Bungie is nerfing/downgrading two of the strongest guns in Destiny: the Thorn hand-cannon and Gjallarhorn rocket launcher. Why? Because they want you to use more than just those two guns and they feel gamers should be using a variety of tactics over Destiny's proposed 10 year life span.
Gamerant picked up quotes from Bungie's community manager David “Deej” Dague in an interview with IGN, where he explains...
This is the challenge for us, to create things that you always want to do. . . . We want to give you new things to experience all the time, new places to go, new ways to upgrade your Guardian, new enemies to fight, new weapons to use, new subclasses to master. The act of playing Destiny is all about evolving your character. And using the same weapons for the next decade wasn’t really part of that vision.
So basically they want to redistribute weapon usage.
Doing so by downgrading two of the game's more popular weapons becomes a pretty big debate for some die-hard fans because not everyone wants to stop using the Thorn and the Gjallarhorn to pick up and learn to use something else in Destiny.
I'm curious what head of Xbox Phil Spencer thinks? He's logged 300 hours into Destiny and has a crazy high K/D ratio so he would likely be able to offer some sound reasoning on the change.
But in all seriousness, Bungie has a tough road ahead of them with Destiny because now it means any weapon that becomes a regular favorite amongst the community will likely need to be nerfed when a new expansion arrives in order to keep people shuffling around their equipment and using new weapons.
MMOs go through this problem all the time. However, games like Star Wars: The Old Republic or World of Warcraft introduce all new areas with higher level monsters so that even the biggest, baddest equipment is no longer top tier in the new zones. This forces players to have to level up, find new equipment and then eventually come up to par with the zone's baddies.
I'm not entirely sure why in the case of Destiny the weapons have to be down-scaled instead of the enemies in the new areas being granted immunity to the old weapons, but it's Bungie's game so they can do whatever they want.
According to Dague, the developers want to keep gamers guessing as they play...
Our goal as developers is to keep you guessing, to keep you thinking about, ‘I’m going into this tactical scenario, what am I going to equip?’ And if Gjallarhorn is an obvious choice, then we’d like to provoke you to think a little bit more about your loadout.
I guess it's at least good that Bungie recognizes that players are stuck in a weapon loadout cycle that they aren't getting out of. I just wonder how well the community will take to being forced to think outside the weapon box when it comes to their loadouts in Destiny?
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