The Forsaken Pre-patch

Season 4 of Destiny and it’s Forsaken expansion is a mere few hours from being ready for Guardians to adventure and explore through. This time around however, Bungie has decided to present the community with a pre-patch, exposing the player base to new systems and features that have been teased for months now. While not everything in the pre-patch was perfect experience, the good far outweighs the bad.

Early Patching: Better now than launch week

It’s probably best to get some of the bad out of the way first: A lot of small things were broken in some annoying ways. Just on my end:

• No experience on Bright Engram progress displayed
• Weapon Catalyst progress locked on certain exotics
• Scout Rifles dealing incredibly poor damage in PvP
• Hand Cannon’s have extra recoil after respawning

To be fair to Bungie, “Pardon our Dust” is about as good an indicator as any to expect a few things to be busted. Any live mmo-like experience worth it’s salt can’t escape a few bugs before hitting live servers. In the best light, these bugs are very minor, and can be solved quickly after being reported with this week’s live patch. On a brighter note, some unintended bugs, such as acquiring Forsaken gear early through certain sources has acted as a mini-preview of upcoming perks and armor. If we’re lucky, this will just be the tip of the iceberg.

Weapon Slot changes: A new way to play

It feels incredibly comfy to go back to the Destiny 1 system of Primary/Special/Heavy It’s even better though that this isn’t the limit. Destiny 2 vets in favor of the double primaries, or innovators that want to try for double-special loadouts now have that ability to do so, creating the greatest amount of playstyle flexibility ever presented in the franchise. Getting a week to test between Perfect Paradox and Alone as a God in the primary, finally breaking out a sword with extra ammo, or even tackling the improved grenade launcher heavies has really helped to inject new life into what was a stale system over the past year.

My only gripe still remains that there is no eloquent rule to explain everything. There are only a few core tenants that still stick around: No energy elements in the primary slot, the heavy slot always takes heavy ammo, etc. etc. Other than that, exotics break rules and find themselves in additional slots, such as Legend of Acrius, D.A.R.C.I., and Whisper of the Worm. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found heavy versions of hand cannons or pulse rifles in the near future, anything that helps to shake up established paradigms.

Data Mining: Give and Take

Spoiling the secrets of what kind of gear that is expected to be found in an expansion can cut even deeper when the game’s lore is also attached to said items. It’s the Dark Soul’s approach, taken to the extreme. And while Bungie has become better with their API to hide and classify certain pieces of gear, things still slip through the cracks. This has become a basic truth for any live-service game: If you let players download the game early, they’re going to crack it open and start looking through files. There is potential to spoil everything from minor story beats to huge plot twists.

It’s just the potential however. As more online communities become savvy with how they want to experience stories, creators are also adapting to this environment. Any player hardcore into Destiny was able to see through Bungie accounts that the past week was the time to go dark if they didn’t want spoilers. Conversely, marketing does what it always does: pick out the juiciest bits of content to tease the community and serve them up on silver platter. Cinematics, gear, and even first level of the new expansion were embargoed and released with surgical precision to generate the most hype.

And then, if you wanted to go one level deeper, reading into hundreds of lore entries about what was up and coming, to the point that you’re basically reading the last 20 pages of a book before you even begin, that experience was also available via dataminers. Rather than trying to scrub everything from players, just letting the community decide how much they want to spoil themselves is the much smarter move altogether. It even has an extra knock-on effect: Letting lore experts get excited early has the potential to get all players psyched when they speak with vaguity and allusion. I personally fall into this camp, and have found myself fascinated pouring over bits and pieces on light.gg

The Annual Pass: Timing the DLC talk.

Talking about future downloadable content is...tricky. Announce too early and you make the company look greedy, as if they cut content from a larger release to section off sell to you. Announce too late, and there’s a very good chance that you’ve already lost the interest to a significant portion of your player base. Looking at you, Bioshock Infinite. Right after announcing the Forsaken expansion, Bungie also decided to jump in and talk about another piece of content coming later with very few details. While it was neat to know that there would be more coming after Forsaken, that venue wasn’t the time or place.

Their second crack at upselling a new season pass fared much better. A dedicated infographic and related ViDoc helped to not only to better inform potential customers with what was coming, but also when and with a new kind of expected regularity. The stated goal of not having a content drought, even admitting that it had been the case prior, is a huge step forward for Bungie. Destiny as a franchise too closely resembles an MMO, even if it wants to be labeled as a “Shared-World Shooter,” so upping the amount of expected content, and keeping the player base less fragmented can only help.

It’s taken a full year, but Bungie finally seems to be correcting course with this ship. Here’s hoping to a smooth and successful launch for Forsaken