The Future 2 neighborhood has been spiraling ever since a disappointing State of the Sport replace earlier this month failed to deal with what some followers see as core points with the fashionable model of Bungie’s sci-fi MMO. Now sport director Joe Blackburn has taken the weird step of addressing the neighborhood immediately in a brand new video that guarantees a free Eververse armor set in Season 22 and a free PvP map pack for Crucible in 2024.
“Just a few weeks in the past we put out a State of the Sport communication that wasn’t as much as our requirements for what y’all have come to anticipate for these sorts of communications,” Blackburn mentioned in an August 15 video recorded at his dwelling workplace work desk. “It didn’t present the high-level imaginative and prescient we usually present and actually and really a bunch of us have been heads down engaged on The Remaining Form and weren’t in a position to give it the form of care and love we often put into these types of communications.”
He then proceeded over the subsequent quarter-hour to set expectations for the August 22 Future 2 Showcase revealing extra about subsequent 12 months’s The Remaining Form enlargement (will probably be centered on top-level concepts aimed toward informal followers) and handle a number of the greatest factors of controversy popping out of the State of the Sport weblog submit from earlier in August. These principally needed to do with the present state of PvP, which sits someplace between benign neglect and full-blown abandonment, and Ritual armor units which gamers have been as soon as upon a time used to seeing refreshed yearly.
On the Crucible facet, Blackburn promised a brand new streamlined PvP improvement striketeam that may determine on modifications and new content material and talk these modifications to the neighborhood sooner. Whereas Future has at all times primarily been a PvE-focused sport, Crucible matches was a way more important pillar within the each day lives of gamers. One large concern, which was seemingly at all times unfounded, was that Bungie’s improvement of the just lately introduced extraction shooter Marathon meant Future’s PvP improvement sources had utterly shifted away from Future. Blackburn tried to clarify that’s not the case.
To that time, he mentioned the present system of periodically injecting one new PvP map into the sport at a time wasn’t serving to. As a substitute, the plan is to launch a bunch of maps all collectively as a part of one free map pack in 2024 that experiments with numerous new concepts and zaps the stilted mode with much more power and pleasure all on the similar time. The “free” half may also assist dissipate a number of the latest frustration with how Future 2 has been nickel-and-diming gamers for each piece of outdated and new content material.
Future’s Ritual armor blues
Microtransactions angst has additionally been a supply of lots of backlash on the armor entrance. Essentially a sport about trying cool whereas doing alien genocide, many gamers have been offended with the shortage of recent Crucible-, Vanguard-, and Gambit-themed outfits earned within the sport fairly than purchased from the Eververse store. February’s Lightfall enlargement skipped them completely. Blackburn mentioned this was a part of a acutely aware option to focus extra on armor units designed for top-tier actions like raids, dungeons, and Trials of Osiris, in addition to the seasonal-themed appears like Season of the Deep’s underwater set. To try to make it as much as gamers for not correctly speaking that shift, he mentioned certainly one of Season 22’s paid Eververse units can be made free as a substitute.
To this point the shock transmission is working. The video’s been obtained positively by gamers, not simply due to the additional data and freebies, however as a result of it added a extra private and intimate framing for the information. After all, given the heated nature of Future debates, and up to date authorized motion Bungie has taken in opposition to gamers who’ve overstepped boundaries or made violent threats in opposition to the studios and its builders, it’s straightforward to know why Blackburn’s informal on-camera video hasn’t at all times been the norm.
“We wish to be speaking to you all extra, however speaking to you all extra our number-one precedence we have now to maintain our neighborhood members and our neighborhood leaders protected from the Bungie facet,” he mentioned. “I don’t need anybody that indicators as much as come work at Bungie and to speak to y’all in regards to the sport to have to fret about their private security.”
