When you boot up Destiny 2‘s new expansion you may find that the new Stasis powers feel a tad familiar if not entirely different to anything else in the game. Ahead of the Destiny 2 Beyond Light release date, Bungie has been talking up the design philosophy behind the new powers. Speaking to Edge (thanks, Wccftech), game director Luke Smith explained that the team wanted players to feel a greater sense of freedom.
“I think we’re trying to get a little bit back to the feeling of Destiny 1, but updated to how we’re thinking and some of the systems that we’re using today in Destiny 2,” he explains. “I’ll use a MOBA as an example. They get to have a lot of tuning vectors for their four abilities. The modularity and the piecemeal nature of Stasis allows us more flexibility to do more to introduce […] cool stuff. I know that Kevin Yanes and the abilities team have a pretty strong desire to keep iterating on it. We’re just getting started.”
If you missed out on Destiny 1, subclasses were more customisable as you could select different power-ups to finish your build. The game’s follow-up is a tad more limited as each subclass has three pre-set options you can pick from.
Bungie gave us a look at how Stasis’s customisation works not too long ago. It’s not back to the days of old, but you’ll be able to gain stat boosts and unlock new effects for your abilities with ‘aspects’ and ‘fragments’. To think, I was just getting to grasps with the whole armour mod system – oh well.
Bungie has also given us a peep at Destiny 2 Beyond Light’s Exotics, and some of them look quite good indeed. You can catch me rocking that ugly-looking Mask of Bakris. Fashion is a small price to pay for the ability to hop through dimensions.