Great Interview With Luke Smith (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, June 13, 2017, 15:40 (2507 days ago)

Here.

Highlights:

Bungie is being careful to make sure new players are welcomed to Destiny 2's story and world:

So for people who’ve never checked this game out for any number of reasons, we wanted Destiny 2 to be a game that you could look at and pick up off the shelf and open up and understand what’s going on and have a great time.

Weapon balance and feel will be tuned separately between console and PC:

I wouldn’t be so quick to make the assumption that we’re going to balance unilaterally. I think that we want to have one design build of Destiny, and the one design build means that we have exotic A and exotic A, and they’re both the same exotic across the builds for the game. But with the specific tunings and the way the guns play in each ecosystem, those are two consumer types with very different needs.

Destiny 2 PC will have text chat and Luke thinks it is a better option for voice chat in some ways:

Because you just have the potential to have your perception of someone ruined, like “oh it’s a kid,” or he sounds like me, a nasally Westerner. That’s not going to be fun to listen to for five hours. But with text chat it’s like frictionless—everyone can sound cool or be cool in text.

Sunsinger, Defender, and Bladedancer are basically gone:

Yes. For all intents and purposes, they’re gone.

Except, the Defender is not quite dead!

The other thing is that I love the Defender Titan, personally. He’s a class fantasy that I really like—and in the team too, oh my gosh the sandbox team feels this way as well. So one of the Sentinel trees actually has the option to, when you cast your super, you can press and hold the super activation and you’ll place a Ward of Dawn instead.

(Makes you wonder what Subclass Zavala is actually playing in Homecoming.)

In Destiny 2, Bungie will have a greater ability to more easily edit the stats of individual weapons:

We have some different tools at our disposal for Destiny 2 because of the way we’ve built the weapons. We’re actually going to be able to do some different types of modifications to weapons, where in Destiny 1 we largely modified whole archetypes in large balance patches. Let’s say Clever Dragon, the high rate-of-fire pulse rifle, is really powerful in the current meta, we’re going to hit all high rate-of-fire pulse rifles. In Destiny 2, if we have a weapon that is a specific infractor, we’ll have the ability to go in and just touch that.

Will the ships serve any purpose beyond a cool loading screen?

No, they will not. They are a cool loading screen trinket.

There's more to read. It's a really good interview and Luke went into quite a bit of detail about all sorts of stuff. Have at it.