After Destiny 2: Beyond Light’s limited arsenal, Bungie promises more guns in the future

On Tuesday morning, Destiny 2’s assistant game director, Joe Blackburn, put out a developer update. The blog post speaks to one of the major concerns from Destiny 2’s latest expansion, Beyond Light: guns. Blackburn speaks to how the team plans to fix some of the game’s limited arsenal problems in the coming year and also teases some upcoming features.

According to Blackburn, Bungie feels like they delivered excellent rewards in Destiny 2: Beyond Light — a sentiment we agree with — but offered too few weapons to chase. The studio’s goal is to increase the quantity of rewards in the future while maintaining the quality of Beyond Light.

Blackburn assured players that annual releases like the upcoming Witch Queen and Lightfall will offer more weapons than Beyond Light or last year’s Shadowkeep. In order to maintain the health of Bungie’s workers, the studio has shifted some resources and started training up new developers for their so-called Rewards Team.

Starting in Season 13 — expected in February of 2021 — players can expect six new Legendary items to hit the “world pool.” Strikes, Gambit, and Crucible will each get two of these weapons, helping reinvigorate the game’s core playlists with unique rewards. There will also be three Nightfall exclusive weapons: The Palindrome, The Swarm, and Shadow Price. These Nightfall weapons will also get Adept versions that come exclusively from the Grandmaster difficulty.

Regarding infusion capping (what we know as sunsetting, or removing older weapons from viability over time), Bungie is looking to make some quality of life improvements there. Namely they want players to have access to almost all of the currently active weapons from one source or another. To compensate, the studio will also start to rotate weapons that are about to become infusion capped out of the loot pool so players don’t pick up a new toy only for it to become mostly useless within a few weeks.

Blackburn teased a host of exciting new features coming in 2021. Some of these details we knew, like the return of the beloved Vault of Glass raid or the old Cosmodrome Strikes, Fallen S.A.B.E.R. and Devil’s Lair. But Blackburn also confirmed that consoles will get DDOS protection for Crucible and there will be Master and Legendary Lost Sectors on the Moon with new Exotics — both coming in Season 13.

Image: Bungie via Polygon

The Transmog system (appearance customization) will also make its Destiny debut next year in Season 14 — likely in May, based on Season 13’s timing. While we don’t have exact details on how it will work, we got our first look at the system, which includes a much more intuitive shader system.

Finally, Blackburn confirmed that Destiny 2 will get cross-play in 2021, allowing people on different platforms to play with one another.

Tuesday also marks the launch of Destiny 2’s next-gen console update, which includes a host of improvements for the new hardware.