Destiny 2 is scrapping weekly bounties and ramping up recoil
Your mouse-aimed rifles are about to get a whole lot shakier.
Destiny 2 is ditching weekly bounties in favour of a new "weekly challenges" system next season, as part of Bungie's latest push to combat what it sees as a problem with bounty fatigue.
Writing in the studio's latest This Week At Bungie post, senior community manager Dylan Gafner announced plans to replace Destiny's tedious weekly bounties system with new Weekly Challenges. These'll be instantly familiar to anyone who's ever peeped at something like Apex Legends' battle pass, delivering "between 3 and 10" new challenges every week for the first 10 weeks of a season
While daily bounties will remain, Bungie reckons challenges will give them more freedom to get you doing stuff outside of the restraints of weeklies. These challenges also hope to up the amount of Bright Dust folks can earn—something Destiny has been a little stingy with lately—with a 4,000 completion bonus on top of the 10,000 awarded for completing those objectives along the way.
"In moving away from weekly bounties, which were restricted to broad objectives tied to ritual activities, we have taken more leeway with creating some interesting or more difficult Challenges. These may be things you are already doing, or things that test your ability".
Challenges aren't the only thing getting a shakeup, mind. In preparation for eventual cross-play support, Bungie are ramping up the recoil effects of a half-dozen weapon archetypes for mouse and keyboard players. Right now, recoil punch for things like auto rifles, SMGs and hand cannons is reduced by about 40% compared to their controller counterparts. That figure will be reduced to around 20% sometime later this year.
Destiny players have been concerned with the game's recoil disparity between platforms for years, though the community seemed more keen on lessening gamepad recoil. That Bungie plans to do the opposite by making guns harder to handle on PC seems controversial, to say the least.
As usual, Destiny 2 is in a kind of uncertain spot right now. Weekly challenges might alleviate the chore of running your bounties across three characters. It may even turn around concerns over limited bright dust opportunities. But Destiny players are still reeling in the wake of Bungie's decision to sunset weapons and vault over half the game's planets, raids and content.
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Bungie has already announced plans to revamp rewards next season, with more guns and that aforementioned crossplay arriving later this year. Season 13 kicks off next Tuesday, February 2nd.
20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.