Destiny 2 update 1.1.2 went live earlier this week, as did a "development roadmap" detailing Bungie's plans for the game over the next few months. Included on that map was a promise of changes to come to the Sandbox, which is Bungie parlance for the way weapons, abilities and your character all interact.
In an update posted today, design lead Josh Hamrick revealed some of the Sandbox changes that are currently being tested for what the development team is now referring to as the "Go Fast Update." The idea, he said, is to enable more "hero moments" by making players faster and stronger, and boosting the effectiveness of Power weapons.
Supers (ie your ult) will also recharge faster, while Arcstriders, Sentinels, and Strikers will all move faster while their Supers are active. Weapon types including Hand Cannons, Pulse Rifles, Sniper Rifles, and Shotguns are all being buffed ("A key goal here is to make Shotguns, Snipers, and Fusion rifles more prevalent in the game," Hamrick said), and the ground speed cap has been increased for everyone.
PvP play is also being tweaked up to increase the pace of combat and the frequency of Power weapon use: Power ammo timers have been decreased, players will now drop power ammo when they die, and ammo counts have been adjusted "in relation to these timers, and in relation to weapon type."
Speaking of Power weapons, Bungie has also discovered a bug in sniper rifles that's actually preventing the team from properly adjusting the flinch on them. "While the current batch of changes we are playtesting go a long way to bringing snipers back to where they should be, this bug will still prevent them from feeling perfect. That bug, which we are actively working on fixing, requires some deep changes to the art of each of the individual snipers in the game," Hamrick explained. "That will take us a while to stomp out. We’ll get it fixed and pushed out to you as soon as we possibly can."
The changes currently being tested may not all make it to the next Sandbox update, "but the outlook is good at this point," Hamrick said. And they do sound promising overall, although my eyebrows raise at the thought of more Power ammo floating around in PvP. Rocket launchers and fusion rifles are one thing, but swords are already wildly overpowered, and the last thing anyone needs is for them to become even easier to wave around.
The blog post also includes some known issues with the 1.1.2 update:
- Shader Previews: An issue was discovered shortly after deployment impacting Shader Previews. If a player attempts to preview a shader, the tooltip will automatically change to display the first page of shaders in inventory. The issue has been escalated to the appropriate team for investigation.
- Lost Sector throttle: A short-term solution was shipped, reducing the throttle timer from 10 minutes to 5. We have a Hotfix planned for mid-February to fully address this issue, but we wanted to deploy this change sooner than later to reduce impact to the player experience when clearing multiple Lost Sectors in short amounts of time. Stay tuned to @BungieHelp for announcements on when to expect this Hotfix.
- Future XP Balancing: Destiny Update 1.1.2 has reduced the required amount of XP for a rank-up from 160k to 120k XP. Additional balancing for Crucible XP rewards are currently in development, planned for a future Hotfix. Both Quickplay and Competitive playlists will receive an increase to XP rewards. Additional information will be shared when available.
