Because everyone is angry or happy about Destiny 2’s PvP news

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Destiny 2

Bungie

Yesterday, assistant to Destiny 2 game director Joe Blackburn made headlines when he commented on PvP status and future plans for the mode, something Bungie has been exceptionally silent about for eons now.

Blackburn has mapped out a rough schedule of long-awaited additions to Crucible, and the end result? A rift between players thanking Bungie for their transparency and others who are doing this ??

The facts are as follows:

Season 15 is bringing us what we’ve already heard about, the death of three peeks and the changes to Trials. Season 16, featuring the Witch Queen, is bringing back two Destiny 2 PvP maps at a time, yet to be determined. Season 17 will bring a brand new PvP map from one of the locations where we don’t have one yet. Season 18 features a new Destiny 1 PvP map. Over the course of 2022, there will be three new Crucible modes, including the likely return of Rift.

The good news is that all of this has been talked about. Bungie has said so little about future plans for PvP (aside from sandbox changes and endless Trials changes) that each season comes and goes and players should just guess if a new Crucible map or mode might appear. We now actually have a program.

Its good transparency from Joes and an unusual delivery mechanism, a Twitter thread (he also provided a brief update on Gambit, which are balancing it, but the new maps are a long-term project). I appreciate that Bungie finally explained the program this way because that’s what everyone has wanted to see for almost two years.

It’s still

I definitely understand why many people are frustrated with the substance of what is actually presented here. Basically, it’s four PvP maps after losing 11 to content vaulting when Beyond Light hit. Two of them are simply bringing back the vaulted ones (which Blackburn explains is a more difficult process than you might think, given the backend changes they’ve made). An upcoming map is from Destiny 1. Only one map is truly new, despite all the new wilderness the game has brought to us in recent years. And it will take more than a year for this current schedule to take place, with season 15 likely to last 5-6 months on its own, so this won’t even start for another semester when we’re already waiting more than 600 days for maps.

Destiny 2

Bungie

I think Bungie has messed around with its priorities a bit here. They’ve done a good job producing solid seasonal PvE content, particularly last year, and yet, looking at the population numbers, this relentless 95% focus on PvE content alone doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Charlemagne tracks yesterday’s player population 416,000 PvP players and 100,000 Gambit players, compared to 713,000 PvE players (I’m not sure this counts 158,000 raid players). And that’s without live Trials or Iron Banners, which should push them even higher. The point is that PvP is a significant part of Destiny’s population, yet it’s treated as if it practically doesn’t exist, having to settle for sandbox changes or some weapons to farm in those modes. The fact that without fail, Destiny downloads a ton of PvE content in the game every single season with virtually nothing for Crucible or Gambit is bizarre.

The common theory, which Bungie has yet to confirm outright, but was supported by some comments from Blackburn yesterday, is that Bungie has simply moved a massive portion of its PvP team into its PvP-focused incubation projects, which we are not about. still in the know. Hardly anyone is around designing PvP maps for Destiny because they are doing it in these other future games. Blackburn cites the roles Bungie is currently looking to take on to create more PvP content, which implies the lockers are relatively bare for those teams, but again, who knows how long it will take to manifest.

Simply put, there aren’t enough resources to go around, which is why PvP and Gambit have fallen by the wayside. Bungie has lost both A) its support studios that it worked with under Activision and B) many core PvP employees to other non-Destiny projects within the company. So, where are we now.

So yeah, I think the Blackburns transparency here is great and I’m glad something is coming up. Yet it seems perfectly reasonable to be frustrated with the total sum of what’s coming after all this time, especially when you consider how large Destiny’s PvP player base actually is.

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