One of the least popular announcements that came out of the impending release of Destiny’s Taken King is that Bungie is going to be re-balancing a number of the game’s most popular weapons. Among those slated for fixing is the Gjallarhorn rocket launcher which the company swears was an issue with a bug detecting the way the weapon was behaving in testing.
Bungie senior designer Sage Merrill recently explained to Game Informer how the weapon became so overbalanced. “There was a bug late in the development of Destiny where the trails didn’t appear for the sub-munitions of Gjallarhorn, so you couldn’t see what it was doing and it wasn’t this spectacular display that it is now. However, the bug didn’t get logged as, ‘This doesn’t look awesome.” It got logged as ‘isn’t powerful enough.” Merill said.
Bungie also shed some light on an interesting trick the company can do with weapons in the game. Miller says weapons can be “overpowered” just by upping the audio on their discharge. The developer said that if the audio is lower, players will assume that the weapon is underpowered. If the audio is turned way up, even if the damage done is exactly the same, but there is a big booming discharge, players will suddenly think the weapon is incredibly powerful. For now, Gjallerhorn for one is still a powerful gun that can be picked up from Xur, but once The Taken King launches in September you won’t be getting as much bang for your buck.