When Bungie revealed Destiny 2's new expansion calendar and Codename: Apollo, the first release in this new "medium-sized" format, it also teased a new content hub called the Portal. This Portal will house the playlists and activities we know today along with a new type of activity called Solo Ops. The studio's finally shared more details on Solo Ops, and these 10-minute missions designed with lone players in mind suddenly sound a lot more interesting after the promise of "treasure goblins."
In a new blog post, Bungie outlines the basic goals and rewards for Solo Ops activities. Some may be disappointed to hear that these "aren’t intended to be intense tests of buildcrafting prowess or thumb skill." Instead, Bungie says, "we want them to focus on the joy of playing in Destiny’s action sandbox in a way that’s easy to jump into and play in just a few minutes" – 10 minutes or so, to be exact, with the option to play them with up to two friends in versions that scale based on fireteam size. "We never want to tell you that you can’t play with your friends," Bungie says.
Solo Ops will be free to everyone, support the upcoming scoring and challenge customization options apparently designed to put more of the difficulty curve and loot grind in player's hands, and feature underused spaces in the Destiny 2 universe, like the EDZ Salzwerks area. Bungie's promising a few ways to inject variety into them run over run, and I already want to see some of these come to other areas of the game.
"Solo Ops missions will sometimes come with optional goals that only present themselves once you’re in the activity, like the presence of treasure goblins, or passageways to secret rooms opening where they are normally closed," Bungie says. "We’re also scattering random treasure chests throughout the activity and finding them will get you a bonus to your final score."
Additionally, Bungie's been cooking a "dynamic enemy spawning system" that "runs behind the scenes, monitoring how well you’re doing, how long it’s been since you’ve been in combat, and how close you’re getting to your objective, and then spawns squads of enemies when the system determines that you need to be challenged." This will give Solo Missions the ability to "spawn enemies at unpredictable times from places where you may not expect them."
Something about the phrase "you need to be challenged" triggers a few alarms, but I'm still too hung up on the honest-to-goodness treasure goblins to care. Treasure goblins! In my 10-year-old sci-fi FPS MMO? It's like you spilled your Diablo 4 in my Destiny 2. We can only hope.
Bungie admits that clearing some Destiny 2 PvE activities, like Strikes and seasonal grinds, can feel like competing with other players to get kills or just rushing to finish the dang thing, positioning Solo Ops as your own little private garden. "Overall, we hope that the Solo Ops missions will be a good activity for players who only have a short amount of time to play, prefer to play by themselves, or are looking for a lower-intensity way to revel in the Destiny gameplay sandbox, as well as any combination of those three," the dev concludes.
