Next month, The Final Shape will be hitting one of its most critical internal milestones: a ritual we call the End-to-End playtest.
This ritual has been a key part of development since Forsaken.
It’s multiple days of consecutive internal playtesting that not only generates incredibly valuable closing feedback on everything coming this summer, but also spiritually kicks off a shift towards bug fixing and polish work.
Heading into this milestone, I've gotten to play 100s of hours of The Final Shape, and what the world-class talent here at Bungie has created has quickly become of the things I'm most proud to have worked on throughout my career.
It's me, Joe, your local Destiny 2 Game Director, wading into the waters of the internet to talk about increasing the base difficulty of the Vanguard Ops playlist.
This content specifically has unintentionally become less engaging compared to our Guardians' power over time over the last few seasons, and we want to course correct that in Lightfall.
While we still have a lot of reward tweaks planned throughout this whole year, when we ask Guardians to play Vanguard Ops for pinnacles or weekly challenges next season, we want to make sure that content has kept up with the player power increases over the years.
I just wanted to step in and say: Heard loud and clear on the feedback with our current seasonal backbones. The team is excited to put some more creative risk in seasonal progressions, but there will be some time before the feedback catches up with the dev cycle. Preview:
Coming up next is Lightfall and Season 20. While Guardian Ranks and Neomuna destination pursuits are going to shake things up- on the seasonal pursuit side our major focus is reducing complexity and improving the synergy between your seasonal pursuits and the rest of the game.
Season 21 is at the halfway mark of development, and the team is currently looking at ways to differentiate progression aside from having a more novel activity setup in the works.
The team's been playing a lot of Witch Queen. Wanted to give some quick updates on where our head is at with some week 1 reactions. [1/13]
First, aren't super happy with how unpredictable it can be to complete Report: Relic Data for the Evidence Board quest chain. [2/13]
We're still monitoring the time commitment for unlocking and upgrading crafted weapons, but the drop rates and unlock requirements for the Wellspring Throne World weapons are currently going to gate off too many players from being able to earn their exotic glaives. [3/13]