Destiny 2’s Act 2 content is up to par, but its Focus Time Gate isn’t

Destiny 2 launched Act 2 yesterday, and I was very impressed with the breadth of content it offers. Two of the three new Battlegrounds, where the concept of Battlegrounds has gone from annoyingly recycled to what are literally new attacks, more or less.

There’s a lot of new level geometry, taking us deep into Nessus after a brief stint in old areas, and next week’s third battleground also looks likely to feature a completely new experience, complete with very different bosses, mechanics, and arenas. That alone makes me think Episodes might just work after all.

However.

What was less pleasant was the fact that after waiting six weeks for three new weapons, it came with a major caveat. While two of the weapons can be found as loot, or acquired in 2 of the 8 general focuses, you can’t specifically focus either the new Echoes sidearm or the pulse rifle in Failsafe this week. Many have saved up a lot of engrams to be able to craft them, but instead you have to fight through tons of RNG in the big general gamble of discounting for maybe do it. But if you fail, all your engrams to focus disappear do to be added.

On top of that, for reasons unknown, the fourth carryover weapon from Season of Dawn, the Saint’s Perfect Paradox Shotgun, is simply not there at all. There may be a story reason for this, but it’s still weird because again, people were probably waiting to try and get a solid roll when the season launched, not log in and find it again. another door of time after six weeks of waiting. And we don’t even know how long the wait is.

Why limit the development time, specifically? You don’t want players to craft the weapon on day one? Why? They’ve already waited six weeks to get it. And what’s the difference between week 1 and (hopefully) week 2? Why do it? And if the idea is that “it’s too fast” with the massive transformation of engrams, that’s more of a problem with crafting in general. But the system is what it is.

I’ve been impressed with the content in the Echoes episode so far, but they haven’t really nailed down a release schedule for this one. After a lot of complaints about the idea of ​​three weeks of story content, three weeks off, now in Episode 2 they’re doing the three weeks of content in one week per act, then five weeks of nothing. I don’t see how that’s any better, or worse. When asked what I would do, well, I actually didn’t mind having 7-9 weeks of story content straight per season, but these two new systems seem worse.

And then we have them do this for loot as well, not just by time-locking weapons between acts, but now by time-locking those weapons in various ways. In Acts. I know they want people to come back week after week, but it’s not working, even though the actual content that Acts produces is solid.

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