Power Cap On Legendaries, Seasonal Content Balancing, And More Addressed In 'Destiny 2' Director's Cut Post

“Destiny 2” game director Luke Smith offered a taste of some of the changes coming in Season 10 of the game and year four with a surprise Director’s Cut update on Bungie’s official website Wednesday.

The biggest change Smith spoke about is that Bungie will be placing power caps on select legendary weapons in an effort to address “power creep” in the game. He says that infusion exacerbated the problem by forcing the dev team to keep testing older gear to keep up with the current sandbox and couldn’t commit more time to creating new things. It also prevented certain weapons from “being able to breathe” and stand out from the rest of the gear available in meaningful ways.

To address this, new caps will be put in place that will eventually cause the older gear to be pushed aside in favor of newer gear as new seasons roll out.

“The more specific nitty gritty for this will come a little bit further down the road but we wanted to get some of thinking behind it to you sooner rather than later,” Smith said. “The simplest version of how it is going to work is: Legendary weapons will have fixed values for how high they can be infused. Those values will project the weapon’s viable-in-end-game lifespan and we think that lifespan is somewhere between 9 and 15 months.”

He clarified that these limits won’t be placed on exotics for the time being.

The other major topic Smith addressed in his post is seasons, themselves, and what changes Bungie is considering to improve them. Specifically, the idea that the current model has too much content that can be considered “FOMO” material.

“What we’re discussing now – and which is early enough that things might still change – is how we focus our efforts around Seasons from a development standpoint, while also trying to create the moments that make memories, WHILE ALSO balancing the amount of ‘fear of missing out,’” Smith said.

To address this, he said the team is looking at ways to improve “core activities” and creating activities that would exist in the game until the following year’s expansion.

Despite the criticisms, Smith did point out there were still several changes made to the structures of seasons that made them a success. He points to the more connected narrative that leads in and out of one season to the next and the Battle Pass system.

Smith also touched on smaller topics, including faction rallies, bright engrams, new light, and the quest log:

• Factions rallies will not be returning to the game anytime soon, but some of the more popular gear will be added into the loot pool
• Bright engrams will not be purchasable from Eververse starting with Season 10
• The team will improve and expand New Light when Year 4 begins in the fall
• The Quest tab will have a new categorization feature to better organize quests for players