I’ve been going a bit deeper into the big changes that Bungie is making to Destiny 2 with The Final Shape, and the one that easily drew the most headlines is the reversal of weapon sunsetting on all fronts. This is actually a byproduct of a different decision, the idea to raise player power to that of your team leader in order for friends to be able to play together across all activities. But that meant whatever your loadout was, including sunset weapons. So here we are, no more power caps.
The problem? While it’s nice and nostalgic, and it’s fun to take your (non-deleted) sunset weapons out for a spin again, one of the reasons they’re able to do this at all is because so few of these weapons are actually useful in this day and age, and old monsters have been neutered at this point.
I have gone back and forth on weapon sunsetting over the years, as I sort of got it, and thought content vaulting was a much bigger deal. But now the landscape of the game has changed so much it doesn’t even matter.
The biggest issue here is power creep, where essentially every old favorite has been rendered less useful than modern slot rivals, either new weapons or even new versions of old weapons.
Take a beloved classic like Midnight Coup, which was issued in the fixed roll era, and is now available with five or six truly wild rolls as of Into the Light. It might feel good to fire Bygones or Go Figure at this point, but there are a dozen more useful pulse rifles by now.
One of the main issues is the addition of subclass 3.0 elements to weapons. You want things like Incandescent, Voltshot or Repulsor Brace on your light subclass weapons. Strand and Stasis weapons didn’t even exist in the sunsetting era at all, but now elemental synergy is hugely important.
I’d also argue that this slate of weapons suffers from an overreliance on kinetics, which used to be the entire top slot, but kinetic usage has fallen behind elemental weapons because of again, that lack of subclass synergy (minus a few standout exceptions, or some things in PvP).
Another fear used to be that a few specific weapons were too dominant and Bungie’s fear was that they’d have to be massively powercrept to be used less often. That’s sort of ironic now, given the above, but it’s also the case that so many of these weapons had their signature perks nerfed. We can quite literally see that with Into the Light. Things like Recluse, Luna’s Howl and Mountaintop have similar designs or perks, but they’ve been drastically nerfed. There are at least a couple open questions like how say, Revoker might be received, but all of these “problem” weapons (which I credit as a huge amount of the reason sunsetting happened at all) are more or less dead.
Bungie seems to realize this, and they’ve promised that lots of sunset weapons are going to still be reprised with new rolls. We’ve already seen something like Season of Dawn’s Perfect Paradox show up in a Final Shape trailer, for instance, and you can extrapolate out from there what else might be arriving at that same time…
Is it good Bungie did this? Yes. But in terms of how it will affect the game, the other changes like fireteam power level and account-based power level are much, much more substantive, to be sure.
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