As Destiny 2: Beyond Light approaches, it is time to sit and think about all the changes that Bungie could make to improve the player experience. Guardians who have been fighting the Darkness for years will be intimately aware of the true Destiny 2 endgame, wishing for things that will likely never happen. This is a wishlist that would make even a Hive God feel pity for me, but I cannot help but hope that at least one of these might happen.
1. Improve item management
Unless you want to download a third-party app, you spend a lot of time in Destiny 2 switching characters and running to your Vault to change your loadout. If one of your Guardians has a weapon you want another to use, you need to place it in the Vault, change characters, then grab it with the next Guardian you wish to use. It’s a headache, and it needs to go. While many players will use an app like Destiny Item Manager, it is time for Bungie to take control of this and rely less on passionate fans and app builders.
2. Add an in-game LFG
While we are on the subject of the Destiny 2 community carrying Bungie when it comes to vital features, the lack of a Looking for Group function also needs to be rectified. Bungie is always trying to tell us that Destiny 2 is an MMO, but the lack of any feature you associate with an MMO undermines the marketing. Not being able to find a group of people looking to run the same activity as you from within the game is a detriment to player enjoyment. Even worse, LFG sites can be reasonably lawless, and player behavior in those groups is not always welcoming.
3. Improve difficulty balancing
One of the more significant issues when playing Destiny is that playing through content alone can be a painful drag, while doing it with three people can be a little too easy. I am not saying that finding a way to scale the challenge that a particular mission would pose to one person with the challenge it poses to three people would be a simple task, but I feel that it would be worthwhile. It would also need to be done in such a way that players could opt into that higher difficulty level, as there are people out there who adore their solo runs.
4. React to things impacting players as quickly as they react to issues affecting Bungie
Bugs and errors that impact players can often be left sitting for weeks or months without being fixed. A great example of this is the Merciless Exotic Fusion Rifle. The main perk that allows it to do lots of damage to bosses has been broken for quite some time, with no sign of a fix. Meanwhile, any bug that has made it easier for players is dealt with quickly. Sometimes this has meant completely disabling the weapon or armor piece. If that same pace were present when players were being affected negatively, that would be a great way to express thanks for the community for not burning the Tower down over the goddamn…
5. Peer-to-peer connections
I struggle immensely with people who can play a lot of Destiny 2 multiplayer. I don’t understand how their minds work, or if they are simply made of tougher stuff than me. Truthfully I find it impossible to treat any shooter built on peer-to-peer connections even remotely seriously, as each interaction feels like a 50/50 chance of winning or losing before you event take player skill into account. Lag is a massive issue in The Crucible, and meleeing someone to death only to have them launch a melee animation, kill you, and then fall over dead themselves is infuriating. It also happens far too often.
If Tess can find endless emotes, armor sets, and sparrows to stack in the Eververse, then she can send Fenchurch out to grab some Golden Age tech in the form of servers for the Crucible, Iron Banner, and Trials of Osiris. While the playerbase will endlessly argue about the merits of connection-based matchmaking versus skill-based matchmaking, nobody will complain if the game starts using actual servers instead of the complicated mess of connections that currently make up a multiplayer match.
While I don’t expect anything on this list to happen in Destiny 2: Beyond Light, I think it is essential to keep a conversation about how the game can improve alive. At least that way, something might change at some point. They are all crucial issues that mean Destiny 2 will be a good game on its best day, but it will never be great.
