Tuesday, 03 August 2021 16:36

Destiny 2's Artificial Difficulty Should Change With The Witch Queen

Written by Andrea Trama
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Destiny 2 is an ever-evolving game that tries to spike the difficulty often, like in GM Nightfalls and Champions, but this can feel artificial.

Destiny 2 is one of those games that constantly changes and evolves, sometimes based on what the community's feedback is, and other times based on what the developers at Bungie think is best for the future of the franchise. With the introduction of difficulty scaling based on what the players choose when it comes to the endgame content, Destiny 2 now offers Nightfalls ramping the challenge up to Grandmaster, and the Season of the Splicer set the precedent for increased Raid difficulty with Master Vault of Glass. However, despite the fact that the game lets players decide how they want to tackle the content, the challenge is not exactly harder because of the addition of diverse content that requires deeper strategy, but rather it is scaled via the game spamming Champions at the players.

Champions are another notable addition to Destiny 2, and they are quite tough to deal with, especially if players are not well-equipped with the right mods and guns or if they are newer Guardians who don't exactly know how to handle this sort of encounter. As a matter of fact, Champions need to be stunned with seasonal mods or specific Exotic weapons with a built-in ability that temporarily staggers them - such as Eriana's Vow, for example. This system is fine, and while the rotation of seasonal mods makes it so that the meta in Destiny 2 is always shifting with each new Season, it also means that it is going to stagnate, and Season 15 is likely to do the same.

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In less than three weeks, Bungie will release Destiny 2's Season 15 and reveal more information about the major upcoming expansion - The Witch Queen - on that same day. Generally speaking, Seasons almost never bring major changes to how the game is designed to work and instead tend to focus more on balancing classes, Exotics weapons, and armor. This is bound to come with The Witch Queen expansion as well, but in that case, it is very likely that Bungie could be making major tweaks, too. As such, some fine-tuning of outdated mechanics or changes to things that don't really work in the current state of the game could be seen.

Allowing Destiny 2 to scale difficulty without the need of adding more and more Champions would be beneficial for two reasons. The first is that the challenge wouldn't feel artificially hard, rather than something intrinsically difficult to do, like maybe solving a jumping puzzle or having a boss fight that has layers of mechanics to understand and deal with before the damage phase. The recently added Vault of Glass Raid does that very consistently, and it makes it so that players have to learn how each and every encounter works, with a prime example of this logic being the Oracles, as they have aural callouts that indicate their order and position within the room.

The second reason to change the artificial difficulty of Destiny 2 is that it could bring the meta to a more healthy and balanced place than it currently is. Again, stacking Champions to increase difficulty is not necessarily a bad thing per se, but this approach also makes specific guns and mods a must-have for all sorts of endgame content, with little variety available. Having options is always a good thing, because it means that players are actually free to choose how to deal with the game's mechanics.

For example, the current Season features the Impulse Recycler mod that can be slotted into the arms, but that takes the place of at least one Champion-related mod, and that is not really affordable to do in high-end content. Endgame activities should, by all means, have Champions because they have gradually become an intrinsic aspect of Destiny 2's gameplay. However, they shouldn't be the sole focus when trying to increase the difficulty of any activity since that can be more detrimental than helpful.

Destiny 2 is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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