Summary
- Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn reveals plans to overhaul the PvP experience by creating more content updates and addressing community frustrations.
- Bungie acknowledges a more pragmatic approach to the Crucible and plans to prioritize the PvP experience for players who enjoy it, while making it optional for others.
- The Destiny 2 PvP Strike Team will react quickly to player feedback, release new content faster, and introduce annual map packs to improve the overall PvP experience.
Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn discusses Bungie's plans for how it intends to overhaul the PvP experience over the upcoming year. Over the past couple of years, the Destiny 2 community has been frustrated with the game's Crucible mode, a PvP experience that was no longer seeing much in the way of content updates. While Bungie made mechanical changes here and there, new content like maps and loot were becoming rarer and rarer to the point where the community felt like things had become overly stale and potentially left behind in favor of the PvE side of the game.
Thankfully, fan reactions to the Crucible have seemingly been heard by the developers at Bungie who revealed ton of incoming changes during The Final Shape showcase earlier in August. While Season of the Witch is getting a new Crucible map called Multiplex as well as a new game mode known as Relic, the big news for fans of PvP is that Destiny 2 is getting a dedicated strike team intending to create content at a faster rate. New details have recently emerged regarding just how Bungie plans to implement these new updates in the near future.
In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Destiny 2 Game Director Joe Blackburn discussed Bungie's overall plans for the PvP side of the game. Surprisingly, he admitted that when he returned to the company in 2020, Bungie was largely paralyzed with how to proceed with it as many felt the mode hadn't moved the needle in a while and there were not many examples of games providing a hybrid PvE and PvP experience in one live service package to go on. However, focusing on the fact that Destiny 2 makes it easy to grab a great gun and jump into a match, Bungie appears to be taking a more pragmatic approach with the Crucible going forward.
Blackburn confirmed that the studio is going to stop trying to make everyone happy when it comes to the Crucible and instead focus the PvP experience around Destiny 2 players who enjoy playing these modes for long periods of time each week, while also making it more optional for players that don't. Blackburn believes that placing the focus on a more targeted audience and understanding that the new content won't be for every player will help the team build out something that people will enjoy. Regardless, if it doesn't work out, Blackburn mentioned that Bungie isn't afraid to be wrong and will instead try something else for the Crucible community.
But I think that if we are clearer with who we are trying to make PvP for, we can make the right decisions for that group and we can build a thing that people enjoy. It's definitely a new take, and if this one doesn't work, we'll try something else.
In addition to more immediate updates in Season 22 and 23, the Destiny 2 PvP Strike Team intends to not only monitor player feedback and react quickly to necessary changes, but will also develop new content at a much faster rate. In fact, Bungie intends to release a new map pack each year in one drop, rather than the much slower system Bungie had been utilizing up to this point.
Destiny 2 is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: PC Gamer