Bungie’s decision to cap a weapon’s power in Destiny 2 — a significant controversy among the loot-shooter’s community when it came three years ago — will be fully reversed for the game’s last expansion, The Final Shape. And that, too, is a source of some controversy.
To explain, with the launch of Destiny 2: Beyond Light in November 2020, Bungie introduced “weapon sunsetting.” The weapons themselves weren’t removed, but a player’s ability to “infuse” (power them up) certain weapons was removed.
The problem is that with “power creep,” older weapons could be infused to the game’s new power caps very quickly. This was a big headache when it came to Bungie designing and balancing new content, as players with these weapons could blow through it rather than face a challenge. The game had already been out for three full years when Bungie made its “sunsetting” call.
Yet the pushback from the community was strong enough that Bungie walked back these “sunsetting” plans just four months later, although older weapons still remained effectively capped. With their usefulness diminished, a lot of Guardians dismantled theirs (breaking them down for parts to upgrade weapons of a better quality).
Destiny 2: The Final Shape undoes all weapon sunsetting
Well, guess what. For The Final Shape, Bungie has announced that all of these legacy items will now have their infusion limits removed, meaning anyone who was either farsighted — or nostalgic — enough to keep theirs in their vaults will now get to use them at their mightiest.
What’s the reason for the reversal of a four-year-old policy that lasted four months? Destiny 2: The Final Shape will introduce something called Fireteam Power, which is meant to encourage group play (as well as entice apostates back to the game). Basically, everyone on the team will be brought up (or just under) the Power level of the highest-powered player among them.
“Always being able to play with your friends was a huge goal for us,” Bungie wrote on its official blog on Thursday. “As we close out the Light and Darkness saga, we want to rally all Guardians (active, returning, and new) to help fight the Witness, and there is no better way to play Destiny than with your fireteam.”
As Bungie was working out how to pull this off for The Final Shape, they realized this feature would mean that Power-limited older items would be boosted past their cap. And if that was going to happen, developers reasoned, they may as well remove the caps on those legacy weapons in the rest of the game.
“As we pursued this goal,” developers said, “it became apparent that Power limits were fundamentally incompatible with Fireteam Power.”
Destiny 2 fans complain it’s too little, too late
Bungie somewhat egg-facedly admitted that “many old Power limited items have been dismantled by this point, and we regret that we have no recovery mechanism for them.” Other players have pointed out that even if someone hung on to their original power-limited items, they’re still underpowered next to current gear as they don’t have access to perks that Bungie added to Destiny over the past two years.
The studio said it would “reintroduce sources for most or all of these, updated to modern Destiny sandbox standards,” but that still means Guardians who put in grind for their cherished gear will have to do so again.
Destiny 2: The Final Shape launches June 4. The game is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
