Luke Smith, the lead designer of Destiny‘s sprawling raid quests, knows that a lot of people aren’t very happy with the Crota’s End raid introduced in the game’s first expansion, The Dark Below, and he understands why. Smith took to a discussion thread on NeoGAF over the weekend to address Destiny‘s fans directly, owning the mistakes of the first downloadable content release and offering some thoughts on how they can be addressed in the next one.
“Nothing specific to announce at this time, but the mistakes we made with the DLC1 reward economy will not be repeated,” Smith wrote, referring to the way upgrades for difficult-to-obtain Exotic weapons was handled prior to Dark Below‘s release. Bungie added a way for players to get the stats of their older Exotic gear in line with the stat increases that accompanied the first DLC, but was quickly criticized for the way the system required everyone to “reset” the skill progression of their upgraded Exotics.
After The Dark Below‘s release, Bungie was also castigated for the new “base” level of armor in the store giving players an easier route to the pre-DLC level cap when getting to that point prior to The Dark Below was such an difficult journey. Before the DLC came out, reaching the level 30 cap required players to earn a series of rare drops from the first raid, Vault of Glass. The Dark Below‘s arrival gave Destiny‘s vendors a new set of supplies that effectively allowed anyone to simply buy their way to level 30.
Smith zeroed in on both of these as major issues with the first DLC’s release. The details of his post are the sort of nitty grit stat discussion that only a serious Destiny player would be interested in, but that segment of readers here can take heart in knowing that Bungie is working on fixes.
“We want fewer barriers to equipping upgrades,” Smith said. “The shard economies” — a valuable “Exotic shard” must be exchanged in order to upgrade an Exotic — “erect these barriers between players and the new piece of gear they just got.”
He continued, “We’re not intending to adjust the shard economy for this Tier — we don’t want to invalidate player effort (again). But removing the barrier between that new drop you’re excited to get and actually being able to equip it as a member of your arsenal are something we will do going forward.”
