Destiny 2 to rework Nightfall Strikes, removing timer and adding difficulty modifiers

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Players will be able to set their own challenge level.

Bungie plans to remove the timer from Destiny 2's high-level weekly Nightfall Strikes and rework the scoring system to encourage players to kill more enemies, it has announced. The current system, which kicks you out of a Nightfall strike if you go over the time limits, "pushes players through the encounters as fast as possible" and "turns a lot of people off", Bungie said in a blog post.

So, the team is reworking the strikes across a series of future patches to create a new scoring system that lets players take their time if they want to, and rewards every kill. Your score will be the sum total of your team's individual points, and the easiest ways to ramp it up will be killing enemies and generating orbs by popping your Super abilities. 

However, speed is still encouraged. In the new system, your fireteam's score will gradually decay over time, and cut off after certain time thresholds. After 15 minutes, new points you earn are reduced by 50%, while after 18 minutes you can't earn any more points, but you can still complete the strike. It's a good system, I think, with something for every play style.

To encourage you to raise the difficulty, Bungie also plans to add Challenge Cards to the Prestige version of Nightfall strikes later this month. These cards will make Nightfall strikes more difficult in exchange for a score multiplier. For example, they might decrease your power level, or make it so that if your whole team dies in a no-respawn zone you're returned to orbit. You'll be able to tune these cards to try and hit the difficulty sweet spot.

If you want to read more about the changes to Nightfall strikes, head over to the full blog post.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.