Destiny 2 will have locked loadouts and public event timers

In the latest video from IGN’s month of Destiny 2 reveals, we scrounged up a few interesting changes coming to the sequel, though they likely won’t be revelatory to fresh PC players. The most notable change is the news that some activities won’t let players change their loadout mid-mission. Previously, you could swap between whatever weapons or gear were in your inventory with a quick menu dive. Game director Luke Smith wants players spending less time in menus and more time carefully considering what to bring.

"The difficulty, certainly pinnacle level of the game, we've tried to make a much tougher game that, if you think of your weapons and items as a golf bag, we only want you to look into your golf bag before you start an activity and go like, 'Oh, what should we bring to this?'” he says, “because for some of those activities you're going to be loadout locked once they start, which means you can't change."

So long as there’s enough variety in the weapons and items to make specific loadouts fun and useful throughout, say, an entire raid, I’m into the change. 

The other big change comes in the form of UI, which you can see on the map just after the three minute mark of the video. In the first game, public events on each planet happened on an invisible timer. You sat around the same area waiting for a tank to spawn or used third-party timer solutions like DestinyPublicEvents.com instead.

Now, event timers and locations are built right into the map UI. As someone that wasted way too much time waiting around public spaces to complete some of the more tedious bounties, this is an extremely welcome change. Destiny is best when you have a glut of stuff to do—even if some of it isn’t exhilarating—and can efficiently chug through it. 

Along with the reveal of the new social hub, The Farm, it seems Bungie is on the way to making a more social, streamlined sequel.