Destiny 2’s latest expansion, The Edge of Fate, has been teetering on the edge of some serious challenges forBungiesince its July 15 launch. The most readily apparent problem has been itsevidently weak population. Whereas The Final Shape struck a peak concurrent player count of over 314,000, The Edge of Fate hasn’t quite hit 100k. Suffice it to say, when you’re in the live-service industry, you don’t want to draw less than a third of what you did with your last go-around.
With Steam’s user reviews presently stuck at ‘Mixed’, it’s clear that Bungie has its work cut out for it at the moment. The storied developer’s woes have only been elevated by a bit of a fiasco regarding its first major post-launch patch notes. Despite their extensive nature, they’ve failed to address sizable alterations to the Warlock class. Specifically, a slew of nerfs that have the community in an uproar.
Over on Reddit,Destiny 2 players have been compiling lists of these changes, many of which have been left totally undocumented in the patch notes themselves. Like I said before, there’sa lotto dig through with the9.0.0.1 update’s bullet points. But it’s seldom fun to find out a favoured class has lost some of its punch, and patch notes exist to at least give us a lead on what to expect when it happens.
Destiny 2’s communications manager, Dylan Gafner, has addressed the blunder inan apologetic Twitter post, promising to do better in the future.
As Gafner says, Bungie “never intend to ship ‘stealth nerfs’ in Destiny 2.” I’m especially keen on the bit where he claims they’d be “completely out of [our] minds if we thought we could slip something under the rug without players noticing.” I agree on that score, and I appreciate that there’s a dedicated plan to help avoid these unfortunate circumstances in the future. Furthermore, thereissome belated verification en route for not just the Warlock nerfs, as well as certain exotic ammo backpack changes and more.
With luck, this will be a blip in the grand scheme of The Edge of Fate’s life as Destiny 2’s current expansion. Bungie could use a win right about now, at a time when the industry is quaking from a relentless string ofmassive layoffsandunexpected game cancelations.
