Bungie admits Destiny 2’s Solar 3.0 did not melt anyone’s face off
More heat coming next week in the form of Titan and Warlock buffs.
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Destiny 2 sandbox discipline lead Kevin Yanes made no bones about his hopes for the rework of the Solar subclasses that recently went live alongside Season of the Haunted: “Ideally, it melts your face off,” hesaid last week. In today’sThis Week at Bungieupdate, however, Yanes acknowledged that Solar 3.0, as it’s known, has not landed with sufficient spice.
“Initial reactions to Solar have not met our ‘new thing that melts your face off’ bar,” Yanes wrote, and he’s not wrong. The day that Solar 3.0 dropped,r/DestinyTheGamewas flooded with threads about how the Dawnblade Warlock’s options to play as support medic had been gutted, while Sunbreaker Titan mains bemoaned the changes to the way the Sunspot ability now worked.
Whilst those complaints, inevitably, were a little more shrieky than the situation warranted, Yanes acknowledged today that the rework wasn’t sitting well with the sandbox abilities team which he leads at Bungie either.
“As we’ve said in the past through TWABs, socials, and other dev updates, we’d much rather ship something a little too spicy than something bland that makes a bad first impression,” he continued. “I think with Solar 3.0, we landed somewhere in the middle, and the team feels very passionately that this is the wrong place to be.”
In response, Bungie is making a number of changes and fixes that will go live next week.
Solar Warlock:
Solar Titan:
“That’s no small list of changes,” Yanes wrote. “The team takes feedback seriously—we’re players ourselves, so when things don’t land, we also feel that internally. To say it out loud, a hotfix of this magnitude comes at the cost of other changes, so to set expectations here, the team is unlikely to take another balance pass until much later this Season. It’s important to our team that on top of doing amazing new things, we maintain a healthy work-life balance and this patch necessitates some breathing room.”
“Short-term gain for long-term pain” is definitely a choice, but one that Bungie has made previously: In early 2021 itdelayed The Witch Queen expansioninto 2022, “primarily for the health of the team.” In December 2021, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons formallyapologizedto “anyone who has ever experienced anything less than a safe, fair, and professional working environment at Bungie,” following a report into sexism, toxicity, and a crunch-heavy culture at the studio.
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Yanes also noted that next season’s Arc 3.0 rework is “still cooking up nicely,” but warned that the abilities team will likely “go dark for a little while” once it’s live.
Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill.Lotsof Henry Cavill.
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