Destiny 2: The Witch Queen’s crafting is like golf clubs, according to Bungie

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, the game’s most-hyped expansion since Forsaken In 2018, it is less than two weeks. On Tuesday, Bungie debuted what’s sure to be its final preview of the add-on, a 13-minute video detailing The Witch Queen’s new campaign and Void 3.0 subclass rework. The real stars of the show will be weapon crafting, Origin perks and general customization. Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion.

Bungie invited us to a preview, where we saw a crafting workshop and were taken on a hands-off guided tour of the second mission. The Witch Queen. Also, we spoke with Destiny 2Joe Blackburn, game director, and Blake Battle (project lead)

After walking my preview group through a campaign mission in Savathun’s ThronewOderld, Blackburn and the Bungie team took us to Mars. This wasn’t the open-world Mars I remembered from Destiny or Destiny 2. This was actually a landing spot, an Enclave social area with NPC Guardians. It’s Always Sunny In PhiladelphiaA mystery board with a spooky look and an untold secret.

Below the Enclave is the Relic. It’s where Destiny Fireteam members and I will spend many hours over the course of the next few decades. The Relic is a sort of “sci-fi 3D printer,” a place to build and customize weapons in a way Guardians have never been able to before.

It’s easy to navigate the menu. Players can choose “shape” to craft new weapons or “reshape” them, altering the perks on something they’ve built before. Crafting starts rather limited, with players only having access to a few perks, “pattern” blueprints, and customizations, like frames. Playing Destiny 2Their repertoire will grow.

In Weapon Crafting Destiny 2 isn’t just about building something powerful for a moment, it’s about investing in something that could still be useful two expansions from now. Guardians can upgrade their weapon arsenals by using their handcrafted weapons. This is similar to the way that investment in weaponry works in the original. Destiny. As players hit new level thresholds, they’ll be able to customize their weapon further, tweaking its stats. By level 20 they’ll have unlocked all options for the weapon — including enhanced versions of fan-favorite perks, which will give crafted weapons a slight edge — and players can keep leveling their gun in perpetuity for bragging rights.

It’s a system unmarred by weekly limits, and it addresses a complicated issue in Destiny: sunsetting. It includes Beyond LightBungie implemented the sunsetting program, making many weapons inoperable and removing them from competition with more advanced weapons. While players need reasons to pick up something new each season — lest the game lose all purpose — removing Guardians’ hard-won toys was too harsh, and Bungie did away with the system in less than six months. But through weapon crafting and the new Origin perks, Bungie is offering sunsetting on player’s terms.

Image: Bungie

“I’m really bad at golf,” Blackburn told me. “But my dad plays golf, and so I try to golf every so often so I can play with my dad. […]Over time, golf clubs get better over the years. And so I think we want people to feel like, ‘Hey, the new stuff that’s coming out is exciting.’ But, you know, I think what we’ve learned from our past is we don’t want, necessarily, that new stuff to feel required. […] I mean, I’ve got some really old golf clubs, they still work, I still take them out, and sometimes I hit better shots than other people.”

Unlike the previous sunsetting system, all of players’ current weapons will still be viable in The Witch Queen and beyond, they’ll just be slightly suboptimal. Players who prefer to roll with their old faithful weapons will be just as powerful as they are now, but they won’t be able to take advantage of the Origin perks and their seasonal benefits.

Origins are fixed perks on what Blackburn referred to as a “family,” and they’ll start dropping on every new weapon starting in The Witch Queen. All new season 16 weapon, Cabal-themed, come with Land Tank, an Origin perk that increases damage resistance following multiple kills. For crafted season 16 “family” weapons, Land Tank is the one thing they won’t be able to customize, as it’s tied to the gun’s blueprint.

Adding a third perk to every gun will certainly get players interested in new weapons, but it doesn’t get to the heart of why Bungie built the sunsetting system in the first place: power creep. Bungie creates better and more powerful items to lock itself in a vicious cycle that increases player power. This is eventually unsustainable. That’s why Origin perks will take advantage of the seasonal Artifact to alter the weapon meta each season.

“What I love about the Origin perk solution is it puts a bunch of categories on weapons,” said Blackburn. “[…]Because they come with that perk, you can tell they belong in the appropriate categories. And then that allows us to, using stuff that seasonally resets like the Artifact, push those weapons up into different power bands where it might say ‘hey, you know, season 16, we love void stuff, we love [Cabal]-themed weapons and the psycho hack weapons,’ and so there can be some specific perks that [we] sort of juice that up in a way that makes the meta really different.”

Image: Bungie

Blackburn, for example, compared Origin perks with Warmind Cells in Season of the Worthy. Ikelos weapons could be used in combination with an armor mod to create massive orbs of explosive damage. Bungie intended the system to be retired, but it ended up being a long-lasting feature. Bungie chose to keep them alive as super-powerful bombs instead. Destiny 2 from forever being a game about “shooting orange orbs that come out of things.”

Had Origin perks been in place during Season of the Worthy, the system would’ve played out differently. All Ikelos family weapons would’ve come with a Warmind Cell perk, which would generate the explosions on kills, as usual. But Bungie would put special armor mods in the seasonal Artifact, increasing the Warmind Cell perk’s potency for the next three months or so. When the season ended, players could still use Ikelos weapons, but the Cells wouldn’t be nearly as powerful — that is, until the mods came back around in another season.

But Origin perks come on all new weapons, so crafting won’t entirely replace random rolls in The Witch Queen; there will still be weapons that players can’t craft, even beyond quest-based Exotics.

“We’ll have things like the Ritual weapon that can’t be crafted at all, we’ll have some things you probably [think], ‘I wouldn’t expect that would be crafted’ that can be,” said Blackburn. “But we’re also pretty passionate about, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a roll that you can only get through random drops compared to what you can get through crafting.’ […] You’re not always going after drops because they’re fuel, sometimes you’re going after drops because they’re special.”

With Destiny 2: Witch QueenBungie intends to transform the way players invest in their games Destiny 2. Players don’t have to strive for the perfect roll. They can create a friendship with one weapon. But for Blackburn and Bungie, it’s not about destroying what came before, or making it obsolete, but rather giving players new options to create for themselves.