destiny 2‘s season of plunder was a surprisingly pleasant romp hitherto through the imaginations of space pirates, but it has not been without problems. The biggest yet came this week when a new story quest required players to kill 50 champions before progressing. Bungie decided to auto-complete the challenge for players a day later, but the situation eventually sparked heated new debate about fundamental issues with the way the game is currently played.
Season 18 is about raiding pirate hideouts and looking for buried loot as such, it revolves around a new activity called Ketchcrash. Each week, players ambush a fallen pirate ship in Ketchcrash, then complete an expedition to find treasure, and finally surrender against a new pirate boss to advance the story. It’s easy and repetitive but also a great time.
This week, however, players had to kill 50 champions in addition to completing an expedition. These are tougher versions of common enemies whose shields can only be destroyed with specific weapon charges. They’re also rare in the game’s most common modes, making it a potentially big hurdle for many players to overcome. A weekly quest line that could normally take an hour would now require a lot of tedious grinding. That is, unless the players upped the game’s difficulty, and this is where the controversy begins.
Bungie’s 50-The Champion Contract grants bonus progression for playing Ketchcrash on Master difficulty. How much progress? thirteen times more effective enough to complete the requirement in a single mission. Master Ketchcrash is a 1600-Power activity, however, and there is no matchmaking for it. This means that players wishing to participate must have a power level of around 1580. You also need real onesLife Friends to play with or be ready to use the LFG (Search Group) tool in Bungie’s destiny 2 companion app.
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destiny 2 itself will not do in-game matchmaking for some of its best content, unlike other shooters. “I think matchmaking can make other players available to you,” said then-creative director Luke Smith already said in 2015 in defending the practice. “The reason people leave strikes is that there are no consequences for leaving, just punishment for the throwaway person on the other end of the line. It’s emotionally quite difficult for me to expect groups of players to do something like that.”
For understandable reasons, many players don’t meet the requirements of Master Ketchcrash and don’t want to have to use a separate app to beg strangers to play with it. So Bungie decided to kill the whole thing. “Since the completion requirements are too high for many players, we’ve auto-completed the Champions Defeated objective for this week’s Sails of the Shipstealer seasonal quest,” the studio said announced last night on Twitter.
The tweet has now sparked thousands of replies and quote tweets as players debate whether it was the right thing to do. “Good,” wrote one person. Another wrote: “Babies”. Some of the answers were more substantial. “For the people saying just master… not everyone can master many people don’t have free time please relax,” read one of the comments. “Then don’t do it lol why do video games have to fit your schedule?” replied another gamer. “In return, what happens is they make the whole game free…”
To me, the fact that the discussion about something seemingly so small has become so heated shows that there are deeper issues at play. The real problem, as far as I’m concerned, is that there’s an entire version of destiny 2 Most players can never interact with it because it unnecessarily sits behind outdated progression mechanics and Bungie’s own weird apathy towards matchmaking. The problem isn’t that Bungie inadvertently made a quest request geared towards endgame content, but that Bungie still seems determined to keep endgame content out of the reach of most players.
The truth is, Master Ketchcrash is a lot of fun, especially this week’s version. It’s hard, but not too hard. You don’t need a top build of a destiny 2 Influencers to survive, but you need a thoughtful loadout with some synergy to avoid being completely useless. The initial stages of the mission you can usually sleepstroll through or being AFK for overall require a degree of spatial awareness and an overall focus on staying alive and completing the objective.
A mission modifier means there is no radar, which really raises the tension and if the whole team doesn’t keep up and get wiped, they’ll all be booted back into space. The final boss fight, meanwhile, has you trying to hold your own against a small pirate army on the ship’s bridge as various enemy types flood the screen from all directions. It’s the best time I’ve ever had destiny 2 outside of a raid in a while, and there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be more accessible to anyone playing the game.
performance level, that is determination Jargon for an odd number that reflects how much you play the game and how difficult various activities will be feels dated in the game’s current seasonal model for a while. That became clear when The Witch Queen released with a Legendary setting for the campaign that made it the best in series history and basically completely ignores this mechanic. The mode is calibrated to a specific difficulty and doesn’t change no matter how much you grind.
Raids, traditional destiny 2, are in a similar boat now as their recommended performance levels quickly fall short of each new season’s. Raids are still difficult due to their esoteric puzzles and unique boss encounters, but the only thing stopping most new players from at least experimenting is the fact that they still don’t support normal matchmaking.
For a long time, the idea behind not allowing players to matchmake raids was that they required close communication and coordination, and trying to do that with five other strangers who didn’t have mics would suck. Not that one-So-However, the secret truth is that this is exactly what players do all the time on Bungie’s LFG app. At any given point you can find players at different stages of a raid asking for people to join them and kwtd (know what to do). Sometimes they have microphones on. Sometimes they won’t. Some players known as Sherpas go out of their way to find newcomers to raid to teach them. Often it is enough to simply climb in and let the veterans carry you through. There are hundreds of written guides and YouTube videos out there showing you what to do as quickly, if not fasterwhen five people fool around in the team chat.
Bungie seems to understand that forcing players to do so much of this outside of the game is getting thin. Last month it announced a number of social feature improvementsality that would involve adding LFG tools directly into the game if the incidence of light Expansion coming next February. It’s not exactly clear how all of this will work, but I’m confident we’re getting closer to a day where everyone can get by destiny 2‘s Social Hub, submit a request, then jump into whatever activity you need to complete with the Fireteam.
destiny 2 is a fantastic game. Hopefully, when it reaches its 10th anniversary, each player can experience the best it has to offer without first having to navigate a Byzantine maze. I’m tired of my friends rolling their eyes every time I try to explain to them what they need to do before I can start showing them the really cool stuff.
