What We Know (And What We Don’t) About Destiny 2 Right Now

After a couple of months’ worth of anticipation, Bungie today revealed our first look at gameplay in Destiny 2. If you didn’t catch the stream but are very curious about the company’s upcoming adventure, we’d highly recommend you watch the replay. Otherwise, you may feel content after watching the official trailer:

Let’s rattle off the most important bits:

There are going to be three playable classes as there were in the original Destiny (Hunter, Titan, Warlock), and while similarities will be evident, available subclasses have been overhauled to create fresh ways to create destruction.

All of the game modes fans have come to know and love are making a return, which includes campaign, strikes, crucible, and of course, raids. Going forward, crucible modes are going to default to 4v4 in lieu of 3v3, and at this point, it’s safe to assume 6v6 will remain the cap, although we can hope Bungie has some more surprises in store for us.

Destiny 2 Environments

 

 

 

 

 

A brand-new mechanism in the game is “Guided Games”, which is essentially an in-game Sherpa system that lets solo players find quality groups to join so as to experience content they’d otherwise be unable to experience. Clans willing to help solo players out can create a listing, and welcome aboard random gamers to help out.

As simple as it seems, the Guided Games feature is an important one. Allegedly, 50% of players who reach max level finish the raid, which means that a significant amount never get to experience that (about 10% of the total number of players on PlayStation 4 completed a raid, based on Trophy listings). Guided Games should help those scared to join random public groups relax knowing that the group they’re about to join is going to be patient and understanding of their lack of experience.

Also worth noting is the addition of Loot Sectors, which are points on a map that lead to dungeons populated with boss enemies – likely on par with bosses from strikes rather than raids.

Destiny 2 Story Missions

 

 

 

 

 

During the stream, a huge number of quality-of-life improvements can be seen, such as the lack of need to go to orbit in order to switch to another activity. That change alone will save hundreds of minutes in load times over the course of many players’ time spent. Destiny 2 will also deliver something that’s been heavily requested but for some reason seemed technically impossible for Bungie to implement in the original: an in-game map.

Destiny 2 is "coming soon" to PC, @Bungie not saying that means Sept 8.

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 18, 2017

Onto some important bits: what we know about the PC version of the game. Bungie has confirmed that the game will natively support 4K resolution, and ultrawide (21:9) resolutions. In addition, there will be no cap on the framerate, the field-of-view will be adjustable, and there will be a proper graphics options screen to spend time tweaking in. Of course, the game will have full mouse and keyboard support (with custom mapping), and unlike the console versions, a text chat will be available.

Interestingly, Bungie announced that Destiny 2 on the PC wouldn’t be made available on Steam like many expected, but instead Blizzard’s Battle.net, which houses such games as Overwatch and World of Warcraft. The lack of a Steam version might annoy some, but fortunately, many PC gamers will already have Battle.net accounts.

If there’s a potential downside to the PC version, it’s that Bungie (per the tweet above) hasn’t explicitly confirmed that it will launch at the same time as the console version.

Destiny 2 PvP

 

 

 

 

 

As amazing as the PC version of the game could be, console owners might be left with a bad taste in their mouths, as a rabid rumor floating around is that the game will be locked to 30 FPS on all versions. Bungie has yet to comment on these types of console specifics.

At the event, NVIDIA had supplied GeForce GTX 1080 Tis to be used in the demo PCs. The PCs were also equipped with brand-new Destiny 2 peripherals from Razer, Intel’s Core i7-7700K processor, and Acer’s Predator XB1 27″ 4K monitor, which happens to use NVIDIA’s G-SYNC technology.