‘Destiny 2’ discovered a missing key to ‘fun’ in the season of the chosen

I talked a little bit about why Destiny 2’s Season of the Chosen is going well, focusing mainly on loot and loot chase, which have been greatly improved in both Beyond Light and Season of the Hunt. But I don’t think it’s worth anything that Bungie seems to have fundamentally changed things about all the new combat encounters we’ve seen this season, which made things much More fun.

That change? “Enemy density.”

This is true both in the three new battlefield activities we’ve seen so far, and in the replayed attack in Devil’s Lair. It will probably be the case for the fourth battlefield, Fallen SABER and the new attack as well, if current standards suggest a trend.

Simply put, it all means that Bungie is attacking more and more enemies with each encounter. The difficulty of each particular enemy was not necessarily increased. Battlefields are a low energy event in the way champions appear, yet you play 15 Phalanxes, 20 Legionaires, 5 Centurions, 3 Colossi and 10 Psions in an arena with a boss and it will be difficult to invade them all without getting overwhelmed.

Difficult, but fun! Battlefield missions are uninterrupted combat encounters, pouring wave after wave of enemies over you, essentially with no gaps between them. Things get really wild during the boss stage, because the more enemies arrive, the lower the boss’s health, and fighting the mobs is as important as burning the boss.

Devil’s Lair illustrates how this principle also applies to attacks. I saw Datto talking about how the Sepiks’ attack is essentially only three quarters, much, much smaller than most Destiny 2 attacks, and yet it contains more real enemies than even the biggest and longest attacks in the game like The Corrupted or The Scarlet Keep. You can really feel it while playing, and even though Sepiks is The Destiny’s first hit in history, looks more fun and challenging than most current ones.

Destiny often seems to be focused on length and environment, making attacks or other long and extensive activities, but those where you can only fight a handful of enemies in a very long series of small rooms. But with Sepiks, we can see that it’s more fun to just have a few big rooms with a tonne of enemies in them. When you think about the last activity that actually had some wild enemy density, it was probably Flock or Escalation Protocol, both of which are fan favorites, but here, it seems that we are even higher than that in some cases, and without complicated timers or goals, it’s just a bunch of shots, the thing that Destiny is best at.

As such, I am excited to see the new attacks and the final battlefield to see how this principle can be applied there as well. The exception to this “enemy density” idea is probably the Presage mission with your Scorn, but it is understandable there, given that the mission should be mainly about solving puzzles with less focused combat. But who knows, maybe that will change when the heroic version arrives.

Destiny’s strength has always been his combat and I think he has found a very easy way to make activities more fun by playing a lot of enemies in encounters. I don’t know if this is something that just wasn’t possible before, until the recent backend changes and engine updates, or if it has nothing to do with it. But it’s something that we haven’t really seen at this level until now.

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