'Sunsetting' in Destiny 2 is no more

To say that sunsetting, seen in-game as Infusion Caps, has been a heated topic of discussion within the Destiny 2 community for the last couple of months would be an immense understatement.

There have certainly been a few pockets of the player base that have sided with Bungie on this concept of force rotation of gear but for the most part the community has been staunchly against it. It seems that Bungie has finally decided to side with the majority and has announced in a recent Developer Update that going forward, they will be making sweeping changes to sunsetting.

In this Developer Update, titled ‘Destiny 2021 Update: The Road to the Witch Queen,’ assistant game director Joe Blackburn outlines many of Bungie’s plans for the coming year and beyond. One big point Blackburn decided to raise was how the team at Bungie have realized that sunsetting isn't sitting well with their players and how they could change this system to better appreciate their players.

In Blackburn’s own words: “With Season 11, we introduced infusion caps, an iteration on infusion designed to keep Destiny’s gear game fresh from release to release and to create a healthy ecosystem for our aspirational content. While we still believe in these goals, it's clear our execution was off the mark.”

So here is how Bungie plans to alter this system, or more accurately, completely get rid of it going forward. As of right now, any weapon that can currently be infused up to the max Power of 1310 will continue to be able to be infused up to max Power permanently. Starting in Season 14, Infusion Caps will also be completely gone from the game.

“This means you’ll be able to take your Trustee, your Falling Guillotine, and all the high-stat armor you’ve earned this year to take on the raid in The Witch Queen,” says Blackburn.

Basically, any piece of gear from Season of the Worthy onwards will be able to remain at max Power.

Blackburn states that they still believe in the higher concept of refreshing players' gear to avoid the meta becoming stale but they will be taking time to figure out the correct way to do this before implementing a new system.

“While we still strongly believe that Destiny needs a method to shift our meta in the game’s most challenging activities, we don’t believe that infusion caps are the right answer. We’re taking time this year to research and validate a plan that creates a fresh and balanceable ecosystem for our most aspirational content, one that doesn’t make our rewards feel like they have an expiration date,” says Blackburn.

“We’ve learned a lot this year and don’t want to rush finding the best plan, so don’t expect to hear anything more about this until after The Witch Queen.”

As a counter to this, Blackburn now says that the team at Bungie will need to be more aggressive in their PvP and PvE weapon tuning as now certain builds and pieces of gear will remain in the game for good. Felwinter’s Lie and Warmind Cell builds for specifically mentioned by Blackburn so expect to see some updates to how these perform in the coming year of Destiny 2.

This developer update, and specifically its proposed rolling back of Infusion Caps, has generated a ton of positive energy within the Destiny 2 community.

Paul Tassi, one of Destiny 2’s most well known writers, tweeted out the following once the developer went live: “Sunsetting being gone feels like a literal weight lifted off the game. Like it's genuinely tangible”.

Gothalion, a well known streamer and content creator for the Destiny franchise, replied with a simple “Yep” to the above tweet from Paul Tassi and then followed up later with his own tweet of: “Today's article from @joegoroth has me excited to actually get back into Destiny this season. I'll be hopping in next week. Feels good.”

Datto, another well known content creator, uploaded a video with his thoughts on the developer update. In this video Datto was quoted as saying “I think the way they [Bungie] handled going back to no sunsetting was good.” and “It’s also going to lead to a lot more happy players in the game and the game can always use happy players playing the game.”

Even on reddit where the Developer Update was posted, the top comment in this thread with almost 5,000 upvotes is a simple, humorous comment by user CursedJay that reads: “THEY SUNSETTED SUNSETTING. THIS IS NUTS.”

This change is one that the player base has been clamouring for for some time and it was beginning to seem like sunsetting was here to stay. As always, it's great to see that Bungie does actually listen to its community every one in a while.