Destiny Crucible Design Lead Was “Never Happy” With PvP, Talks Destiny 2 Changes

Bungie’s Lars Bakken hasn’t had the most enviable job in the past few years. As the Crucible design lead, he’s been responsible for numerous changes in Destiny’s PvP modes, buffing and nerfing weapons as seen fit. As such he’s had to deal with a lot of flak over the years but with Destiny 2 on the horizon and so many changes being made to Crucible, why would Bungie choose to revamp PvP entirely?

Bakken spoke to DailyStar UK about this and said, “There’s a lot of people that internally were like ‘why would you change this thing that people obviously enjoy’ and the answer is it’s not as good as it could have been. The answer is even though we created something that you know millions of people loved, I was never happy with what we created and I always wanted to make something better and so it was easy for us to talk about how can we make this better.

“Like, how can we make this for people who really enjoy PVP, because I think with Destiny 1 we talked about it in a way where it was important for everyone who wanted to play anything, it was like come on in, let’s give everyone a big hug. That felt good in some ways, but it also caused some strange problems, long form problems that we didn’t necessarily see until later after the game had been out. And we wanted to try and tackle some of those things and like rethink from first principles like how do we want the crucible to work in Destiny 2.”

As for concerns about this community-oriented game that will only support 4 players per team in Crucible – which can be an issue when you’ve built a standard 6 person fireteam over the years – Bakken said that, “It’s absolutely a concern, but when you need to make a change, sometimes there are bones that needed to be broken and that can be painful but if it’s the best thing for the experience sometimes you have to do that in order to give the game a focus and the necessity of what is going to give players the best possible experience.

“We’ve created it for eight players, that is our target and it allows us to do this really great thing as developers to say hey every map or mode we create, we know the target number of players. We don’t have to have a variety of experiences that this thing has to support, it is laser focused on being the best thing it can be with four Vs four.”

Destiny 2’s open beta will actually go live on July 18th, 10 AM PST for those who pre-ordered on PlayStation 4. Xbox One users join on July 19th while the open beta is available for all on July 21st.