Destiny 2’s Guardian Games Is Kind Of A Mess, 2024 Edition

This week, Destiny 2 rolled out another iteration of Guardian Games, its class-based Olympics that pits Hunters, Titans and Warlocks against each other.

While there’s one kind of cool new gun, and a definitely cool new hoverboard, as the days press on here, things are getting a bit messy. Here’s what’s going on.

There Were A Few Hours Of Unlimited Loot – This was actually a fun one, where you could load into Master or Legend Lost Sectors which would instantly complete and give you all the loot from them. Bungie shut this down within about two hours so many players missed out on the bounty. Naturally, this led to claims that Bungie only races to fix bugs when they benefit players.

Class Matchmaking Broke – Destiny 2 was starting to hit players with Mongoose errors, so the solution to this appears to be to…disable class-based matchmaking for both Crucible and Gambit for the rest of Guardian Games. Three days after launch, that’s two-thirds of ritual activities turned back into “normal” versions, erasing the whole class competition thing. Now it’s just strikes, where you’re not even going against other classes at all. And for some reason this cannot be fixed during the entire three week event.

The New Focused Activity UI Is Confusing – This year Bungie did something with “focused activities” where there will be a specific activity that players are asked to grind for a limited amount of time to see which class comes out on top. But to even understand what this is you need to hover over a tiny little node above all the Guardian Games class nodes. When you default into the map on PC at least, you cannot even see it. Then, if you do an activity you get a reward package which goes straight to your inventory with little fanfare, as it’s not something you claim from Eva or a chest you open in the Tower, so it’s easy to miss.

The New Trials Card Is Annoying – I guess this is not specifically Guardian Games related, but it did launch with it. This is the new “Passage of Persistence” where eventually you can get to an Adept weapon on a flawed car so long as you eventually win enough games. However, Bungie revealed that if you lose a game with zero wins right at the start, this means you can never complete the card, even if you do get to 7 wins. So some people are grinding out two dozen games, getting to the end, and not getting an Adept weapon. This is not even listed as a bug, it appears this is how the card is supposed to work, but there’s no logical way anyone would realize that.

More generally, as fun as the Skimmers are, I wonder if Bungie has perhaps broken a bunch of their encounters by introducing a new, very easy way to skip past content with almost unlimited air grinding, but that’s a longer term problem. These other ones are the priority issues.

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