With Destiny 2 finally out on the PC and looking pretty fantastic, Bungie has put up a blog post and developers update video looking ahead to the future of the game. The post also includes at early look at the upcoming 1.0.6 patch, scheduled to drop next week, and a list of known issues that have come up since the PC release.
"We've been playing the game in the wild for seven weeks, and like the Destiny experiences that have come before, we're always thinking about where the game is heading next," game director Christopher Barrett said. "We're still planning when a bunch of the improvements listed below are going to make their way into the game, but we wanted to let you know what we're up to."
Barret said Bungie is currently focused on:
- New systems and rewards to give our most engaged players additional, optional pursuits.
- Better incentives for players who complete challenging Prestige activities.
- Better rewards and replay value for strikes, adventures, and Lost Sectors.
- Private matches for the competitive community (we are targeting early 2018).
- Crucible tuning like adjusted Supremacy scoring and better spawning rules.
- Better incentives for completing Crucible matches (and penalties for quitting competitive games).
- Continued improvements to Iron Banner and Faction Rallies, including uniqueness of rewards.
- Changes to make the mod economy more interesting and impactful.
- Ongoing improvements to Exotics, including adjustments to reduce instances of duplication.
- New ways to spend surplus currency and materials (looking at you Legendary Shards).
- An emote interface that allows players to equip Salty, Spicy Ramen, Six Shooter, and Flip Out all at the same time.
It's all good stuff, but better Prestige incentives and mod economy improvements are particularly noteworthy because they will impact (and, hopefully, meaningfully extend) the endgame, which as console players can tell you feels a little lacking right now. The return of private matches will also resonate with the PvP crowd, and signals that even though Bungie may not be aiming for a place on the competitive scene right now, it hasn't entirely forgotten about it either.
On the "we know and we're working on it" front, the update also notes that Destiny 2 will not run on CPUs that don't support SSSE3, and while the studio is trying to fix crash issues experienced on processors below the minimum spec, the bottom line is that they aren't officially supported and so there are no guarantees. (Bungie didn't say so but I think the implication is that instead of waiting for a fix, you should think about upgrading your rig if you want to play the new hotness.)
It's also attempting to address a problem with crashes in mission six on AMD Vega GPUs. The Buffalo, Trumpet and Chive error code articles have been updated in the knowledge base, and Bungie is aware of problems with missing Clan Rosters and Beta participant emblems.
Finally, the 1.0.6 patch will be rolled out next week, with a fix to an emote issue and "several Crucible changes that affect scoring and spawning." Full patch notes will be released alongside the update, but you can get a preview of what's coming below.
General:
- Fixed an issue with collision detection on the Bureaucratic Walk emote
- Fixed an issue causing players to encounter empty public spaces too often in free roam
Crucible:
- Updated Mercy Rule settings to allow Mercy to activate slightly later in the match, allowing a wider range of scores to trigger it.
Clash
- Reduced score limit to 50 (was 75)
Control
- Reduced score limit to 90 (was 100)
- Reduced influence that enemy-controlled zones exert over the spawning system
Survival
- Reduced round time limit to 2 minutes (down from 3)
- Reduced life count to 6 (down from 8)
Supremacy
- Increased score-to-win to 70 (up from 50)
- We now grant one point for defeating an enemy Guardian
- Adjusted the influence that enemy crests have on the spawning system
