Ever since the release of Destiny 2's Edge of Fate expansion, developer Bungie has been busy fixing the many problems created by this very expansion. Amid widespread community pushback and series-low player counts on Steam, the studio's just announced another major U-turn: Destiny 2's Unstable Cores are being removed entirely.
Unstable Cores were introduced in Edge of Fate as the new infusion fodder used to increase the Power level of a piece of gear. Bungie is physically incapable of not releasing new currencies, and this one proved particularly problematic. High infusion costs, difficult activity modifiers, and reward payouts based on equipped Power actively discouraged buildcrafting experimentation and added yet another tedious grind to the to-do list. You had to infuse stuff, but it would cost you an arm and a leg in cores, so it was extremely difficult to get multiple builds up to snuff.
In a stark demonstration of the system's failure and incongruity, high-level infusion would cost thousands of cores while the game's battle pass would hand out dozens. Virtually everyone hated this on sight, and Bungie has finally seen sense.
"We have landed on a plan to fully deprecate this currency," Bungie says in a new update. "Once deprecated, infusion will cost an amount of Enhancement Cores and Glimmer."
Bungie admits "Unstable Cores have been too restrictive across power levels and fail to drive interesting buildcraft decisions, whether they be powering up through Campaign missions and wanting to try different weapons, or going into Endgame content and looking to infuse lower-level gear to higher power levels."
With that in mind, cores are being removed, though Bungie does not have a release timeline for this change just yet, and a one-time bonus of 777,777 cores is being handed out to smooth things over. A smaller update reducing infusion costs at "higher Power levels" is also coming ahead of the larger deprecation patch and economy rebalancing. Here's an idea: reduce all costs to one (1) core now that we're all openly in agreement that this system sucks and should not have happened.
Earlier this month, Bungie rushed to undo another unpopular change from the newest expansion. Power levels, which are in the crosshairs of many players after Destiny 2's abrupt pivot back to protracted level grinding in a half-baked system, will no longer reset in the upcoming Renegades update. Just as Bungie has recognized that Unstable Cores are anti-fun, so too has the studio acknowledged that redoing this new Power grind simply ain't gonna fly right now.
This all comes as Destiny 2 is knocked out of Steam's top 100 games for daily active users, falling to an all-time low of 16,416 concurrent players earlier this month according to SteamDB. At the time of writing, its 24-hour peak is barely any higher at 16,821. There's been plentiful chatter in the community about how these figures put the game below the previous lowest point around the maligned Curse of Osiris release.
Steam – that is, PC – is just one of Destiny 2's many platforms, but people have demonstrably exited the game in droves. With Bungie rolling back massive missteps two weeks in a row, not to mention countless necessary but futile changes to other damaging new systems, it's not hard to see why. The game is a mess, and I'm clearly not the only one who's decided that waiting out these inevitable fix-it updates is the way to go.
Andy writes – Borderlands 4 does what Destiny couldn't: I'm finally back on the looter shooter train, and it feels like reliving my 60 hours in Borderlands 2.
