of the Witch weapons preview article a few weeks back?” That’s a good question! We wanted to observe the system in the wild for a little bit and didn’t want this information to get buried in patch notes or a larger weapons balance update, like with the earlier weapons preview article. The full context is important to understanding the purpose and PvP implications of the partial predictability of weapon recoil with this particular system active. 

Let’s dive into it. Take it away, Proctor:  

Starting in Season 22, all of the following weapons with a Season 22 or later watermark will have what we’re calling deterministic recoil set up for them:  

• Auto Rifle 
• Pulse Rifle 
• Scout Rifle 
• Submachine Gun 
• Sidearm 
• Hand Cannon 
• Trace Rifle 
• Machine Gun 

This includes all full-auto weapons as well as burst-fire and semi-automatic Primary ammo weapons. 

These weapons will recoil in a predictable way with sustained fire, allowing players to learn the patterns and compensate for them. 

You may have seen similar systems in other games, but our implementation is quite different because we release so many weapons a Season and drive their gameplay via stats (importantly in this case: recoil direction and stability). 

The goal of the system is to make each weapon feel unique, with a recoil pattern that can be learned (to a degree). This will enable players to truly master weapons in a way that wasn’t possible with standard Destiny 2 recoil, which has a fair amount of randomness in it. Note that the pattern of the updated recoil is very similar each time, but not exactly the same. 

Here’s how it works: 

A weapon is set up with a few possible recoil patterns. The weapon will always start with the first pattern. Most of the time, it will run through this recoil pattern until you stop firing for long enough to let the weapon’s recoil and accuracy reset completely. Occasionally, somewhere in the first half of the magazine, it will switch to another pattern. 

Each bullet fired has a small amount of randomness to it, due to the accuracy cone (a.k.a. error angle) placing the bullet somewhere in a radius around the target point. 

The entire pattern shifts left and right, dependent on the weapon’s recoil, with higher recoil direction having smaller horizontal spacing. But even as a recoil direction stat changes, the pattern will still be recognizable. 

This video shows an Abyss Defiant High-Impact Auto Rifle, with 86 recoil and 25 stability, firing with no compensation for recoil. You can see that, while there is some randomness to the location of each specific bullet impact, the pattern is generally the same. 

Some Q&A: 

Why don’t Fusion Rifles, Shotguns and Sniper Rifles get this treatment? 

Fusion Rifle recoil isn’t a big factor in the randomness of their apparent recoil patterns. They’re much more dependent on accuracy cone growth. What we found when we set this up on Fusion Rifles is that you can’t tell there’s any predictability to the recoil because accuracy places the bullets so randomly. 

Shotguns get fixed pellet spread instead. Technically, deterministic recoil would function on Shotguns, but you wouldn’t be able to feel it in most cases. 

Making Sniper Rifle recoil predictable isn’t something we’re comfortable with doing at this point. It would likely make follow-up shots too easy, and accuracy cone growth doesn’t have a large enough impact on Sniper Rifles for this to feel safe. 

Does the recoil pattern only reset on a full magazine? 

No, it resets when you stop firing for long enough for the weapon to fully settle (meaning that its accuracy cone has gone back to its default, resting state). Typically, when you reload, the weapon is idle for long enough for this to happen though. 

What happens if I keep refilling my magazine while continuously firing? 

The implementation we’ve used has no upper limit to the length of the recoil pattern. For example, firing an Auto Rifle with Actium War Rig or another magazine refill method won’t cause any weirdness. 

Are there any security implications to this feature? 

It was very important that this feature not be exploitable. Weapons Design worked with Game Security on this implementation to ensure that we achieved the goal of allowing greater player mastery of weapons without allowing recoil to be predictable enough to be exploitable. We settled on three prioritizations:  

1. A predictable recoil pattern, but standard randomization in accuracy and error angle. While the pattern is predictable, each bullet will land in a slightly different position each time. 
2. A low chance to branch to a different pattern in the first half of a magazine. Any attempt to use automation to compensate for a specific pattern will randomly fail. 
3. A server-side flag to disable the feature, so that if we encounter issues, we can revert to standard behavior immediately while we work on a fix. 

We’re expecting some more questions, so please feel free to reach out to @Destiny2Team on Twitter/X, and we’ll be sure to clarify or provide additional information if needed. 

Hopefully that gives you some insight into why the Season 22 weapons feel a little different. We'll be monitoring recoil in the live game as well as feedback around the system and are ready to make adjustments if needed. 

Curiosity May Kill the Cat, But What About the Guardian? 

You've been exploring the Spire so much that you've discovered its deepest secrets: the mystical arcane chambers where Savathûn turned trickery into power. You're free to explore... but try not to become a victim of your own curiosity. 

Pay extra attention as you make your way through Season of the Witch starting this week, Guardians. Some surprises are still waiting to be uncovered—and not all are easy to spot.

What’s a Controversial Halloween Candy in Destiny 2? Candy Thorn. 

Look, you can admit it. Don’t be shy. It’s OK to say out loud that you enjoy the ever-loving Traveler out of going fully stabby-stabby with the recently added Monte Carlo catalyst. We get it, we’re not here to judge. In the same vein, have you considered Thorn for your loadout lately?  

Thorn is arguably one of the most iconic Exotic Hand Cannons in Destiny, so it only makes sense that this bad boi is the next weapon up for some catalyst action coming in Season 23. And before you ask: no, you can’t stab people with it. 

Bless Your (Pale) Heart

If you’ve been digging the leadup into The Final Shape so far, you’ve likely already seen the trailer below highlighting The Pale Heart. If you haven’t, buckle up because the next step of this wild Destiny 2 journey is going to be a doozy. If you have already seen it, well... watch it again because it’s— quite frankly—awesome:  

The Pale Heart is the primary destination in the The Final Shape. There’s a juxtaposition of danger and beauty felt with every twist and turn. But don’t get too cozy... The Pale Heart is constantly evolving, after all. 

OK, But Have You Considered Feeling Like a Total Badass? 

During the Destiny 2 Showcase earlier this year, we shared the first look at three new Supers coming in The Final Shape: Twilight Arsenal for Titans (purple axe go bonk), Storm’s Edge for Hunters (putting the edge in edgelord), andSong of Flame for Warlocks (which, let’s be honest, that name sounds cool as heck).  

The teams have had such a blast playtesting the new Supers that we couldn’t wait any longer to share more about them. So, without further ado, please enjoy us going full-on chaos mode in PvP and getting some dungeon time with the new Supers in the three videos below. And no judging the random panic-running away from those Supers coming in hot; those things are spicy.  

Warlock - Song of Flame:  

Hunter - Storm’s Edge

Titan - Twilight Arsenal

Have Lo-fi, Will Travel—to Total Coziness With Eris 

Lo-fi isn't really new, but it has seen a surge in popularity over the past year, and for good reason! This genre of music is one designed to help you relax and chill out, which we could all use sometimes. Certain lo-fi tracks are even designed to help you focus, which makes Eris sending us tithe-bearers into chill mode even cooler. Who doesn’t want to focus when kicking Hive butt? I mean, honestly...  

Grab yourself a nice cuppa something warm and toasty and get those comfy sweatpants ready. It’s time to vibe:

Want more Eris? How about some behind-the-scenes action of the actress who played her, Morla Gorrondona,  and the rest of the team filming the cinematics for Season of the Witch? Here’s Destiny 2’s Cinematic Director James Myers with a little story time. Take it away, Myers! 

James Myers: When Senior Narrative Designer Hazel Monforton came to me with the initial pitch for the intro cinematic in Season of the Witch, I knew immediately that we were going to have a lot of fun motion-capturing this one. The very first draft already involved the Guardian grabbing Immaru and Eris floating into the air (again!), so we knew this was going to be a fun one. Eris’s story arc is something Hazel and I have both celebrated in the past, and we had a blast jamming on ways to tackle this scene. 

For the shoot, we are lucky to work with awesome talent who have embodied these characters for a decade. Morla Gorrondona played Eris, Alysson Kulavis played Ikora’s body (with facial capture from Mara Junot, Ikora’s voice actress, combined), Richard Sloniker played our hearty Guardian, and Brandon O'Neill, who you may also know as Crow, played Immaru. Having all of them on stage, building on each other’s performances was a fantastic experience, and I count myself lucky to work with such talent so regularly. The crew at Sony’s mocap stage built an adorable Immaru-on-a-stick that we used for eyelines and a starting place for animators. (Shout out to Xavier James in animation for getting “the grab” to feel so satisfying, along with David Shaughnessy's excellent voice work.) They also taped down proxies for the Hive runes that Eris would be tracing on the floor. Charles Searight and Rachel Swavely in our mocap team did a bang-up job prepping all of these assets before the shoot!

On the game side, we did a ton of rapid research and development (with brilliant technical support from Fritzie Mercado) to find ways to show lots of Hive worms surrounding the ritual circle. The biggest challenge was finding a way to show Eris’s transformation to her Hive form. We had a Hive Eris character in the works, and we had a human Eris, but the technical process of showing the in-betweens is much harder than it sounds! Luckily, AJ Sall in Character Art and Cody Wilcoxon in Tech Art are awesome, so when I pitched that we break off pieces of Hive Eris, rig them as props, and shoot the transformation almost like a practical effect (the transformation in An American Werewolf in London was a strong source of reference), they ran with it. And, to no surprise, they absolutely nailed it.  

In the end, they actually split up the meshes, stacked them, used part swapping on the visible pieces that would change using blendshapes in Maya, and then matched vertex animation in engine. Jane Kim shot the cameras, Keith Reicher handled the edit, and our whole Cinematics Animation team came together to add to and accentuate what we got from our on-stage talent. Extra shout-outs to Melissa Chan and Andrea Ratsos for all the animation work they did on the transformation itself, Jacob Saunderson for all those swirling green VFX, and Mike Poe for the lighting and grade!

It's been a joy seeing players react to this scene. All the care and effort that the writers, acting talent, and cinematics team put into this really paid off! 

All Primed Up With Everywhere to Go  

It’s that time again, Guardians: Time to get your Prime Gaming on. The latest Destiny 2 bundle will make you want to dive face-first into some archiving fun. Because reading is cool, and so is this emote:  

• Consult the Archives Exotic Emote 
• Curse of Foresight Exotic Sparrow 
• Edge of the Worlds Legendary Ship 
• Methane Explorer Legendary Shader 

And if you don’t know what Prime Gaming is, don't worry, check out our help article to learn more!  

Yeet the Smollen  

Putting this little treasure of a video here because there is something just... uniquely hilarious about yeeting a smollen. Or maybe that’s just me? We don’t need to look too deeply into that, OK?  

Hope this little clip of happiness made you smile, like it did for me.  

Player Support Report 

They’re doing what at the crafting table!? 

Another week, another Player Support Report. Here’s where you’ll find our incredible Player Support team’s list of updates for known issues and Destiny 2 shenanigans that you need to know about. 

Known Issues List  |  Help Forums  |  Bungie Help Twitter/X

IGNEOUS HAMMER + JAVELIN-4 RETURNS 

Due to the effects of the weapon crafting issue on the previous weekend’s instance of Trials of Osiris, both Igneous Hammer and the Javelin-4 map will be returning for the upcoming Trials of Osiris weekend. 

MASTER CROTA’S END DELAY 

After a delay from the intended Tuesday launch, the Master Crota’s End raid mode is now available with the release of Update 7.2.0.4. Essence of the Oversoul will also see an increase in drop rate. Players who encounter issues accessing the mode should report them to our #Help forum. 

CROTA’S END 48-HOUR CHALLENGE MODE EMBLEM  

We are working to ensure players who completed the Crota’s End Challenge mode within the Contest mode window are properly credited with the All For One Triumph and associated emblem. Additional updates will be provided when available. 

For more information on this issue and the steps being taken to resolve it, please see last week’s Player Support Report. 

KNOWN ISSUES 

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported in our #Help forum:

• The Path of Burning Steps Titan Exotic and associated ornaments no longer change appearance when the Solar Weapon Surge perk is active. 
• The Hoarfrost-Z and Icefall Mantle Titan Exotics are using the incorrect cooldowns. 
• When inspecting weapon details for items stored in player vaults, the weapon perk icons may no longer appear. 
• The Rank 71 Weapon Scrounger Seasonal Bonus displays as requiring ownership of the Season Pass, even if players already own the Season Pass. 
• Some players who did not fully complete the Season of the Deep story missions may be blocked from completing the current Season of the Witch weekly story mission until they finish the previous Season’s story. 
• Returning players who did not fully complete the A Guardian Rises intro quest prior to the launch of Lightfall are unable to obtain the Learning Light quest. 
• Multiple pieces of arm armor can cause obstructions when aiming down sights on the Tessellation Exotic Fusion Rifle.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, check out our Known Issues article. If you observe other issues in the game, please report them to our #Help forum.

"With Our Powers Combined” —Tessellation Probably 

Bruno: "Rise, Disciple, and bear this gift with pride." 

Movie of the Week: Just a whisper 

Ivan: The atmosphere of a friendly neighborhood guy is relayed very well in this #Destiny2MOTW. There is a special vibe built with on-point transmog, comic book art-style pop-ups, and great Easter eggs. All this makes it even harder to wait for the next big Sony PS5 title. What’s up, danger? 

Movie of the Week:  Spider-Guardian: Across the Destiny-Verse 

Hippy: You know what they say: when in doubt, go full Shania Twain. Not sure who exactly says that, but we’re sure somebody somewhere does. Maybe. Anyway, this #Destiny2MOTW pick is pure fire. I dare you not to sing along. 

Bonus Movie of the Week: Let’s go, Guardians, by Carolina DX via TikTok

@carolina_dx Lets go, girls! 🤠🥰 (Huge thanks to @Dirty Tee for dancing and @Dylan for dancing AND his incredible filming skills!) #destiny2 #destiny2tiktok #destiny2community #destiny2memes #xbox #gaming #shaniatwain ♬ Lets go girls - Carolina DX

Shine Bright Like a Witness Disciple  

Hippy: In the wise words of Rihanna: shine bright like a loyal Witness Disciple. Jokes aside, can you imagine the level of patience required to create something like this, piece by piece?! Outstanding... 

Artist of the Week: Shine Bright like a Rhulk, by UhKnope. Via Twitter/X 

And that’s a wrap on yet another This Week in Destiny. Hope you’re not giving Super Saiyan Eris too much trouble. After all, you won’t like her when she’s angry... 

Just your usual reminder to drink that water, practice your self-care, and always lead with your kindest foot forward. Enjoy Season of the Witch, and don’t forget to throw on those sweet, sweet lo-fi tunes! A chill, good time—it’s what we deserve.  

Until next time, friends! 

“I should go,” 

<3 Hippy