Arguably the worst kept secret in Destiny 2 was finally conformed earlier this week. Following the community’s substantial efforts to donate 9,777,777,000 fractaline needed to complete the Empryean Foundation, Bungie released a new trailer confirming the return of Trials of Osiris. While the official confirmation was most welcome, most fans already had a pretty good idea the popular mode was coming back thanks to numerous leaks and datamined information throughout the Season of Dawn.
The return of Trials of Osiris does fill a fairly large hole in the current state of Destiny 2. Bungie is positioning it as a challenging, end-game mode that won’t appeal to a portion of the player base. The trailer also revealed that the Egyptian-style armor and weapons are making a return as well as three classic maps: Cauldron, Anamoly, and Exodus Blue. As expected, Trials of Osiris will enable power levels similar to Iron Banner, though Bungie also confirmed a community fear that the Seasonal Artifact would also be enabled.
The community did not react well upon hearing the news. Responses, discussions, and comments lit up most places like the forums and community-driven sites like the Destiny 2 subReddit.
The Destiny Difference
Many fans began scratching their head after seeing the reveal that the Seasonal Artifact would play a major role in impacting Trials of Osiris. While keeping power levels active is an important part of the mode, many fans felt that Bungie misunderstood the idea of power level advantages.
In the first Destiny, Trials of Osiris had a leveling system and specific weekly activities which helped balance the players that were able to spend hours in the game each day and others who could only spend a couple hours per week. This was achieved through minimizing the importance of bounties and instead place the focus on weekly activities as well as a max light/power level. There was no way to infinitely increase light levels and therefore prevented huge statistical discrepancies.
How Power Impacts Destiny 2 Trials of Osiris
From Bungie’s perspective, keeping power enabled makes sense for a few reasons. Power advantages does make whipping up a new character and jumping right into the mode less appealing as a lower power character is likely going to get stomped. However, if there is no power minimum, it likely won’t stop hackers from infiltrating. The second main reason comes from Luke Smith’s latest Director’s Cut where he confirmed that some guns will now have an infusion ceiling, which means new metas and weapons will likely develop and rotate in as the season progresses.
However, things get a little messy when the seasonal artifact gets added into the mix.
The major reason why the majority of Destiny 2 players wanted the artifact disabled is due to the fact that it provides unlimited power levels. Essentially, players can grind out XP as much as they want each season and continue to gain additional levels above the hard cap. This means that the more time a player puts into the game, the more XP and power levels they’ll be able to grind out creating a bigger gap between other players.
Here’s where the main concern starts to take hold. On paper, this means that Trials of Osiris favors players who ultimately spend more time playing the game rather than which team is more skillful. Ultimately, it seems that players will likely be able to grind their way to an advantage in the pinnacle PvP mode, meaning that a 1v1 firefight gives an advantage to the player that spent a few more hours earning XP than actual gunplay. The community has rallied around one particular scene in the Trials of Osiris developer video, where a Dawnblade super isn’t able to take out an enemy player in one hit due to the power imbalance.
Community manager Cozmo23 delivered the news to Reddit users sparking a massive outcry from those who fear players will find ways to cheese the system or farm simply bounties in order to gain as much XP as possible to gain a major advantage over other players. Many assume that after the first couple of weeks, the mode may become unplayable or fail to satisfy fans once again as the gap between those who have spent more time playing increases over those that can’t play for hours a day.
What’s Next?
Bungie made sure to let players know that they’re going to closely observe player data and feedback once this mode launches but for many in the community, that isn’t good enough. Many continue to worry that Bungie won’t be able to respond to problems fast enough highlighted by certain exploits and glitches taking months or entire seasons to fix.
There are still a few things that are unknown which could potentially help. Bounties have been a controversial topic for the community for some time now, reaching maximum visibility during The Dawning event where Eva’s special bounties granted double XP through finishing simple tasks. This event allowed players to level up extremely quickly, leading some in the community to request that Bungie takes a look at the system all together.
Bungie has yet to say much on the topic and with a big list of sandbox changes expected at the start of Season of the Worthy, perhaps the studio has some planned XP changes to share as well. Many fans are hoping that the mode will have some sort of level cap instituted to prevent such massive disadvantages.
Regardless, it’s clear that the community worries if this mode doesn’t deliver right out of the gate, it’s going to upset the community even further. Some speculate that players will abandon the activity if it feels too unbalanced and Bungie will need an entire season to collect feedback and examine potential fixes. By that point, it’ll be far too late. At this point, it’s unknown if it’s too late to institute any changes as Season 10 is now a couple weeks away, though its highly unlikely that Bungie hasn’t noticed the near universal concern and negative feedback from its community over this Trials of Osiris detail.
Destiny 2 is available now on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
