Destiny 2 has always been better at the shooter side of the looter-shooter spectrum, but the MMO finally delivered a true-blue loot rain this season with the well-received Coil activity. You get multiple chests throughout the Coil, and if you play it well, you get a giant room full of chests at the end, all containing valuable endgame materials and some solid weapons. At a recent group interview, I asked Bungie if it's ready to meet the inevitable demands for more Coil-grade loot going forward, and the dev team's response was encouraging (and at times eyebrow-raising given the miserly payouts we've gotten in past game modes, but I digress).
"Absolutely," began staff designer Clayton Kisko. "We're thrilled with that response and I think, you know, when we're setting out to make an activity, we are putting the respect of the player's time in the forefront. You can see that in the Coil, getting paid out after every boss run, and as things get harder and things take a little bit longer, your rewards grow to match and evolve that level of difficulty. After an hour of playing, we all just thought it's a natural conclusion to have this special room that we could reward players who have mastered that content over that length of time and then to absolutely make it rain for them.
"I remember implementing the chests and working with audio about staggering some of it so you just didn't hear a loud bang all of a sudden, right? And that feeling of the first time seeing those chests load up and spawning all of the – we call them baubles – the engrams, felt really great. We knew players are gonna respond really positively to that as well."
It really is that simple: give us a giant room full of useful loot for 40 minutes of effort and Destiny 2 players will be happy as clams. Answering a follow-up question about the balance of activity difficulty and rewards, Kisko added:
"We have some internal metrics on the level of difficulty and what players deserve to have and what we want to give them in that regard. So you'll see, especially in Coil, you'll get double the rewards at some point because you're hitting a difficulty level that warrants it, for instance. And again, it goes back to time, the amount of time that you spent, we want to make sure that you're getting paid out for that time.
"You're there to chase the rewards, right? To have a great experience and enjoy the content. But you don't want to spend a half hour and then only get maybe one weapon. So again, we play the game, probably just as much as anyone, and that's a level of feedback when you're playing someone else's content like, 'I don't know.' That's something we try to get in very early on, because it's so important. Rewards are so important to the activity that we want to see what that experience is like, and a lot of people are going to see what they got and look at it and be like, 'uhh, I got two blues, this is not feeling that good.' Or 'okay, I got the grenade launcher again, it didn't feel kind of up to par.' And so we'll definitely iterate on that."
We still have several months of Coil ahead of us after The Final Shape's delay, so it's a good thing it's actually worth running. Here's hoping future activities, especially whatever's planned for those still-mysterious Episodes, hit the same bar.
It's taken 10 years, but Destiny 2 is finally getting the most important feature for any MMO: character customization that lets you tweak your appearance anytime.
