Bungie has been the brunt of a significant amount of backlash this past year for its work on Destiny 2, very little of which was unfounded. In an effort to retain its player base and inject more transparency into its work on Destiny 2, the developer sat down in its latest Destiny 2 update blog post to discuss what the team is working on. The first topic of discussion is the ongoing changes to Nightfall strikes, as laid out by Game Director Christopher Barrett:

Nightfall should be a challenging test that only the bravest Guardians dare face. Fireteams of any size should be able to participate, from organized clan groups to skilled solo players. Players should be able to determine their own challenge level, by going slow and steady or fast and wild, with elective modifiers to test the most hardcore veterans. Your final score will separate the best from the rest, and with high risk comes high reward. Each terrible villain that players face should have a very rare and powerful unique item, themed to them, that tumbles to the ground as they collapse into a pile of bones. Conquering Nightfall should be a badge of honor, with the best players able to show off their achievements with new dynamic emblems and exclusive auras.

That’s the vision of where we want to take Nightfall, you’ll be seeing the first of this direction in the next patch, with more being added over time.”

Designer John Favaro and Senior Design Lead Tyson Green then take the stage to discuss how the team plans on enhancing Nightfall strikes, with Tyson specifically mentioning how negative of an impact time limit mechanics had on the weekly Nightfall. “As we are working on new sandbox improvements, we recognized the need for a venue in which those improvements matter more,” Tyson said.

The weekly Nightfall, especially on the Prestige difficulty, was intended to be such a venue, but the controversial time limit mechanic is a simple pass-fail mechanism. It only acknowledges success as being a clear, with no degrees of success past that, so no competition exists in that space. It turns a lot of people off of Nightfall too, since it is both difficult and indexes performance solely on speed.”

The next topic of conversation in the Destiny 2 update post are the actual scoring mechanics within Nightfall strikes. According to the team, strike scoring is being reworked to allow players to in essence create their own goals to strive for in order to earn greater rewards. Here’s the breakdown of the new scoring rules, along with a look at the updated mechanics coming to Nightfall strikes:

Destiny 2 Update

Nightfall Scoring

• Reward you for engaging and defeating enemies instead of running past them.
• Avoid over-emphasizing specific mechanics like precision kills that highlight certain areas of the sandbox (and/or punish other areas), so that players are the ones who determine the most effective Meta.
• Reward you for taking on greater challenges up to the limits of your own capabilities.
• Reward you for doing the above quickly and over the course of a short run versus long slogs over several hours.

Updated Mechanics

• Scoring is team-based and the sum of individual performances. A team should be able to focus on what works best, not feeling put out by who stole whose kill.
• Scoring is primarily driven by kills and secondarily by orb generation. We want you to find what works best for clearing strikes instead of telling you which weapons to use, but we want coordinated use of Supers and other team support mechanics to contribute to high scores. We’re interested in restoring special point awards based on medals, but we want your input to understand the basic meta first.
• Score bleeds over time. We are watching this closely — score decay can feel bad, but all else being equal, a team that clears faster than another team should score higher. Score decay achieves this in the most transparent fashion.
• Scoring cuts off after time thresholds. At 15 minutes, new points earned are reduced by 50%. At 18 minutes, you stop earning new points and it’s a race to finish the run and post your score. We want time to matter (see above), but we also want to avoid some of the problems we saw with Prison of Elders, where a “high score” might involve punishing respawning combatants (and yourself) for a few hours until the novelty wore off. A good Nightfall clear shouldn’t feel like a slog.

Challenge Cards will also be implemented, which will boost the challenge of the Nightfall strikes in exchange for score multipliers. Destiny 2 is now available for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

So, thoughts on the latest Destiny 2 update post? Will the new mechanics convince you and your friends to invest more heavily into Nightfall strikes? What else would you like to see implemented in a future Destiny 2 update? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!