It had taken Bungie seven years of trial and error to land on systems for loot, leveling, investment and currency in Destiny 2 that were somewhat balanced and accepted by the community. Then, The Edge of Fate came and blew it up.
Destiny 2 is now in the process of undoing some of its worst decisions in the post-Edge of Fate era, first declaring that the exhausting power grind would not force players to start over from baseline when its next expansion, Renegades launched. Now, Bungie has turned its eye toward a currency that never needed to exist in the first place, Unstable Cores.
Unstable Cores were a replacement for Enhancement Cores for leveling, temporary currency used to infuse gear up to your power level, but the amount required to do so increased from a few dozen to a few thousand in time. Attempt to experiment with a new build or two and a couple sets of old armor or weapons, and you’d be broke in short order.
First, Bungie said they were not going to delete Unstable Cores between seasons. Now, they’ve gone a step further and said they are going to delete Unstable Cores entirely and set up a new system they haven’t fully revealed yet. Costs, however, are supposedly more akin to what they were pre-Edge of Fate. To tide players over, they’re reducing high-end costs and giving players a free chest of 777,777 currency cores.
It’s yet one more frustrating situation of a Bungie “win” that has happened only because Bungie made a huge mistake in the first place, then it took months of community yelling to change it. I’ve lost track of how many times this has happened since Edge of Fate launched, but it feels like every other week they’re trying to buff something that’s bad or revert something that’s worse.
The problem with all this is that Bungie built the Portal/power/currency/loot system as a closed loop. But when they keep ripping things out and jamming new pieces back in, none of it works anymore. We’re having weird situations like players who hit max level not needing to do anything for the next eight months except instantly get Tier 5 gear all the time, due to the power changes. The Unstable Core thing is less severe, but it was yet another redesign of the infusion system for about the eighth time, and the worst version yet. At this point, you might think that Bungie would realize that infusion costs are just pointless.
Bungie always wants players to go for “build diversity,” but I have no idea how you’d play with this Unstable Core system and think that’s what it would yield. Rather, all these systems, from power to currency, were designed to limit build diversity because Bungie wants you to make builds out of Portal gear that you need to grind for, as it’s almost the only place you can get tiered loot and significant power gains. They don’t want you infusing 300 things out of your vault, they want you to grind, use and dismantle only new gear, for the most part.
So I’m sorry, zero credit for this one. The power grind reset stuff, maybe, but Unstable Cores were something that should have been rejected the second someone said it in a meeting, and I have no idea why it took four months to get rid of it.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
