This week Destiny 2 developer Bungie announced the return of Destiny’s Trials of Osiris. However, it also confirmed: “Artifact power will be enabled for all activities including Trials”, which has raised some eyebrows in the FPS game’s community. Following this, the studio has now said it’ll be disabling the Artifact for Trials until it can add Power capping.
Game director Luke Smith has announced the decision on Twitter, explaining: “We will be disabling the Artifact for Power-enabled PVP (Iron Banner and Trials) until we can implement a Power cap feature. This cap will allow us to weave Artifact and Power Pursuit together while preventing unbound Power growth in PVP.”
Given Trials of Osiris isn’t even live yet, the timing of this news is quite surprising, but likely welcome to the Destiny 2 community because of the balancing issues the Artifact’s inclusion in Power-enabled PvP could potentially bring to the game. Artifacts are seasonal items that bestow powerful boosts to players’ Power through mods and are unlocked as you progress through challenges.
Having the Artifact enabled for a PvP mode like Trials could, in theory, mean players who have gained extra Power through hours of grinding in PvE wield an advantage over players who haven’t (and who could actually be more skilled players).
We will be disabling the Artifact for Power-enabled PVP (Iron Banner & Trials) until we can implement a Power Cap feature.
This cap will allow us to weave Artifact and Power Pursuit together while preventing unbound Power growth in PVP.
— Luke Smith (@thislukesmith) February 28, 2020
If you’re keen to know how this will all work together when the Artifact’s re-enabled again, Bungie’s got some good news – it’ll be explaining more about this soon, according to a follow-up tweet from Smith.
Somewhere down the road (but before we implement the Cap!), we’re going to talk about what effect Power has on combat in PVP (think deep dive/numbers/etc).
All of that is way more info than Twitter can take.
See you soon.— Luke Smith (@thislukesmith) February 28, 2020
“Somewhere down the road (but before we implement the Cap!), we’re going to talk about what effect Power has on combat in PVP (think deep dive/numbers/etc.)”, he says, though also adding: “All of that is way more info than Twitter can take. See you soon.”
The Season of the Worthy start date is just around the corner, on March 10, with Trials of Osiris’ launch following a few days later on March 13.