Developer Insight - Core Game: Activities

Welcome to one of many Developer Insight articles for Codename: Frontiers. Over the weeks and months to come, we will be covering a lot of different topics about changes coming to Destiny 2 next year with these deeper dives. Check back with our Paving the Way for New Frontiers article for more information on our plans and an always-updated list of these articles as they are published.  

Now let’s talk about core game activities 

The Core Game is Destiny’s always-available ritual activity offering, ranging from Strikes to Crucible to Events. 

Going forward, an even wider range of Core Game activities will provide more variety, deeper mastery, and better rewards through the introduction of challenge customization. 

TLDR 

• Core Game activities feature a wider variety of new and updated activities across many types, with an updated selection every Major Update. 

• Challenge Customization will provide a way to adjust activity difficulty, with better rewards for those seeking more challenge.

• The new Portal screen allows for quick access to Core Game activities, making it easy to find what you want to play.

The Problem 

In past Destiny releases, all attention has been on a relatively small offering of newly introduced seasonal activities, most often with a narrow range of difficulty options (if any.) Rewards and objectives have focused all purposeful play into these activities to the exclusion of most others. 

As a result, the ritual game quickly becomes stale and is exhausted of worthwhile rewards, and any further pursuit requires a pretty deep knowledge of Destiny or online guides to find worthwhile rewards in older activities. 

The Solution 

Core Game Activity Offering & The Portal 

The Core Game activities are those accessed from the new Portal screen and are together a selection of several dozen new and updated activities that tie into the current Seasonal theme and gameplay meta. This selection is updated every Major Update and includes the current Expansion and any running Events. 

Early mockup that is subject to change.

For more information about the Portal, please check out the deep dive.

These activities cover a wide variety of activity types, from Strikes to Dungeons to Crucible, and are organized in Categories with similar fireteam requirements. 

Challenge Customization 

The major change to Core Game activities is that they all support deeper personal mastery and a corresponding deep reward offering. We’ll start with PvE activities, then dive into the Crucible and PvP, which present unique challenges. 

All of the PvE activities will now support robust Challenge Customization, exposed as new options alongside selecting the difficulty: 

Work in progress mockups, subject to change.

Challenge Customization gives you the ability to select and activate Challenge Modifiers, which affect the activity you are launching. These Challenge Modifiers may: 

• Introduce new enemy combatant abilities to increase their threat.

• Introduce new combat challenges that change how you play. 

• Provide incentives for changing up your buildcrafting. 

• Raise the Power target for the activity, globally increasing the difficulty. 

As a player, you will first be able to select a base difficulty, such as Expert or Grandmaster. The difficulty will set some base difficulty tuning and a Power target, but more importantly will determine how many Challenge Modifiers you can add on, and in some cases which Challenge Modifiers are available. Higher difficulty means more Challenge Modifiers to slot, and a wider variety of them to choose from. 

Reward Rating 

Rising to the right level of challenge can make an activity not only more fun to play, but more rewarding too. 

All Core Game activities will support Reward Rating, which is a combined team and personal score that determines the amount and quality of rewards obtained at the end of the activity. 

Reward Rating is increased by: 

• Playing an activity at a higher base difficulty. 

• Applying Challenge Modifiers, which have individual bonuses to Reward Rating. 

• Having personal bonuses from sources like Power, Artifacts, or buffs. 

Here’s how Reward Rating works: 

As a team, you will earn a Team Rating over the activity, determined on a per activity basis. Sometimes this will resemble existing systems like Nightfall score, but new activity types can have their own way to determine Team Rating. This outcome is shared by all members of the team and will always try to mitigate competition between teammates for things like scoring kills or specific setups.  

At the end of the activity, your Team Rating is multiplied by any personal bonuses you may have. This final multiplied value is your Reward Rating, and this value is used to determine the quality and quantity of rewards. 

Reward Rating is used to determine things like the quality tier of the weapons and armor that drop, or the quantity of useful consumables like Enhancement Prisms or Ascendant Shards. 

In this way, you can select any Core Game activity, use your skill and build to take on more and more challenging versions of it, and earn higher and higher tier rewards. 

Except Crucible... 

Crucible is a unique challenge, because you cannot simply add Challenge Modifiers or use the score of the match as a Team Rating.  

This is a tricky problem that we’re still working out. We’re working through options like factoring in matchmaking ratings, or leveraging existing progressions, but each presents unique challenges to our end goal of ensuring that Crucible offers our PVP players a fair and complete path to high-tier weapons and armor. 

We will be excited to share a solution once we have one nailed down. 

FAQ 

What about Expansion activities? 

Expansion activities, such as story missions or Destination activities, present some unique challenges in how they relate to Power and changing seasons. Our intended outcome is that Expansion content is always a great way to start off a season and will have a path to high-tier weapons and armor, but that progress via Core Game activities will be part of that path. 

Raids and Dungeons released with Expansions still represent a pinnacle challenge for players and will have their own paths to the highest tiers of weapons and armor too. 

Are old activities going away? 

No, except for some seasonal activities that are normally removed at the end of a year. Older activities will remain available to launch from the Destination map, just as they are today. 

Over time, it is our intention to clean up and retire some older activity offerings that are well served by the Portal, such as Vanguard Ops. These have lots of ties to existing content, though, and will need to be moved over gradually. 

How does matchmaking work with Challenge Customization? 

For activities that support matchmaking, like those in Fireteam Ops, matchmaking will be available for some preset difficulties, but using Challenge Customization to enable different Challenge Modifiers will disable matchmaking. 

While Fireteam Finder may be a good way to pick up some slack here, we also intend to feature higher challenge options on a daily rotation, in activities with active bonus rewards. These activities should have concentrated enough populations to ensure that matchmaking can do a good job setting up good matches with solid connections.