Destiny's Crucible expanding with new modes in The Taken King

Destiny developer Bungie is changing up the Crucible in The Taken King with two new gametypes, reports Game Informer.

Lars Bakken, design lead on Destiny, told Game Informer that Bungie listened to feedback from players in coming up with one of the two new Crucible modes in The Taken King. Fans have long asked Bungie for an objective-based mode separate from the existing Control, and Bakken said that the studio "wanted to do something that felt more in line with what the Destiny world is like."

Bungie came up with Rift, which is a twist on traditional capture-the-flag modes: It rewards players with points even if they don't complete their objective. The problem with standard CTF, said Bakken, is that it is "very binary," since you get nothing even if you get all the way back to your base with the flag but die before you can score.

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Rift plays out like a "neutral bomb assault," according to Bakken. The objective is an item called the Spark, which sits in the middle of the map. The goal in rift is to pick up the Spark, then carry it to your opponent's goal. But the Spark has a timer on it, so you can't just hang on to it forever and camp out in your own base; you'll only have 75 seconds before it kills you. Rift is a six-on-six mode.

The Taken King's other new Crucible mode is a wild gametype called Mayhem. A developer at Bungie came up with the concept — "what if we just made it, like, so you had your super almost all the time?" — on a whim, unsure if it would actually work. The result is a mode that "feels more like a party game than anything else," said Bakken. Ammunition, grenades, melee attacks and supers all recharge very quickly — fast enough for a warlock to deploy six or seven Nova Bombs within a single round, according to Bakken.

"We're going to put it out there, we're going to see what people think," said Bakken of Mayhem.

In addition, it sounds like Bungie will bring back the Elimination playlist permanently, at least at the launch of The Taken King. Elimination is the tense three-on-three gametype in the Trials of Osiris mode, but it's inaccessible whenever Trials is offline — i.e., from Tuesday morning until Friday afternoon Eastern time.

For more on The Taken King's changes to Destiny's Crucible, check out Game Informer's full video interview with Bakken, as well as their analysis of the expansion's eight new maps. The Taken King will be released Sept. 15.