‘Destiny’ King’s Fall Raid Made With Hard Mode First, Crucible Rewards Bug Found
Bungie dropped a Weekly Update for Destiny that was filled with some truly interesting nuggets of information. Perhaps the top two is the approach the developer took with the King’s Fall Raid design, and the fact that the lack of rewards PlayStation and Xbox players complained about in the most recent Iron Banner had plenty of merit.
The King’s Fall Hard Mode raid is set to launch on Friday, October 23, at 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT. As previously covered, the recommended Light level for the more difficult raid is between 300 and 320. New gear will drop ranging between 310 and 320 to make Guardians even more powerful.
The approach Bungie took with King’s Fall is the opposite from the Vault of Glass and Crota’s End raids. The studio created the normal mode first, and then upped the difficulty to make a hard mode. This time, Bungie created King’s Fall as a hard mode raid first, and then scaled back the difficulty to a normal mode.
This Weekly Update has news any sort of Guardian can use. https://t.co/GJEZtZQIjk pic.twitter.com/6gGv8DU3El
— Bungie (@Bungie) October 22, 2015
“This time, we followed a subtractive approach by building the mechanics early on. For a long time, we play-tested internally in Hard Mode, treating it as the default experience. Once we were satisfied, we removed them to arrive at the Raid you have already played,” Lead Designer Gavin Irby explained.
“For the mechanics themselves, we shied away from simply increasing sandbox difficulty (not that it won’t be harder),” he continued. “You’ve had time to hone your strategies and develop a rhythm. Some of you might even be able to do it backwards, blindfolded, or upside-down. Hard Mode is going to upset that rhythm. We’re going to give you one more plate to spin, and make you think on your feet.”
This should be wonderful news for Destiny players if the King’s Fall Hard Mode Raid shakes out this way. One of the major complaints of Crota’s End was that Bungie simply raised the level of minions and didn’t add any gameplay elements to it. The only major change was the removal of the Chalice of Light in the final encounter, to prevent player health from regenerating.
Bungie is keeping things a secret for now, but expect details of changes to hit within hours of the King’s Fall hard mode going live. Expect the usual cast of Twitch streamers hitting the raid as soon as possible.
King’s Fall. Hard Mode. Oct 23. 10AM Pacific. Be there. Bring five friends. Be Brave! pic.twitter.com/tuIm6aYg70
— Bungie (@Bungie) October 23, 2015
Meanwhile, the return of Iron Banner to Destiny since the launch of The Taken King was welcomed with the promise of better rewards. As previously covered, players reported receiving few, if any, of the promised loot drops in numerous matches. Bungie defended the lack of drops at first. That is, until they discovered something in the code.
“It turns out that, when we started digging into the issue, we uncovered a nasty bug that affected how Legendary drops happen throughout the Crucible, including Iron Banner,” Design Lead Lars Bakken wrote.
“We’re working hard to ensure that the next Iron Banner will work as intended, and be even better than before,” Bakken explained. “These changes will make your entire Crucible career more rewarding.”
Other changes that are incoming include a rebalancing of the Daily and Weekly Crucible bounties and a change to Lord Shaxx’s Crucible quest line to make it less grueling. The latter was featured in the six things Bungie needs to fix for Destiny Year Two. The developer first fixed it by removing the quest requirement for alternate characters, but now the number of steps and the difficulty of some of the steps will be reduced.
Surprisingly, Bungie even gave an estimated date for the next major patch to be released. Look for the 2.0.2 update to be released in November.
[Images via Bungie]
