Destiny 2 completes U-turn on sunsetting legacy weapons, although too late for many players' dismantled guns
"We regret that we have no recovery mechanism for these."
Bungie has announced it will remove all power limits from legacy gear in Destiny 2, a major decision for fans and the final step in a now-complete U-turn on the controversial decision made four years ago.
The decision to cap the power of Destiny 2 weapons - prodding players into the pursuit of newer options, at the cost of abandoning old favourites - was controversial when it was announced in 2020. Bungie later relented, and stopped capping weapon power in 2021, though an armoury of player favourites released prior to the Shadowkeep expansion remained in limbo.
Now, that's no longer the case - as a consequence of Bungie's upcoming plans to allow new or lower-level players to jump into Destiny 2's upcoming climactic The Final Shape expansion quicker. This will be achieved by the new Fireteam Power system, where your whole party is uplifted to the approximate power output of its highest team member. Because of this, older weapons could have been made more powerful anyway - and so Bungie is now scrubbing legacy weapon power limits altogether.
"You might have noticed as you read about Fireteam Power that the Adjusted Power shared by the Power Leader would sidestep the caps on old Power limited items, making it possible to ignore them," Bungie wrote in a blog update. "After thoroughly considering the problem space, we came to the decision to remove Power limits from all items starting in The Final Shape.
"Always being able to play with your friends was a huge goal for us. As we close out the Light and Darkness saga, we want to rally all Guardians (active, returning, and new) to help fight the Witness, and there is no better way to play Destiny than with your fireteam. As we pursued this goal, it became apparent that Power limits were fundamentally incompatible with Fireteam Power."
This means that veteran players will now be able to use some of their prized older weapons in new content once again - although by this point, many of those older weapons have since been deleted by players keen to free up account item space. Bungie has said there's no way to get those back, but that it will introduce new methods to obtain legacy gear - which would also have the game's more recent additions attached too.
"We understand that many old Power limited items have been dismantled by this point, and we regret that we have no recovery mechanism for these," Bungie concluded. "Going forward, we intend to reintroduce sources for most or all of these, updated to modern Destiny sandbox standards with added properties such as Origin Traits and buildcrafting perks (as we have started to do with the BRAVE arsenal in Destiny 2: Into the Light)."
The decision has received a mixed reaction from fans - both eager to dust off old favourites, and lamenting lost items that would now have been useful once again.
"I literally just cleaned out my vault this week after hoarding myself at 590+/600 for like a year now, WTF," one fan wrote on reddit in response to the change.
"They waited to tell us this until we're three weeks into Into the Light and having to clear out space for Brave weapon rolls?" wrote another.
Writing on X, Bungie designer Josh Kulinkski further discussed the decision, and said that changes were natural for live-services run over the course of many years.
"Sometimes in order to build the best game today, we have to make pivots to decisions that were made in the past, " Kulinkski wrote. "That's just the nature of Live Service game development.
"I get that some people will be upset about this change, we said you could delete sunset weapons and changed course. These aren’t things we foresaw, but we believe this is the right move for the success of Destiny in 2024 and beyond."
Destiny 2: The Final Shape launches on 4th June, following earlier delays. As for what happens after that, rumours have been swirling about Bungie's plans for Destiny 3.