3 ways Bungie can make Destiny 2's ‘Sunsetting’ work in Beyond Light

‘Sunsetting’ is a term that when used in gaming means to phase out different gear or content after a certain amount of time. For Destiny, this is a way to promote the use of different weapons as players will not be able to hold on to the same loadouts for years at a time.

This concept of sunsetting was first revealed earlier in the year and since then it has seen a largely negative reaction from the community. This would be a massive change to the game and many were worried that Bungie would not be able to implement the change in a way that feels rewarding to players.

A portion of the community remained hopeful but it seems that hope was misplaced. It is now three weeks since the release of Beyond Light and it appears that sunsetting has been a big miss.

This is not the end though as there are some relatively simple adjustments that can be made by Bungie in order to keep the core concept of sunsetting intact while still feeling respectful to the time of the players.

Loot from Paid Expansions Exempt from Sunsetting

The core gameplay loop of a looter shooter like Destiny is the hunt for new and interesting gear to play with. Bungie could make the most engaging activity in the world but without unique weapons to chase, the activity will be left in the dust before too long. Conversely, players will shoot into a cave for hours if they know it will net them new weapons to increase their power.

This means that the overall value of the Forsaken and Shadowkeep expansions have plummeted now that their loot has been sunset and cannot be used in most activities in Destiny 2. Of course, there are still the story missions, destinations, dungeons and the raid, which still drops high power gear,  but without a large amount of worthwhile loot it all just falls a little flat.

Nightmare Hunts even had their recommended Power level updated to fit the new cap but the Legendary gear that can drop from these activities is still capped at 1060. As it stands, there really isn't much reason to revisit The Dreaming City or the Moon.

There expansions should either be exempt from sunsetting or have their price heavily reduced in order to reflect the reduced content.

Armor Exempt from Sunsetting (Or Reduce Masterwork Costs)

It’s no secret that sunsetting was born from the completely overpowered Pinnacle weapons like The Mountaintop and The Recluse. Bungie had forced themselves into a corner and had to come up with a way to remove these weapons from the game otherwise all future weapons would be irrelevant.

This was fair enough for the most part but also including armor in the sunsetting rotation comes across as nothing more than a way to raise player retention rates. Armor never was and never will be as problematic as the aforementioned Pinnacle weapons. There is a huge amount of RNG involved with farming for armor between the total stat roll itself as well as the stat distribution. It can take months to build up the perfect min/maxed set of armor that is fully masterwork and to have this taken away due to some problematic weapons is really off the mark.

Add on to this that the overall cost of masterworking a single piece of armor is so high and now suddenly a large portion of the player base simply won't bother with continuing to play for high stat armor due to it all becoming irrelevant in a year's time.

One alternate solution to this is to reduce the overall cost of Masterworking armor, or create additional avenues for earning endgame Ascendant Shards. This would slightly lower the overall headache involved with creating a half decent build.

Allow Reissued Loot to be Infused into Sunset Loot

This was another change that immediately caught people’s attention when Season of Arrivals launched earlier in the year. Within the Season’s loot pool were reissued weapons like Gnawing Hunger and the IKELOS Sniper Rifle but with a new Season Power Cap.

These weapons did not not even come with a refreshed perk pool but were instead carbon copies of the same weapons from Season of the Drifter and the Warmind expansion. Many people farmed The Reckoning for an untold amount of hours for a god roll Gnawing Hunger only for that version of the weapon to be sunset and for another copy to be released later on.

This is another change that feels like its only purpose is to drive up play time by forcing players to grind more hours in order to reacquire the same weapon that was forcibly taken from them.

A simple solution to this is that if you have acquired both the newer and older version of a certain weapon then you are able to infuse the newer one into the older one in order to increase the Power cap of the older version. This change would respect veteran player’s time by not forcing a needless grind while still allowing newer players to earn popular older weapons with a revamped Power cap.

Sunsetting as a core concept isn't going to kill Destiny 2 but it has created an air of negativity around the game if social media is anything to go by. This isn't the end though as the philosophy behind sunsetting is a sound one.

Sunsetting just needs a few tweaks here, a change of implementation there and it will all come together nicely in a way that will allow Bungie to continually expand the game while leaving players satisfied.