Destiny 2
This season in Destiny 2, Bungie introduced the seemingly simple but technically complex feature of allowing players to access their vaults from orbit, rather than needing to travel to a specific location like the Tower or the HELM.
But players almost immediately figured out a way to access it from any activity, not just hanging out in orbit. It involved going to start another activity but in the process, being able to access the vault in the pre-launch menu. Then you get out of the menu, and you’ve gotten what you need without needing to return to orbit at all.
Now Bungie is…patching this, temporarily, starting today, as it’s not intended functionality. However, they’ve agreed with the community that this is a useful feature, and so they will turn it into an actual addition to the game. First, they’ll revert the fix from today in January (perhaps by then it will be “less janky” as they say), then they will make the ability to get to your vault from anywhere a part of an update after The Final Shape.
Given that The Final Shape will now release in June after a six month extended season due to its recent delay, and this says after Final Shape, not at launch, that’s likely going to be a while. But next month players can once again keep using the “jank” method, as it were.
For the more dedicated Destiny players out there, all of this is not terribly useful. If you’ve been around a while you are almost certainly using DIM, which is better in almost every way between the ability to search and filter, transfer across characters and do ten million other things. I’d argue that when Bungie implemented loadouts that it was actually one thing easier to do in-game than in DIM, at least overall, but vault access? Yeah, less so. Still, I don’t think we can discount what percent of Destiny 2 players do not use third party gear shuffling services like DIM, as we’re living in a bit of a bubble if we believe that’s true.
Honestly, Destiny has always been a bit ahead of the game in terms of stuff like this. It’s one of the very, very few games that lets you access all manner of menus and inventory screens while you’re loading into an activity, a real rarity among most games in adjacent genres. They’ve kept that going with the orbit thing and it’s a big part of fireteam finder too, though the “technical lifts” on both of those were supposedly massive, according to sources.
Anyway, it’s cool that they’ll mostly leave this alone and then try to make it permanent later. May not help me much, but it’s good for the game overall.
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