More Masterwork Cores and Exotic alterations
Destiny 2‘s Forsaken expansion brought a lot of great changes for the sequel, essentially bringing out of the dark ages in some aspects. But since Bungie is always tinkering, despite the fact that they already had a winning formula near the end of Destiny 1‘s lifecycle, a few new mechanics rose up that weren’t so great.
The first is the new infusion (making guns more powerful by feeding them other guns) system. In the past it was fairly easy to swap over power levels, opening up more loadout options, but now there are more restrictions — infusion requires rare Masterwork Cores as well as planetary materials. Cores are available from several sources in-game, but are still considerably rare given how much experimentation the Destiny series typically allows. As such Bungie is going to be “creating more reliable and plentiful Core sources,” and “renaming them” to solve the problem. So they aren’t going away, and based on their history, the avenues to earn them will likely be grindy in nature.
The other issue is exotic drop rates. Bungie has severely toned down how often you get exotics to make the process more “meaningful.” Once again they’ve downgraded an existing aspect of Destiny 1 — many people I’ve spoken to haven’t gotten a new exotic drop in 100 hours of play in Forsaken, just old Year One drops. It’s a pretty busted system, and Bungie is vaguely fixing it by “increasing the chance for exotics to drop for something you don’t already have.” No rates were given.
It’s a step in the right direction but Forsaken as a whole has become grindier than Destiny has ever been — I miss the days when you could casually keep up with the times with three characters. The move to grindier content is a good way to extend the life of the game, but again, Destiny 1, from Taken King onward, took that problem head-on by merely being fun to play.
This Week at Bungie [Bungie.net]
