Bungie is making Destiny 2 faster and more lethal

Bungie has announced sweeping changes to the way Destiny 2 feels to play - and the upshot is the shared-world shooter should play faster and more lethal.

One of the gripes players have with Destiny 2, particularly with regards to the competitive multiplayer portion of the game, is it feels too slow. And not just in terms of movement, either. Most agree it takes too long for supers to charge, it takes too long to kill enemy guardians and there's not much opportunity or reason to use power weapons. In short, Destiny 2 can feel a bit, well, plain.

So, we come to another Bungie weekly update, and this time there's juicy details about how the developer is reworking the game to feel faster and, hopefully, more exciting as a result.

"Our goals for this round are to provide individual players with more hero moments by increasing overall speed and mobility, increasing the amount of supers you charge to demolish your enemies, and increasing the frequency and impact of our most montage worthy power weapons, especially in the Crucible," design lead Josh Hamrick said.

Bungie's making all three glides, as well as Catapult and Strafe Lift, faster. The mobility stat has been reworked so everyone gets faster and the high end is higher. Ground speed cap is increased. The Arcstrider, Sentinel and Striker all move faster (the Arcstrider's super is buffed to be faster with increased range on all attacks).

There's more: supers recharge faster for everyone, and hand cannons, pulse rifles, sniper rifles and shotguns are all buffed ("a key goal here is to make shotguns, snipers, and fusion rifles more prevalent in the game").

Now onto the Crucible specifics. Bungie's goal is to increase the pace of PvP combat and the frequency of power play. So, player respawn times for all quickplay modes is decreased and power ammo respawn timers for all quickplay modes is reduced. Here's an interesting change: enemy players now drop their power ammo on death. The dropped brick is available to anyone until picked up or 30 seconds have passed.

All in all, the changes amount to a pretty significant update to the way Destiny 2 feels to play. It's no secret that interest in Bungie's shooter has flagged somewhat - certainly my interest in the game has waned over recent months. But making the whole thing faster, more lethal and, hopefully, more exciting, combined with the planned addition of 6v6 matches, will probably tempt me back in. It sounds a lot like Bungie's trying to make Destiny 2's Crucible feel more like Destiny 1's Crucible. As a huge fan of Destiny 1 Crucible, I'm on board.