Bungie openly says they “missed the mark” on parts of Destiny 2’s Lightfall expansion

The publisher vows to “make updates based on constructive feedback”

When I played through Destiny 2: Lightfall, I saw a lot of things slip through the cracks that shouldn’t have. It turns out I wasn’t alone, as even Bungie themselves have acknowledged many of these pratfalls in an open letter on a recent blog post.

Here’s the gist of what they had to say:

“With a solid amount of data now under our belts, it’s clear we missed the mark on some of our goals and needed to make updates based on constructive feedback. While the first batch of Guardian Ranks has proven to be an invaluable guide for New Lights, we want to improve the system for all players.”

For reference “New Lights” refers to new players. Bungie is noting that they managed to generally hit a good groove with the new player experience given some of the fundamental revamps of certain systems, but also let down some of their playerbase with other design choices. That sums up the fan reception to the expansion as a whole (with maybe a little more urgency as far as the community is concerned).

Bungie spent the rest of the blog post explaining how they’re going to improve the game from here on out, so let’s break things down.

What is Bungie actually changing to make Lightfall better?

Here’s a quick rundown of the massive bible of a blog post:

• Guardian Ranks (overall account levels) are being revamped with “shortcuts” to avoid more grinding (which is classic Destiny, to do it after the fact)
• Commendations are being reworked to allow more time to celebrate teammates while making the process less laborious to rank up using commendations
• Enemy scaling is being changed: “While we feel incoming damage to players is in a great spot in Legend and Master activities, non-boss units had a bit too much health and could feel more like bullet sponges than we’d liked. We’ve made some changes to balance things out, starting with these tuning updates that went live on March 30:”
• Heist Battlegrounds are being tweaked to lower the difficulty due to fan feedback, as well as some Noemuna (the new core area) patrol activities
• The Terminal Overload area will be a bit more lively with more matchmaking capabilities
• “Legend and Master Lost Sectors will feel very approachable for regular players” going forward
• Exotic drop rates have been increased in several areas of the game (Legend and Master Lost Sectors, as well as the Vex Strike Force event)

Artifact perk refunds, a better seasonal schedule that’s more packed, and buildcrafting (armor mods) are also getting tweaks in the future. So that’s a lot to fix!

It would be nice to see Bungie hit the mark more often the first time around, but given that they’re still around with this business model, something must be working.