Destiny 2 Seasonal Challenges will replace weekly bounties to reduce the grind and FOMO

Bungie have announced a significant change to the day-to-day structure of Destiny 2: Beyond Light. With the reveal of the next Season coming on 2nd February, they’re getting ahead of the curve by revealing Seasonal Challenges that will replace weekly bounties in an effort to reduce the feeling of grind that the game can have.

As explained in the blog post, the team have looked at what they called “bounty fatigue and FOMO”, homing in on a few goals to try and improve the overall experience:

  • Provide a guide to new, returning, and veteran players for what to do today/this week.
  • Guide the player through the Seasonal content, week-over-week.
  • Encourage players to engage with complexities and nuances of the Seasonal activity and rituals.
  • Reduce the penalties on XP and Bright Dust for missing a given week.

Those goals led them to creating a new pursuit type, called Seasonal Challenges, which will introduce a new set of challenges to take on each of the first 10 weeks of a Season but, most importantly, won’t see them disappear once a week is done. These might lead you to Seasonal content, or nudge you to play Strikes, Gambit or the Crucible, or improving guns and armor, and so on. You can complete Challenges once per account, and you won’t have to visit a vendor, since they’ll just be there in the UI.

One thing to note is that, while Challenges won’t disappear week-to-week, most will vanish at the end of the Season, along with any unclaimed rewards. That’s why they’ll only add Challenges through the first 10 weeks, allowing people a little time to mop up at the end of a Season.

This, they think, will let them get more creative and less specific with what they’re asking players to do. Some will be longer, others will be shorter, with commensurate rewards. Here’s some examples:

  • Defeating Primeval Envoys in Gambit
  • Defeating enemies in Nightfall: The Ordeal with Seasonal weapons
  • Gaining Infamy or Valor ranks
  • Acquiring the ritual weapon and its cosmetic ornaments
  • Winning rounds in Trials of Osiris
  • Completing a Grandmaster Nightfall

These effectively replace weekly bounties, removing them from Zavala, Shaxx, the Drifter, Banshee-44 and the Seasonal vendor. They’ll still have daily bounties to reward XP, and there will still be repeatable bounties, but the weekly grinders will be gone.

It’s a really interesting change, and one that I feel will allow the game to be a more healthy part of a gaming diet. I have personally fallen off the wagon several times, and am currently in my longest spell of not playing the game since Destiny beta launched, but this would allow me to not feel like playing something else for a week or two has left me too far behind.

Source: Bungie

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1 Comment

  1. See I’ve not played Destiny since just before the Osiris dlc came out for D2 and I find it impossible to know where to begin whenever a new expansion launches so I haven’t ever jumped back in. It was the same with D1. Hopefully this helps but honestly it’ll probably be Destiny 3 before I play again, and we know that isn’t the plan for quite some time now.

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