Destiny 2 players got a horrifying blast from the past today, as a new Heavy Metal PvP event dished out bugged loot straight from Year 1 of the 8-year-old MMO.
Players began reporting ancient, decrepit, repeatedly power crept loot shortly after Heavy Metal went live this afternoon. Destiny Bulletin received the Year 1 special: a bunch of blues. Destiny 2 content creator Rick Kackis was given a Year 1 version of the notorious Better Devils hand cannon, which might be the funniest thing that has ever happened in a video game.
You may recall an old Destiny 2 development diary where then-game director Luke Smith, at a time where Bungie had inadvisedly abandoned random loot in a game about random loot, discussed how to make acquiring multiple copies of the same Better Devils feel exciting. Bungie never found an answer to this question, random rolls returned, and now, on the heels of an all new tiered gear system, the static Better Devils has returned like the ghost of Christmas past.
Bungie confirmed that it's investigating "issues where launching Heavy Metal from the Tower node drops blue gear and older legendary gear." Until a fix is found, you should launch the activity from the game's new Portal activity hub instead.
Firstly, I don't know how the same activity spits out such dramatically different loot based on how you launch it, but spaghetti code is nothing new for Destiny 2. What really throws me is how these Year 1 guns are dropping at all.
Bungie has famously deleted huge chunks of paid Destiny 2 content purportedly for the game's technical and design health, sweeping old campaigns, destinations, and gear into the so-called Destiny Content Vault. This includes almost every last trace of Year 1 content, right down to the MMO's foundational campaign.
The Year 1 earth is so scorched that, when pressed to prove its defense in court against author Matthew Kelsey Martineau, who claimed in a lawsuit that Bungie had stolen ideas from his old blog posts, the studio had to submit YouTube video evidence of old campaigns and storylines because it could not demonstrate that content in any other way (thanks, PC Gamer).
I desperately need to know how near-decade-old guns tied to content that was wiped from existence can possibly be bleeding into a Tower-specific version of a new PvP mode. Seriously, I hope Bungie explains this in a nitty-gritty blog post, because this is one of the dooziest of doozies in the history of Destiny 2.
