Destiny 2’s Vanguard Ops have a Battleground-shaped problem

Destiny 2: The Final Shape has been a thoroughly successful kick-start of the new era for Bungie’s flagship franchise, but it’s not all grand and perfect. On top of its “new” seasonal format being nonsensically time-gated – again – there are some other concerns, too, like the new Vanguard Ops playlist.

Not the playlist itself, mind: Vanguard Ops has generally succeeded in what it was trying to do! It’s a comprehensive one-stop-shop for anyone eager to just play a few PvE missions in Destiny 2. You open it up, kickstart the matchmaking, check up on your current Pathfinder, and start gunning down the enemies of humanity. Y’know, the good stuff. No, this is all well and good; precisely what we needed and a logical evolution of the previous Destiny 2 Strike playlist(s).

The issue, instead, is derived from the fact that Vanguard Ops is no longer all about Strike missions. Now, we’ve also got Battlegrounds featured in it. Oodles upon oodles of Battlegrounds sourced from not one, not two, not even three, but four previous seasons, each of which included at least two (if not more) individual Battleground missions. What you get, then, is Battleground missions the vast majority of the time, to the point where we now do not have a reliable Strike playlist to fall back upon.

The Vanguard Ops playlist has been taken over by Battlegrounds

Again, I feel obligated to point here that I don’t mind this, in theory. Battlegrounds are solid missions with dense enemy placement, and they’re fun when you’re trying to engage with them. They are also, however, designed as substantially different combat scenarios that don’t play the same way a regular Strike would.

Whereas a Strike consists of a series of finely tuned encounters flowing into one another with an occasional traversal/combat hybrid thrown in for good measure, Battlegrounds is decidedly not that. Instead, you get three or four combat arenas with unique(ish) objectives popping up along the way. Your average Battleground is quite like 2016’s Doom in that way, now that I think of it.

Another thing worth considering here is that Bungie’s been able to crank out twelve whopping Battlegrounds over the last two years and only a handful of Strikes. Not joking here, either. Here are the Battleground missions we received from the Season of the Chosen onwards:

• 4 Battlegrounds – Season of the Chosen
• 3 PsiOps Battlegrounds – Season of the Risen
• 3 Heist Battlegrounds – Season of the Seraph
• 3 Defiant Battlegrounds – Season of Defiance

To be fair, it’s not like Bungie hasn’t been investing in the actual Strikes themselves, too. In that same period, we received seven all-new Strikes and reworked 5-6 old ones. In the active Vanguard Ops rotation, we’ve got roughly 16-17 Strikes by my count and 13 Battleground missions. The thing to note, however, is that due to the differences between the two mission types, you may wish to play one over the other at a given time, which can, in turn, lead to frustration when you cannot choose.

Shoving Strikes and Battlegrounds into the same playlist hasn’t worked out

On paper, massively upgrading Destiny 2‘s main PvE content playlist with seasonal goodies sounds like a top-tier idea: the more variety, the better, and Battlegrounds deliver heaps of visual interest and combat goodness to the mix. Players have often praised the enemy density of Battlegrounds, which makes them uniquely appropriate for Pathfinder objective completions, too. Why wouldn’t you want Battlegrounds in the Vanguard Ops, then?

The answer is, actually, quite simple. Strikes are highly curated, extremely deliberate, and have a certain flow that Battlegrounds do not have. This is fine: the two activities are wildly different, after all. What’s not fine, though, is that we no longer have a dedicated Strike playlist. Instead, you roll the dice on whether you get a Battleground or a Strike in Vanguard Ops. In theory, this should be fine, but Battlegrounds aren’t made to the same standard as Strikes, and you can feel that in how they play out:

• encounters are longer and more drawn-out
• virtually every combat encounter is set in a combat arena
• specific arenas have objective-based padding to keep things going for longer

As opposed to this, Strikes are missions. Sometimes, you’ll find yourself in a poorly lit area fighting off a horde of Hive just before opening up a puzzle-locked door. Other times, you may have to hunt a boss across the Vex netscape before finally facing it down in open combat. There’s a huge amount of execution variety in how Strikes are presented, which is missing from the Battlegrounds’ more formulaic approach, to say nothing of how much faster they are.

Should the Vanguard Ops playlist be separated into two mini-playlists?

I’m not sure what the best course of action would be now. Bungie could certainly stick to its guns and keep shoving more and more Battlegrounds into Vanguard Ops whenever they crop up. Alternatively, they might also wish to separate Vanguard Ops into a dedicated Strike playlist and a dedicated Battleground playlist. This might work better from the players’ point of view, but the decision would also have to be followed up with further incentivization for players to engage with the Battleground playlist.

Most players would likely choose the Strike playlist every time if the active Pathfinder just required activity completions due to its speed and straightforwardness. Battlegrounds can be fun, but fun isn’t the practical measure of an activity’s success in a live-service title; efficacy is.

Overall, it should be obvious that something has to be done with how Vanguard Ops are handled. As it currently stands, the playlist serves up Battleground after Battleground surprisingly often, and for players who want to engage with a randomized selection of Strikes, there’s no way to do just that. I’ve also seen players leave when Vanguard Ops loads them into a Battleground, which isn’t great. What, do they keep leaving mission after mission until a Strike comes up? Great fun, right?

Whatever the case, Bungie will have to respond somehow, and the Vanguard Ops playlist may – sadly – end up failing in its current form.