Bungie is closing in on the release of the third major Destiny 2 expansion, Beyond Light. Originally scheduled for September 22nd, it was delayed to November 10th, which is also the same date of the global Xbox Series S and X launch.
Luke Smith, Destiny 2 Game Director at Bungie, was featured in the latest EDGE magazine (December 2020, issue 351). There, he discussed the benefits of introducing the new Darkness-based Stasis powers in Destiny 2 Beyond Light.
What we’re trying to do with Stasis and wielding the Darkness is to show you as a player more freedom. There’s also a meta statement tha we’re making about the difference in the powers between light and dark, but there’s this other part, which is the fantasy of, ‘This is my Guardian, there are many like it, but this one is mine’.
I think we’re trying to get a little bit back to the feeling of Destiny 1, but updated to how we’re thinking and some of the systems that we’re using today in Destiny 2.
I’ll use a MOBA as an example. They get to have a lot of tuning vectors for their four abilities. The modularity and the piecemeal nature of Statis allows us more flexibility to do more to introduce….There’s cool stuff. I know that Kevin Yanes and the abilities team have a pretty strong desire to keep iterating on it. We’re just getting started.
Beyond Light will also shelve some rather large pieces of Destiny 2 content into the Content Vault, as the developers have decided that such a bold move is required in order to make the game feel truly changing over time. That said, Smith doesn’t pretend to ever get the content balance perfectly right, mostly due to the huge diversity of the player base.
I don’t know that we’ll ever really feel like we have the balance totally right, because of the diversity of our player base. You know, we don’t have a canonical Destiny 2 player. I mean, we have data that speculates what they’re like, but even that data says that these players are unlike any of a game we’ve ever seen.
I could hear someone saying, ‘Hey, this year felt really good’. And I could open a tab and bump into 55 people talking about how this year stank. You’re like, ‘Oh shit, this is where things might be heading. We’ve got to keep up with this’. But the truth of working on Destiny is that there’s always something changing your plans. It’s the embodiment of best-laid plans, right? A lot of times it doesn’t matter what we believe, what our strategy was, because it’s about the team executing to the highest level that they can with the time we have.
Players jumping right away into next-gen will get to enjoy Destiny 2 at native 4K and 60 frames per second for the first time on consoles, though Bungie didn’t exactly announce when the upgrade will go live. Stay tuned on Wccftech to get the official specifics on that as they arrive.
