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Destiny 2 – The new weapon system “changes up the combat loop for players”

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GUNS! You need them, and Destiny 2 has them. So, so many of them. Enough to give Charlton Heston a post-mortem rush of blood to the head should you ever play Destiny near his grave. In Destiny 2, not much has changed with the fundamental pew-pew mechanics of those death-dealing weapons of mass destruction, as they were already brilliant in the first game.

What has changed however, is the philosophy behind those guns. In Destiny the first, weapons were broken up into three main categories: Primary, Secondary and Heavy. Primary weapons were your autorifles, hand cannons, scout rifles and pulse rifles, while the Secondary category was made up of fusion rifles, sniper rifles and pistols. Heavy? These were the big boys, your swords, rocket launchers and heavy machine guns that dealt the biggest damage but whose ammo was far more limited in its availability.

Destiny 2 is changing that rocket launcher/paper/scissors combo up considerably. Weapons now come in three new flavours: Kinetic, Energy and Power. Just about any gun can fit into any one of those categories, with few of them being exclusive to a single branch of gunslinging. “We still have three slots. We start with your power weapons, so this has changed up a little bit,” Destiny 2 Project Lead Mark Noseworthy (OH HI MARK) explained to me.

Destiny 2 guns (3)

it really adds a lot more player choice and it changes up the combat loop for players

We’ve got sniper rifles , we’ve got shotguns and they’re really beefy now. We’ve got grenade launchers, we’ve got rocket launchers and fusion rifles.Those are your power weapons. And your first two slots, you’ve got your Kinetic weapons. Things that shoot bullets and do damage, physical damage. And then you’ve got energy weapons.

They take down shields much faster, they kill other players much faster. Those are the players that have their supers enabled, when they have energy shields enabled essentially.

But those first two slots, Energy and Kinetic? They use the same archetypes. So SMG which is a new one, scout rifle, Pulse,hand cannons, sidearms they can go in both slots so you can now have a Kinetic hand cannon and a solar hand cannon on your character. Or you can have an autorifle in your first slot and a thermal scout rifle in your second slot.

We’ve done this because it really adds a lot more player choice and it changes up the combat loop for players.

Destiny 2 guns (2)

One of those new weapons mentioned above? The sub-machine gun, which feels like the bastard child of the fire-rate of the autorifle and the stopping power of a hand cannon when used up close. If you use it properly that is. “I think it’s for short-range,” Noseworthy explained.

Short-range, shorter clip

Short-range, shorter clip and it reloads much faster than a heavier weapon would. It’s shorter range,it doesn’t have the distance that a scout rifle would. But it shoots a lot faster right?

Yes, yes it does. And it feels awesome. It has a helluva kick to it, so I favoured using it like a shotgun: Up close, chain-sawing Vex faces off with a hail of arc-enhanced bullets. Destiny 2 hits console on September 8. PC players will have to wait a little bit longer for Bungie and Vicarious Visions to nail the port to that platform.

Last Updated: May 22, 2017

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