Update: 'Frankengun' Destiny glitch has been patched, hope you had your fun

Images from The Final Shape showcase
(Image credit: Bungie)

Update: It was fun while it lasted, but Destiny 2's assault rifles and grenade launchers won't be blasting away like shotguns any more. A hotfix—the first of several—has disabled a selection of frames and perks on Exotic and Legendary crafted weapons, including "Osteo Striga, Revision Zero, Dead Man's Tale, Dead Messenger, Vexcalibur, and all three Exotic class glaives" Bungie has announced

"In a future update," says an in-game message, "we plan to replace the illegitimate perks on crafted weapons." 

Original story: It's always a challenge managing a meticulously crafted MMO sandbox, but Destiny 2's eternal struggle for a meta no one will whine about has been absolutely turned on its head by yesterday's discovery of Frankenguns. Thanks to a crafting glitch, players have been churning out ungodly firearm chimeras to melt raid bosses in seconds. Bungie's taken it in stride,  acknowledging the absurd fun of it all, but is also quickly rolling out a fix to bring all those wacky guns to heel.

Destiny content creator elder statesman Datto has a video highlighting the situation and some standout chaos guns, including various assault rifles firing grenades and a plethora of multi-stage bosses crumpling like crate paper. The community's go-to combo seems to be giving weapons the shotgun trait Aggressive Frame. That perk is responsible for those shotguns' spread of 12 pellets, and when applied to say, a grenade launcher, you're all of a sudden firing 12 explosives with every pull of the trigger.

(Image credit: Bungie)

The chaos began with a clip from user Xíngzǒu de hūxī on Chinese social network Bilibili. While crafting weapons, they accidentally combined a perk from the exotic grenade launcher Dead Messenger with the fusion rifle Midha's Reckoning, producing a weapon that could one-shot difficult Champion enemies no sweat. That video was then shared to YouTube with commentary by Destiny 2 content creator Cheese Forever, which set off a race to replicate the exploit.

It's hard to determine who first cracked the code, but this video from Hyrna provides a step-by-step guide on how to replicate the glitch with the specific example of doubling up on the Eager Edge trait (you're usually limited to just one instance) on a single sword to create a lunge machine capable of launching you halfway across a given map with one swing. 

The glitch seems to involve effectively juking the crafting menu, rapidly switching from one weapon to the other to get the splicing to occur, and is most easily performed by capping Destiny 2 at a low frame rate.

Bungie has stated that it will not ban or otherwise discipline players for glitching their guns, and the weekly, uber-competitive Trials of Osiris mode has proceeded as usual, funky guns and all. In order to bring the game back down to Earth, Bungie's rolling out two hotfixes: the first, set to be deployed before the end of this weekend, will lock players out of using any crafted weapons, with a second coming later that will reset "outlier" crafted weapons instead of deleting them entirely.

(Image credit: Bungie)

Overall, it doesn't seem like a bad weekend to be a Destiny player: the Frankengun shenanigans are reminiscent of the game's infamous "Laser Tag" weekend when the bugged trace rifle Prometheus Lens took the game by storm with its instant-deletion beams. 

I'm also impressed with the fix Bungie has in store⁠—there was some worry that the studio would have to do a rollback to take care of the bugged weapons—a reset to a stable point before the glitch's discovery. 

This measure was last deployed in order to help resolve a 20-hour downtime and player progression bug in January, but also meant that anyone who played during the window between weekly reset and the game getting shut down lost their progress. Now it appears that the Destiny community will get another solid day of goofing off with overpowered weapons before a minimally invasive solution is implemented.

Associate Editor

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.

With contributions from
Read more
Destiny 2 Rite of the Nine: The Emissary, massive, ominously standing at the edge of a water basin.
Oops! Bungie rolled out Destiny 2's Rite of the Nine event three weeks early, and new loot is already dropping
The Queenbreaker exotic linear fusion rifle
There's an easy way to upgrade Destiny 2's latest god-killing DPS monster
Destiny 2: Season of Plunder promo image.
'We made one big mistake': Destiny 2 developer reveals how a small team dedicated to player retention led to a 20 hour server outage and character rollback
A Guardian with a grenade launcher and a very fancy hat.
Destiny 2's new episode hits next week, sending players back into the giant, haunted spaceship where the first game had its finest moments
A trio of Guardians adorned with Baron gear in Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 players have found the true endgame: Composing spooky remixes on a giant gothic space organ
helldivers 2 killzone crossover
Defending a kinda wimpy Killzone crossover gun, Helldivers 2's Johan Pilestedt says the game's past balance woes were due to weapons being 'seen as game objects' and that 'balance doesn't matter'
Latest in FPS
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Ogryn
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide adds a psychic horde murderzone mode and makes Ogryns even smashier
Starfield's companion robot giving a thumbs-up
Former Bethesda dev who quit Starfield to go solo says it's 'much less stressful as an indie' without daily meetings or 'office politics': it's 'very refreshing to just care about the game'
A crew of prospectors in Wildgate, featuring a robot, a rabbit man, and a small aquatic creature in a combination mech/aquarium.
Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime's new company is putting Sea of Thieves-style shenanigans in space with a new crew-based shooter
Team Fortress Spy being shocked
An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy
Neighbors Suburban Warfare screenshot a child aims a slingshot at a man from across a cul-de-sac.
A beta of backyard FPS Neighbors: Suburban Warfare is out now, and the balance discussion is hysterical: nerf trash can lids and children
Fragpunk
Somebody finally figured out casual Counter-Strike
Latest in News
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event