GameSpot may receive revenue from affiliate and advertising partnerships for sharing this content and from purchases through links.

Next Destiny Update Makes Toughest Strike Easier

"Destiny is never finished."

39 Comments
No Caption Provided

As part of Bungie's continued effort to improve the Destiny experience overall, the developer has outlined new changes coming to the game's least-played raid that should make it easier for players to complete.

No Caption Provided

"Destiny is never finished," Bungie said as part of its latest Weekly Update. "We'll keep updating it, polishing it, revising it, and pushing its boundaries until you pry it from our cold, dead… You get the idea."

In addition to stamping out "toxic" players, Bungie is planning to tweak Destiny's endgame through the upcoming 1.1.2 patch.

"The Raids are living content for us. We play every week and experience them in the same ways as any other player. In 1.1.2, we have an opportunity to make some targeted fixes," senior designer Gavin Irby said. "We prioritized a list of items based on community feedback and tried to hit the ones that have been the most important to players. In particular, we wanted to improve the Atheon and Crota boss encounters. They’re challenging enough without the game getting in your way."

Meanwhile, Destiny activities engineer Sean Chan said the upcoming game update should eradicate a number of bugs--a process that was no easy task.

"Fixing bugs for the Raid is most challenging in two ways: figuring out went wrong and devising a safe way to fix it that won’t break the rest of the game," he explained. "The Raids have some of the most edge-casey content in the game, so the bugs can get really tricky. For example, we had a bug where players weren't doing damage to Minotaurs with the Relic shield. Turns out that the complicated hit test we use to detect a melee hit just missed the combatant because of the long-legged shape of its body. Some of these bugs were truly baffling, but we dug deep and went to great lengths to improve things."

Bungie is also making various changes to Destiny's Strikes through the upcoming 1.1.2 update. User research lead John Hopson said Bungie is specifically targeting the Ceberus Vae III Strike, which has one of the lowest completion rate of any Strike in Destiny. In short, this Strike should be getting easier.

No Caption Provided

"The Cerberus Vae III Strike is arguably the longest and hardest Strike in the game. It has one the lowest completion rates of any of the Strikes," he said. "Even when players complete it successfully, it takes longer than almost any other Strike activity at 27 minutes on Normal difficulty. When it's appeared as the Nightfall, it's actually had the lowest completion rate of any Strike activity in the game. The Dust Palace Strike isn't quite as hard, but it still takes longer to complete successfully than the average Strike at 23 minutes on Normal difficulty."

As a result of this feedback, Destiny production engineer Brenton Woodrow explained that the Cerberus Vae III Strike will become easier once the new patch is applied. This will be done by reducing strength and health for major enemies, among other things.

"Our goal was to ease the difficulty for the least-completed Strikes. In order to do this, we focused on the final boss encounters, which were fairly lengthy on higher tiers," Woodrow said. "We addressed this by reducing the strength for several of the major combatants. We also felt that the bosses themselves could use some tweaking. We reduced Valus Ta'Aurc's health by a third and reduced the Psion Flayers' shields by about 15 percent. We locked these changes after several playtests with the designers and feel that they bring these encounters in line with the rest of the Strikes."

Bungie has not announced a release date for Destiny's 1.1.2 patch.

What do you make of all the changes Bungie is making to Destiny? Let us know in the comments below!

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

Join the conversation
There are 39 comments about this story