16 little things that would make us clutch Destiny 2 even closer to our warm and loving chests

Destiny 2 is great, but it’s not perfect. Here are some little bitty things we’d like to change.

We’ve got some small niggles about Destiny 2 which we would like to air. They’re not very big, and they shouldn’t distract from the fact that we think Destiny 2 is a pretty good time. They’re just quality of life improvements and minor complaints we feel could be addressed, making Destiny 2 even better. Constructive criticism, possibly?

Since everyone here is a world expert in programming, game design, and Bungie’s internal tech, we absolutely know that these changes would take no time at all to implement and fully expect to wake up tomorrow and find all of them in game and waiting for us. We could then drop them in our Destiny 2 guide with ease. Thanks in advance, Bungie!

1. Let us check challenges before we enter Activities

Challenges are a really great new feature in Destiny 2, and encourage Guardians to check out all four Destinations, the Crucible and Strikes as part of their daily ritual – or at least one of the above, thanks to the daily featured Challenge quest. It’s a nice way to get you doing stuff outside your checklist of chores, and to make completing your standard play more rewarding. We like it a lot.

But we’d really like to be able to make decisions about Challenges before we arrive in an Activity. If we only have time to clean out one Destination today, we want to pick which one without flying around all of them to check which one doesn’t include a Lost Sector on the total opposite side of the map from amy LZ points. We want to go into the Crucible without weapons and subclass primed for the elemental Challenge. We want to – look, to be honest, nothing’s ever gonna make us want to sit in the Strike playlist, so the Challenges there may as well stay as they are. Speaking of which…

2. End Strike playlist repetition

There aren’t that many Strikes in Destiny 2, even if you’re on PS4 and get a bonus one, and yet it is entirely possible to be here at the end of week two and not have seen them all. With no way to select a Strike from the Director except through the playlist, you’re at the whim of RNGesus – and our absent-minded deity seems inordinately fond of throwing the same Strike at us multiple times in a row.

It’s entirely possible to sit in the Strike playlist and do the same mission three times out of four, and frequently you’ll do it back to back. Perhaps this is a fault of matchmaking, as Bungie seeks to give everyone a look at a range of Strikes and all your rando blueberries are yet to see Savathun’s Song 40 million times like you have. But surely that should work in the other direction sometimes?

3. Let us take a fireteam of four into PvE

For a game that makes much of offering a similar, predictable experience across PvP and PvE, Destiny 2 really makes life difficult for those who like to switch back and forth by insisting one of your pals has to drop out if you want to hit up some public events or story missions.

We sort of see how this works in favour of solo PvP players, who will benefit from being matchmade into groups with pre-formed teams of three, as Destiny 2’s PvP is very focused on teamwork. But it seems the more common habit is to group into four for PvP, and then feel frustrated when one of you is forced out if everyone wants to switch to PvE.

4. Don’t badge vendors until we earn a reputation level

You pull up the Director. You notice the Tower is badged. “Golly!” you think. “Someone wants to talk to me!” You open the Tower map. Yes, it’s the Gunsmith. What could he want? All a-tizzy, you fly in. “Yes, Banshee-44? You wanted to see me?”

The irascible old Gunsmith stares at you. “You can turn in five weapon parts,” he says. “Oh,” you reply, somewhat taken aback. “Uh. Here you go?” He takes them. Your reputation bar increases a tiny amount. You receive no rewards. He does not say thank you. He does not even blink. You transmat back to your ship and return to orbit, muttering about NPCs who waste your damned time.

5. Let us track scannables

There’s no Grimoire in Destiny 2, but you can poke around odd corners and scan objects to get little pieces of lore and hints at future stories – or far more frequently, throwaway comments and bad jokes.

There’s absolutely no reward for doing this except the satisfaction of having done so, but that satisfaction is difficult to come by. The game makes no distinction between previously viewed and new scannables, and since many of the environments are similarly-laid out (hello, Titan: which square corridor is this?) you’ll all-too-often pause and hunt down something only to hear the same old shipping manifests line you’d heard a bunch of times. Annoying! Am I missing something I haven’t found yet? Have I already heard this one? How nice it would be to open the companion app and check.

6. Let us preview transmat effects

Transmat effects are mods, which means they’re one-use-only consumable cosmetic items that attach to your ship. Change mods, and whatever you had installed before is lost.

We’re reconciled to this, even though drop rates for transmat effects (and Sparrows, ships and emotes) are low enough to make us give the whole Bright Engrams system a bit of side eye, but we’re not reconciled to the fact that we can’t see what a transmat effect looks like before we wipe out our old one. That Cabal drop ship one is screen-hoggingly ugly and annoying, for example, and to have plastered it over a lovely pink aura or something feels terrible.

7. Give us a compass

Recently we pointed out that the radar has an objective marker on it, because this is something some of you somehow didn’t know. But now we’re asking Bungie to add further clutter to its UI that apparently nobody even looks at, so that we can find North without having to remember it’s x many degrees to our left after we close the map.

Why? So we can find what the heck we’re looking for – especially region chests and Lost Sectors. It’s super annoying to check where you are relative to a marker, then close the map, move, and check again only to find you’ve wandered off in the wrong direction.

8. Let us set waypoints

Stop me if you heard this one: “I’m near that Cabal base. You know. By the rocks?”

It is so, so easy to lose track of your fireteam in Destiny 2, especially when faffing about in the open world as Bungie apparently intends us to do these days. Letting us ping the map would really help in that regard, and also when planning tactics for various Activities, pointing out interesting features, and hassling our mates.

9. Add modifiers to Meditations

As detailed in our Destiny 2 Activities glossary, Meditations are a weekly selection of story missions you can revisit by talking to Ikora Rey. These offer Vanguard Research tokens you can trade to Ikora for her selection of Legendaries, and we like that they offer yet another loot path for PvE players – but they just seem to be the same old missions.

Wouldn’t it be rad if there was a Prestige difficulty for these missions – or if they had modifiers, Nightfall style, to make them trickier? Maybe they could even fork over some fancy loot… but we’re never going to stop asking for more fancy loot so use your discretion on that one, Bungie.

10. Mix up Nightfalls a bit with unlimited time challenges

We sort of understand why Bungie added a timer to the Nightfall; it was too easy – if boring – to play them through by hanging back, sniping, waiting for Supers to charge, and otherwise not really facing up to the difficulties of high-level group PvE play.

Right now, though, we’ve moved too far in the opposite direction – Nightfalls have become exercises in seeing how quickly you can Sparrow through hostile territory, and how few enemies you can kill. It favours a speedrun style of gameplay over all others, which seems really unlike Bungie’s usual philosophy of giving everyone a chance to play, no matter their preference

11. Let us equip more emotes, dammit

Although we’re not sold on the Internet meme ones on account of living here and being over it, Destiny 2’s emotes are wonderfully expressive. Cracking the right one at the right time is a joy for you and everyone around you, and we want more chances to do that.

Right now, Destiny 2 only allows you to swap out the standard “point” for another emote. Your default dance, plus sit and wave, are permanently mapped to the remaining D-pad shortcuts. There’s no way to quickly cycle through emotes; you have to open your inventory and manually change them over. What a shame! Let’s fix that, since we’ve been complaining about it since The Taken King.

12. Give us back ship and Sparrow collections tabs

It’s rad that Destiny 2 brought back D1’s collections terminals, but made them neatly and tidily accessible in the Vault. But why have our ships and Sparrows not come with us? These rare drops (see #6 for some complaining about that) are treasured, and having to dismantle them when our inventory fills up, knowing we’ll never see them again, is really hard.

In D1, some ships and Sparrows were mementoes of Raids and other glorious memories, and it was so much fun to bring one out and remind everyone of that. Now they seem to be as disposable as mods and shaders – but nowhere near as common. What’s going on?

13. Let us browse our performance via the companion app

Now that we get drops on every Crucible match (even if they are almost always Rares) and don’t get booted from menus, it’s easy to miss the post-game scoreboard because you’re looking at your inventory. If the next match starts straight away, you might miss it altogether – and then how will you screenshot your glory to brag about online?

In D1, your recent match results – and in fact heaps of other statistics – were available in the companion app. We’d like that back, please. It was nice.

14. Give Xur more inventory

Xur had a nice collection of Exotics this weekend, but it was easy enough to clean him out if you had a stack of Legendary Shards ready, and many hardcore players already had his entire collection on hand.

We’re not suggesting Xur should deliver more Exotics (there’s aren’t really that many Exotics in Destiny 2 and we’d like this game to last through teatime, thanks), it’d be nice if he had some of the exclusive goodies that made his visits so much fun in D1. Where’s Destiny 2’s equivalent of the Three of Coins or Glass Needles?

15. Bring back Raid drops

It’s nice that Raid rewards follow the same system as other loot pathways, with players cashing in tokens to earn random bundles of goodies. But also it’s a bit unsatisfying to beat an epic encounter and not get a weapon or armour piece. It’s especially frustrating for players who don’t finish the whole Raid or can’t get to the secret Leviathan Raid Exotic chests, as it means they may need to wait weeks to get any loot.

In D1, even managing one encounter of a Raid was worthwhile as you had a chance to get some rare and glorious drop that would specifically help you in the Raid itself. It was like every time you progressed even a little way, you got the tools and power you needed to go further – and that was super cool. It’s also just really fun to have the loot rain down around you after a boss fight, which is a lesson we thought Bungie had already learned, and to celebrate your finds with your Raid team on the spot. (“I got Gjallarhorn!”)

16. Make Raid loot special

The raid armour sets and weapons look kind of cool but they don’t seem especially fancy in the perks and traits department. In D1, the Raid weapons had special bonuses that only applied to the Raid itself, which ties into our point above about getting the tools you needed as you progressed through the Raid checkpoint by checkpoint.

There’s an argument to be made that once you’ve got the whole raid set you’ll never go back so unique perks are useless, and that too many LFG posts demanded this or that special equipment, but for those players for whom Raiding is a weekly ritual or social event, gradually getting better and better thanks to an influx of tailored equipment was super cool.