Destiny players who like to min-max their in-game economic activities have had a busy day. Alongside a new launch trailer for next month’s Beyond Light expansion, Destiny 2’s developer released an update filled to the brim with minor but meaningful changes to the game’s economy. On top of that Luke Smith, Destiny 2’s director, appeared on Twitchgaming and confirmed a key detail about a new system for cosmetics coming to the game.
New Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cthLUnEqT5k&feature=emb_logo
The new trailer, while quite entertaining, doesn’t really add much to the picture of what’s coming to Destiny 2 that isn’t already known. Instead, the video is more of an action montage meant to hype up players on the new season. The symphonic cover of Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones that plays under the trailer isn’t too bad either.
Leveling Changes
The weekly blog post from Bungie, on the other hand, answered a lot of questions players had about the changes coming in the new expansion. Firstly the new minimum power level and level caps for the new season were revealed. The minimum level in Destiny will move from the current 750 to 1050. New players will now start at 1050 and existing player’s gear under level 1050 will be automatically leveled up to 1050. This level will also serve as the maximum level for any gear that players pull from their collections pages.
For those unfamiliar with the leveling system in Destiny 2, the game has three caps on players’ power levels that affect the speed at which those players can level up. For the new Beyond Light expansion and Season 12 of the game the three power caps will be:
- Soft Cap: 1200
- Hard Cap: 1250
- Pinnacle Cap: 1260
This means players between 1050 and 1200 power levels will get gear drops at levels higher than their current level from all sources. Players between 1200 and 1250 will get higher level rewards from a small set of specific sources and players from 1250 to 1260 will level from an even shorter list of activities. Additionally, Bungie is adding some new ways to earn higher-level gear in the 1200 to 1250 range. On the other hand, gear purchased from vendors will drop 20 levels below the player’s current level.
Beyond Light will also be the beginning of the Destiny Content Vault in which several locations in the game will be removed and replaced with new content. Some of the locations being vaulted have currencies in the game associated with them. These currencies will still be usable for some unstated purpose in Season 12 of the game but after that will not be of any use.
A few playable activities not associated with the disappearing locations are also going away. In Beyond Light, Flashpoints, Destination Adventures, and World Quests from the first year of Destiny 2 will become unavailable. Flashpoints were activities on a weekly rotation that would reward players for performing a given amount of basic open-world activities. Destination Adventures and World Quests are both side story content tied to a specific location.
Economic Changes
Another currency undergoing changes is Bright Dust, the currency used to buy cosmetic items that you can earn by playing, as opposed to the real money currency Silver. The change here is that players will earn more Bright Dust from leveling up their season passes and slightly less from completing weekly bounties in-game. According to Bungie, the change is meant to reward single character players more fairly with Bright Dust than under the previous system.
There are also changes coming to the store where players spend Bright Dust, the Eververse. Instead of the current curated archive of old items the store will now contain all content from Season 1 of Destiny up to season three back from the current season. So in Season 12, Eververse will have everything up until Season 9 and in Season 13, it will add Season 10 content and so on.
Along with the Eververse, the Spider’s materials exchange is receiving some changes. The store will now sell the Enhancement Prisms upgrade material up to a limit of three per week and the pricing model for the currently available Enhancement Cores will be tweaked. Purchases of Enhancement Cores will also be limited to five per week.
One more change listed in the update is that all Sparrows, the hoverbikes that players use to traverse the open world, will all summon instantly. Previously, most Sparrows would appear after holding a button briefly but a perk that would randomly appear on some gear drops would allow the bikes to appear with just a tap of the same button.
Finally along with the vaulting of playable content coming in Beyond Light some items in players’ inventories will be removed. The full list can be found on the Bungie website. All the items will have no material usage in the game as of Beyond Light but a few may have sentimental value for diehard players.
Transmog
Finally in an appearance on Twitchgaming Luke Smith, Destiny 2’s director, revealed a detail about the upcoming transmogrification system. Transmogrification is a process that will allow players to change the look of a given piece of armor to match another piece of armor. Basically, the system would allow players to make their gear with the highest stats look like their best looking gear. According to Smith, the process will not require the template gear for the appearance to be present in the player’s inventory. Instead, players will be able to choose from anything in their collections, a sort of digital record of all the gear a player has possessed in Destiny 2.
Whew, that was a lot. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go delete a bunch of Destiny 2 armor.
