From the daily reset yesterday through the daily reset today, Bungie made a special preview of Gambit available for all Destiny 2 owners to play and experience. I won’t spend a bunch of time explaining the mode, but in very brief terms, this is how it works:

  • Two teams of four compete to defeat enemies, “bank” resources those enemies drop, and then defeat a boss that appears after enough of those resources have been collected and banked.
  • The teams play in maps that don’t physically connect to each other—your team of four has its own PvE space during the activity.
  • As you bank resources in specific amounts, this sends enemies to your enemy’s side to temporarily prevent them from banking their resources.
  • If you die without banking those resources (called “motes”), your team loses those resources completely.
  • At various points throughout the mode, each team can send over a single player from their team to the other side to engage in PvP and attempt to frustrate the other team and cause them to lose resources or progress.
  • The game is played to best-two-of-three rounds.

The mode is a public matchmaking playlist, so if you don’t enter with a pre-made team of four players, the game will add players to your team in the same way that Strikes or Crucible matches are queued. Gambit has its own playlist slot next to those activities in the Director:

I’ll work on a guide for playing Gambit later, but in the meantime, while there are still a couple of days left before Forsaken launches and the mode is available to all, I’d like to talk about what I enjoyed and what I didn’t.

Continue reading “Thoughts on the Destiny 2 Gambit Preview”

With patch 2.0 to Destiny 2 this past Tuesday, the way weapons and ammo are organized within the game has fundamentally changed. It’s been confusing for some people, so I thought I’d try to explain it, if possible.

To start, here’s the easiest way to look at it:

  • The slot a weapon is in and the type of ammo it uses are no longer the exact same thing
  • The top two slots determine what ammo a gun uses based on the type of weapon, not based on the slot itself (white or green ammo)
  • All weapons in the third slot take the same type of ammo (purple ammo)
  • Ammo bricks now drop differently, with white ammo being most common, green being less common, and purple being the rarest

If pushed to write this in one sentence, it would be: weapon slots and ammo types have been decoupled.

Trust me: that’s the easiest way to phrase it I can come up with right now. If you want to learn more about the system, keep reading, and let’s talk about Destiny 1 and 2 and their weapon and ammo systems and how they have evolved.

I’d like to know more about this!

Hey, friends!

A couple of things I love are going to join forces in a Twitch stream this upcoming Tuesday, starting around noon Central time and extending until Whenever I Feel Like Stopping:

  • With Extra Life weekend coming up in a few months, I thought it a good idea to do some early fundraising and get the ball rolling
  • Destiny 2: Forsaken launches around that time and I’ve taken some time off to play through it right away with my son, live on stream

I would love it if you would stop by and support the stream! Load it up, hang out, chat a bit, and if you feel generous, donate to my Extra Life campaign for this year. All proceeds donated via my Extra Life page go directly to local children’s hospitals and are tax-deductible.

Watch us run through the story of Destiny 2: Forsaken, experience the new Gambit game mode new to the franchise, or just stop by and chat neat-o Destiny stuff with us while we explore!

If you can’t attend directly, if you would tell your friends and families we’re doing such a thing, it would be greatly appreciated. More eyes on what we are doing means more possible donations to help sick kids in the St. Louis area.

Here are the important links for the event:

Thank you so much for your consideration!

If you were looking for a Season Four info dump, this week’s update from Bungie has you covered. As always, you can find their original post here, and I’ll do my best to re-summarize the information for you and provide some commentary.

It’s a lot. Let’s get started.

Continue reading “Talkin’ TWAB: Weapon Changes, Economy Updates, Eververse…”

Solstice of Heroes is now a week old, and three weeks of earning special seasonal event drops, upgrading armor sets, and completing Moments of Triumph remain before we start transitioning to Season Four and Year Two of Destiny 2.

If you haven’t participated in a seasonal event in Destiny 2, or if the last seasonal event you participated in was The Dawning around the turn of the year, it might be unclear how the limited-time Solstice Engrams function. Let’s talk about what they are, how you get them, and how they work, so you can spend the rest of the event either optimizing for obtaining the stuff you want or ignoring that this grind exists.

Continue reading “Solstice of Heroes Engrams”

Bungie streamed out a look at changes to Destiny 2’s combat system today. It was a 90-minute stream and had two private PvP matches in it, so it takes a while to go through. You can watch it here:

Of course, you might not want to do that, so I’ll summarize the hits for you right here. I’ll try to split them up in general areas of discussion.

Continue reading “Bungie Combat Livestream Summary”

There’s not a ton to boil down for you out of this week’s This Week at Bungie, but what’s there may be significant for you. You can find Bungie’s original post here.

What we do have is a lot of statistics, and some data regarding Year One weapons as we roll into Year Two in four weeks. Solstice of Heroes is well underway at this point, and I hope this week’s update finds your armor grinding underway (or not, if you’ve chosen not to pursue it).

Continue reading “Talkin’ TWAB: Numbers—Numbers EVERYWHERE”

At tomorrow’s reset, Destiny 2 players start celebrating the Solstice of Heroes event—the culmination of the first year of Destiny 2 and a send-off leading into the release of Forsaken and the start of Year Two.

Part of Solstice of Heroes includes the Moments of Triumph, which are specific bounties you can complete for your Destiny 2 account for completing various activities throughout the first year of the game. The initial Moments were made public on July 7th, but a group of them remained hidden and couldn’t be completed until Solstice starts tomorrow.

I previously revealed these hidden goals here and explained what they are and how many points towards the maximum score they would provide. But in this guide, I’d like to cover the entirety of the Moments of Triumph and what they’ll provide to you when you earn them, so you know where to focus your attention for the remaining five weeks of Season Three and Year One.

You can also read up on Bungie’s official guide to Moments of Triumph and how they will work here. The deadline for completing the Moments of Triumph is 28 August 2018.

Continue reading “Moments of Triumph Guide: Celebrating Year One of Destiny 2”

An updated Development Roadmap, incoming changes to power progression, sandbox changes, a new Crucible Labs test, and a bonus info drop from Game Informer—this week was pretty loaded with information.

The posts referenced in this update are:

Here’s what you need to know:

Continue reading “Talkin’ TWAB: 26 July 2018”