![]() If Bungie offered a unique weapon for going flawless in Trials of Osiris, players would complain about the desirable rewards being out of reach for the majority. Even now, though, there remains the problem of how to reward weapons in Destiny's most difficult activities. It makes sense that it takes Bungie time to create new weapons, because each of them has to be integrated into a large and expanding combat sandbox. By shifting the bulk of cosmetic ships, Sparrows and Exotic ornaments to the Eververse, Bungie devalues their potential as a meaningful reward in the game's activities.Ī constant source of frustration voiced by the Destiny community is a lack of guns to chase, something that Bungie has worked hard to address in the last couple of seasons-with some success. This is true of Destiny, of course, but it isn't the whole story, because cosmetics are a valuable component of an MMO's reward loop. Throughout the industry, one of the ways publishers often justify real-money stores is that their wares are purely cosmetic. These issues are just another symptom of a larger problem that's felt throughout Destiny: the Eververse, and how it subverts the game's reward structure. In its current state, Armor Synthesis feels like another advert for Bungie's store, through a system that offers just enough frustration to tempt players to pay for it instead. The game even advertises this fact to you after you've finished the quest that unlocks the system. Of course, you can avoid all of these restrictions if you just go to Eververse and buy a bundle of Synthcord. With five armour pieces per set, unlocking additional full sets requires a significant time investment just to hit the seasonal cap. But in the current system this just feels like a drug dealer offering you the first hit for free. ![]() For this introductory season Bungie in its beneficence will give you 10 Synthweaves per class free for completing the explanatory quest, which essentially means you can unlock a couple of armour sets from the off. What's not great is how slow and restrictive the process is at the front end. The menu used to apply shaders desperately needs some sorting and bookmarking options, but it's a big step in the right direction. Also, I'm genuinely happy that we have a new shader system, finally letting shaders be one-time unlocks rather than consumable inventory stock. In the system's defence, once you unlock an armour piece as a universal skin, you're able to freely apply it to any of your armour without cost forever. Once all that is done, you get your Synthweave-one of the ten you're allowed to earn per class per season. (I'd prefer if Bungie adopted a more rewarding reason, like a rotating pinnacle drop that cycles between old raids and dungeons-but it's something, at least.) ![]() There are benefits to the system: some of the bounties provide an excuse to revisit and repopulate older activities like Blind Well, and even old raids. Others require you to get a whole bunch of Champion kills in Nightfall strikes-a significantly more time consuming prospect. The second is that the bounties are not created equally. At two minutes per Synthstrand drop, it theoretically takes five hours to collect enough to buy a bounty-although that's not counting all the extra time spent queueing, travelling, sorting your inventory, clearing your postmaster haul, decrypting engrams or any of the other busywork that makes up a portion of an evening with Destiny 2. The speculation that it drops not from number of kills but from time between kills matches up with my experience, meaning that there's a hard cap on how quickly you can collect it. The first is how long it takes to earn Synthstrand. While overly complicated, Bungie's description of how Armor Synthesis works hides just how much friction exists within the process. ![]()
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