Gambit in Destiny 2: A story of unrealized potential and development drudgery

Destiny 2 is one of the most successful modern live-service shooters for a reason, and the infamous “Bungie magic” (i.e., the satisfying core gameplay loop) is most definitely a part of that equation. Yet, Destiny’s failures are many, and Gambit, in particular, stands out like a sore thumb.

Destiny 2‘s Gambit is one of those oh-so-popular PvPvE game modes you get in high-profile titles every so often. It pits you, the player, against not just other opposing players but also a whole roster of AI-controlled enemies at the same time. This gives Gambit matches the kind of dynamic you won’t find anywhere else in Destiny, and it makes the activity one of Destiny 2’s three core gameplay pillars. These are the Vanguard Operations/Strikes, the Crucible, and Gambit, in the order of importance to the game at large.

Now, to be fair to Bungie, Gambit is definitely treated as equal to the Crucible and Vanguard Ops on paper. It’s a part of all the major events, and it gets roughly the same amount of loot refreshes as the rest of the evergreen content roster does. Yet, veteran players will know that Gambit never truly settled in as one of the “Big Three” and thus feels at odds with the rest of Destiny 2 in some ways. What’s up with that?

In a 2018 interview with Polygon, Bungie’s designers sat down to explain how Gambit came to be. Their broad goal, as they put it, was to create “a brand-new type of activity that didn’t exist in Destiny, and didn’t exist anywhere else.” In the earliest meetings, Gambit was pitched as a PvE version of the (in)famous Trials of the Nine endgame PvP. The inspiration for it was, naturally, Halo‘s Firefight mode but in combination with Super Puzzle Fighter: an indirect competitive PvP version of Street Fighter.

In Super Puzzle Fighter, players square off against one another not by throwing kicks and punches but by sending out deliberate disruptions into the other player’s field of blocks. This is where Gambit’s Taken Bank defenders come from, specifically. On the topic of Invasions, those were a natural evolution of the Destiny PvP concept: “What happens if we let another player actually go over to the other side?’ because each team is in their bespoke arena. And because it was so easy to prototype, we had this mantra on the team like, ‘Why don’t we just try it and see what happens?'” And the rest is history, as they say.

Gambit absolutely is what it’s been billed as: a comprehensive combination of Destiny‘s core PvE and PvP gameplay loops. The concept’s never been a problem, really. Instead, Bungie’s execution has been subpar almost every step of the way, almost as soon as the mode lost its initial luster.

Having maxed out my Gambit rank in about a dozen Seasons past, a non-insignificant portion of my experience with the activity has been that of frustration. When Gambit works well, it works really well. It can be a slick, tactical, and immensely satisfying experience when everything’s going your way and you’ve got a competent or well-coordinated fireteam at your disposal. Thing is, this doesn’t happen all that often to begin with unless you specifically organize and rally other like-minded players, and there’s a whole lot of complications in Gambit. Complications that can and will cost you your match.

Specifically, Gambit is substantially more mechanics-heavy than either Vanguard Ops (for the most part, at least) or Crucible. Players have to know the gameplay loop first and foremost, which consists of:

• Killing AI enemies for Motes to drop.
• Collecting the ideal amount of Motes for specific kinds of Bank Defender Taken to spawn on the other players’ field.
• Banking those Motes at the right time to overwhelm the other team’s Bank and siphon their own Motes away.
• Dealing with PvP Invaders every so often.
• Contending with the Primeval boss damage phases.

Just figuring out how these elements come together asks a lot from a newbie, and the crucial bit is that you genuinely need to time these actions to get the most out of them. Stacking Defender Taken together can basically clear out the other team’s Most bank, for example, but just sending Defenders out willy-nilly makes them easy pickings. Complexity, then, is a crucial “issue” with Gambit, but when you consider the fact that many Guardians play it just to complete Bounties, you also get a host of uninterested, half-engaged players who just don’t care about winning at all.

To be perfectly clear, none of the above is a game-breaking issue. If Gambit was engaging enough, players would keep playing it at the same pace as they do Vanguard Ops. Instead, Bungie appears to have half-forgotten about it in practice.

Loot refreshes aren’t the be-all-end-all for Destiny 2. If you thought regular Crucible had stale maps, Gambit is so much worse in this respect. The mode received an admittedly hefty content update with the Final Shape DLC and its subsequent seasonal releases, but this is very much an exception to the rule.

Gambit’s biggest issue by far is Bungie’s insistence on not investing time in improving it, and this, in turn, means that the mode absolutely feels like a tack-on to the far more established Vanguard Ops and Crucible game modes. There’s genuine design magic that’s gone into Gambit, and a stellar idea behind it all. It’s just that the mode necessitates better balancing than virtually any other aspect of Destiny, on top of needing way more content than Bungie is willing to push out. Until this paradigm changes, Gambit will keep playing second (or third) fiddle to Destiny‘s true pillar content.