Destiny 2 Director To Players: ‘Delete All That Shit’ Taking Up Space In Your Vault

This week we got another heads-up on several changes coming to Destiny 2, both in its next expansion and beyond, including that players won’t need to keep copies of all their favourite-looking armour in order to take advantage of the upcoming stats-preserving transmog system.

“You’re not going to have to have the copy in your inventory,” Luke Smith, the game’s director, said in a Twitch interview last night. “You can just delete all that shit. We’re going to scrape your account data, and the things that are eligible for transmog will be things that you’ve collected across your journey. It’s not going to be what you have at the moment.”

Transmog, a common feature in MMOs that lets players spend resources to swap out how gear looks while retaining whatever stats and perks it comes with, was originally announced back in May. And while it’s not set to go live immediately when Beyond Light launches next month, players can now clear out their vaults ahead of time knowing it won’t affect their ability to bring back their favourite armour styles from seasons past. If you hear a faint cosmic shimmer in the distance it’s the sound of hundreds of thousands of Destiny 2 players sharding all their old junk this morning.

But that’s not all. Between the rest of the interview and Bungie’s latest weekly blog post, there’s a lot more we now know:

• New Darkness-based subclasses besides Stasis are coming in the future.
• Beyond Light will be smaller than Forsaken but bigger than Shadowkeep.
• Everyone will start Beyond Light at 1050 Power.
• The new soft cap is 1200, hard cap is 1250, and the pinnacle cap is 1260.
• Gambit, Crucible, Seasonal drops, and strikes will continue to occasionally drop Powerful engrams beyond the current weekly limit.
• Vendor armour is getting completely refreshed in Beyond Light.
• Armour purchased by turning in tokens will be 20 points below your current power.
• Phaseglass Needles, Alkane Dust, Simulation Seeds, and Seraphite are being phased out after Season of the Hunt. They can be turned into the Spider for a small amount of glimmer.
• A bunch of other old items, currencies, and quest related stuff taking up space in player inventories is being removed as soon as Beyond Light goes live. Here’s the full list.
• Bright dust can now be earned through the season pass (7,500 for the free version, 3,000 for the paid one) and weekly bounties will only award 100 instead of 200.
• Spider will sell Enhancement Prisms instead of Legendary Shards (limited to three per week) and the cost of Enhancement Cores will be a flat 30 Legendary Shards each for a total of five a day, rather than going up in price every time you buy one.
• All sparrows are about to become instant-summoning (meaning the Transmat Preloader perk is going away).
• Bright Engrams will now have random cosmetics from all seasons a year prior to the current one.
• Bungie is working on a new, less oppressive bounty system for Season 13.

Finally, Destiny 2 will be losing a bunch of world activities. Not as part of the Destiny Content Vault, Bungie says, but rather as part of “general game updates”. This means no more Flashpoints, Destination Adventures, or World Quests from year-one locations.

A lot of these changes, coming soon or in Season 13, are quite granular, but such is the nature of Destiny 2 that the entire experience can turn on how well certain minute aspects of the progression are calibrated. While the news on transmog is a relief, I’m still extremely sceptical of how Bungie continues to try to message the power grind. It seems married to this for the purposes of keeping people playing, but also tacitly admits it can end up just being a barrier to many players that’s more tedious than fun to work on overcoming.

On the bright side, I’m heartened to hear that Beyond Light will be bigger than last year’s underwhelming Shadowkeep expansion, which added back the moon but barely nudged the game’s overall narrative forward. Am I ready to find out what lies burred on Europa? Yes, I’ve been ready since the series launched.

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