Bungie revealed a host of new changes coming to Destiny 2 last Thursday, and naturally, fans are pissed. But Destiny players aren’t mad that their favorite gun is getting nerfed or about the bevy of changes coming to various subclasses. No, Destiny players are mad about sliding changes.
Sliding is a way of life in Destiny 2. While useful in PvE for moving quickly and dodging bullets, it’s most commonly seen in The Crucible, Destiny’s PvP mode. Sliding helps players move fast while lowering their profile, making it harder for enemy Guardians to track their movements. When paired with a shotgun, sliding becomes a powerful tool to surprise someone with a blast from the ground.
In Destiny 2’s 15th season, starting on Aug. 24, the slide’s effectiveness will change a bit. While sliding, Guardians will lose a bit of Stability for their weapons, they’ll flinch even more when taking damage, and their shotguns will have a wider spread, reducing effectiveness. While this should mostly reduce shotgun sliding, fans have been shouting about the slide move in relation to another, more general topic: skill.
Skill and skill expression is something that’s very important to Destiny 2’s top players. In a game that doesn’t reward high-level players by letting them over-level content like a traditional MMO, showing off skill is the only real way for advanced Destiny players to show how much time they’ve put into improving.
With Bungie reigning in sliding — along with it toning down the movement abilities for one of the game’s most overpowered subclasses — some of Destiny’s fans are crying foul.
Making movement worse in crucible along with making aiming worse in crucible because casual players find it too hard to slide and engage.
Mickey Mouse clubhouse over at Destiny 2 crucible. pic.twitter.com/gLzxZzZ9Wb
— Wish (@WishYaLuckk) August 5, 2021
Some fans have taken to Twitter to attack lower skill players, suggesting that Bungie is simply dumbing the game down to make it more accessible. The general sentiment from players who hate the change seems to be that “casuals” are ruining Destiny and forcing Bungie to reduce the skill gap. Or that Bungie is catering to the unskilled rather than investing in its most dedicated players.
The change is divisive, and fuels one of the game’s longest burning fires: skill vs. accessibility. Bungie looks to be trying to make the game friendlier for the majority of players who either don’t want to play as hard as they possibly can every game or can’t handle the complex inputs that come with sliding into an engagement.
But players who love PvP and put the time in to get good at sliding in the first place feel burned by Bungie’s move. What’s the point of getting good if Bungie won’t just nerf your weapons, but your strategies as well?
Aztecross, a Destiny 2 content creator that focuses heavily on the Crucible, gives a good explanation on the entire situation and both perspectives.
Much of the frustration here seems to stem from more than just slide change, but a general philosophy change at Bungie that players see as going backwards. At the start of Destiny 2’s life, the game was far slower than it is today, prompting Bungie to launch an update called “Go Fast” about six months after the game’s launch.
All Destiny players, likely even those who are in favor of the slide changes, don’t want to see Destiny return to those slow-moving days. And some see Bungie’s change to its slide mechanic and the movement reduction to Dawnblade to be a slippery slope back to the dark ages of Destiny 2.
Source: Polygon
