‘Destiny 2’ has come up with a major missing ‘fun’ switch in the Season of the Chosen

I’ve talked a little bit about why Destiny 2’s Season of the Chosen is going well, focusing primarily on loot and the loot chase, which have been significantly improved over both Beyond Light and Season of the Hunt. But I don’t think it’s worth anything that Bungie seems to have flipped a switch to fundamentally change things about all of the new combat encounters we’ve seen this season, making things a bit more a lot of nicer.

That switch? “Enemy density.”

This is true for the three new Battlegrounds activities we’ve seen so far, as well as the repeated Devil’s Lair attack. It will likely also be the case for the Fourth Battleground, Fallen SABER and the New Attack, if current patterns suggest a trend.

Simply put, this all means that Bungie gets stuck more and more enemies per encounter. The difficulty of each enemy in particular is not necessarily increased. Battlegrounds are a low energy event in champions appearing mode, and yet you throw 15 Phalanxes 20 Legionaires, 5 Centurions, 3 Colossi and 10 Psions in a boss arena and it just gets hard to hack them all without being overwhelmed To hit.

Tough, but fun! The Battlegrounds missions are non-stop combat encounters, dumping wave after wave of enemies on you, essentially with no breaks in between. It gets really wild during the boss phase, as more enemies arrive the lower the boss health gets, and fighting through the mobs is just as important as burning the boss down.

Devil’s Lair illustrates how this principle also applies to strikes. I saw Datto talk about how the Sepiks attack is essentially just three rooms, much, much smaller than most Destiny 2 attacks, and yet it features more real enemies than even the longest, biggest attacks in the game, like The Corrupted or The Scarlet Keep. You really feel that while playing, and even though Sepiks is the first Destiny attack in history, it feels more fun and challenging than most current ones.

Too often Destiny seems to be focused on length and environment, making strikes or other activities long, sprawling affairs, but those where you may only fight a handful of enemies in a very long series of small rooms. But with Sepiks, we can see it’s more fun to have just a few large rooms with one your of enemies in them. If you think back to the last activity that really had a wild hostile density in it, it was probably Menagerie or Escalation Protocol, both fan favorites, but here we even seem to be tiered up in some cases, and without timers or complicated goals , it’s just a lot of shooting, what Destiny does best.

As such, I am delighted to see both the new strikes and the final battlefield to see how this principle can be applied there too. The exception to this notion of “enemy density” is probably the Presage mission with its disdain, but it is understandable there, as the mission should be primarily about solving puzzles with less focus on combat. But who knows, maybe that will change once the heroic version gets here.

Destiny’s strength has always been battle, and I think it came up with a pretty easy way to make activities more fun by just dumping tons of enemies into encounters. I don’t know if this is something that was simply not possible before until recent changes to the backend and engine upgrades, or if it has nothing to do with it. But it’s something we really haven’t seen at this level until now.

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