Highlights
- Destiny 2's Season of the Deep is ending with a successful run, but players are upset that Bungie hasn't properly addressed PvP and Gambit issues.
- Gambit, Destiny 2's least popular mode, is getting a new map in The Final Shape era, but it may be too little, too late to save the mode.
- Bungie is adding two new factions to shake up the gameplay loop, but with the resources being pulled away, Gambit's future looks bleak and new content will likely be scarce.
Destiny 2's Season of the Deep is about to end after a successful run that managed to rectify several issues with the Lightfall campaign, and Bungie is preparing to host a massive showcase at the end of the month that will detail both Season 22 and The Final Shape expansion. Ahead of this showcase, however, Bungie released a Destiny 2 State of the Game post to address some pain points, upcoming changes, and the many challenges the team is facing. Of all the problems with the game right now, Destiny 2 players are upset that Bungie failed to properly address those concerning PvP and Gambit, with the latter getting the even shorter end of the stick.
Gambit is Destiny 2's least popular mode by a big margin, and while it has its fans, it seemingly never manages to entice a bigger portion of the playerbase - be it for rewards, the gameplay loop, or other reasons. Bungie has been tight-lipped about this issue for a long time, with the developer only occasionally making changes to the mode over the span of entire years, and so far it's lost more content than it has gained. However, the latest State of the Game post highlights some Gambit changes that can be healthy for the mode, but they might as well be its swan song.
Destiny 2's Gambit May be Getting its Last Update in The Final Shape
For the first time since the 2020 Beyond Light expansion, Gambit is getting a new map in The Final Shape era, bringing its total from just four to five. Yet, this is an old map, one of those that were vaulted with Beyond Light, rather than an entirely new one. To many players, this feels like too little, too late to save Destiny 2's Gambit from complete shutdown because map variety between matches will still be very poor.
Enemy variety has long been another troubling aspect of the game mode given that there are only five enemy races to defeat, with little differences in what they bring to the table. With Destiny 2's The Final Shape, it seems Bungie wants to implement two more factions in the form of the Shadow Legion from Lightfall and the Lucent Hive from The Witch Queen, which could shake up the overall gameplay loop. Still, all these additions are at the very least over six months away, assuming The Final Shape expansion launches toward the end of February next year.
While Bungie's intentions are fundamentally good and there's a chance that Gambit will thrive at least a tiny bit, the studio did state that spending more resources on the mode would take them away from other areas and that at this point it may not be a great investment. This, paired with the fact that Gambit is becoming entirely optional in order to maximize one's Power Level in Destiny 2, with players being free to choose whether to just play Crucible and Vanguard, it seems that there won't be anything else in the pipeline coming to save Drifter's dedicated playlist.
Furthermore, Bungie is removing the Freelance node from Gambit, which allowed players without a fireteam to join in on matches where they're not competing against fully-stacked groups. This will be replaced with a Fireteam Matchmaking node, with the intention of making the queue faster. Unfortunately, it seems like there's not a lot that players can truly hope for when it comes to the future of Gambit in Destiny 2, and the most likely outcome seems to be that the playlist will just stop getting new content and updates outside of maybe a few weapons for gamers to grind.
Destiny 2 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.