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The Destiny gacha game Destiny Rising is making some big changes in a sweeping seasonal update – the kind of update that gacha fans would normally, and not unreasonably, associate with a developer hastily bucketing water out of its ship.
There is historical truth to the inverse relationship between a gacha game's revenue and its investment in player-friendly features. With Season 4, Destiny Rising is cutting a lot of the gacha gunk entirely by removing daily energy limits, giving out some free characters, and letting players skirt the gacha banner system by collecting characters through gameplay rather than RNG or sobering credit card statements.
A recent preview of the Season of Wishes, which channels Destiny 2's Ahamkara wish dragons, outlines seismic changes to Destiny Rising. Developer NetEase spends much of the post quietly agreeing that the pillars of gacha's profit-first, fun-second structure are not fun.
For instance: "Since launch, Pinnacle Energy was intended to be a pacing mechanism to encourage exploration across various modes—Campaign, Gauntlet Ops, Shifting Gates and more—rather than burning through content in a single sitting," NetEase writes. The daily energy system is a mainstay of the genre and would, by design, limit how much progress you could make in a day, keeping you on the hook for long-term retention (and, by extension, monetization).
That's going away entirely, letting players... play the game as they want. "We decided that we will remove the Pinnacle system, and players can play however they'd prefer," the dev says.
I'm reminded of a joking comment from one of the Dispatch developers, who spoke at a GDC panel I attended earlier this month: "What if the gameplay was fun? This blew our fucking minds. We needed to write that shit down."
Here's another humdinger: "Acquiring new Characters through Draw Pools only felt more like a stressful gamble than a celebration." A predatory gacha system expressly built around artificial scarcity and unfavorable odds designed to funnel players towards purchasing confusing currencies was stressful?
Quite so, it seems. "In Season 4, we are moving away from a pure draw-based model to a Character Fragment-drive[n] progression system," the season preview reads, echoing the likes of Duet Night Abyss, which also un-gacha-ed itself to woo players.
"Wolves do not beg for scraps, and they certainly do not 'pull' for what should be theirs by right of wish," the post reads. "Every Lightbearer who enters the game in Season 4 shall receive the new Character at no cost of silver nor charms. A wish freely asked is a wish freely given."
More specifically, players can earn character Fragments "through various in-game activities" and trade 40 of them for a guaranteed premium character. "To honor our most dedicated players, completing all core seasonal objectives will award 40 Fragments at the end of the season, which can be exchanged for a character of your choice," additionally. You'll still be able to spend money on the game, of course, perhaps to pull duplicate characters and power them up, but this is about as gacha-lite as gacha systems tend to get.
