I love the direction Destiny 2 is heading in. The core action has felt great forever, and with Bungie now expanding on the RPG elements of the game, there are more ways than ever to make your Guardian really feel unique — both mechanically and aesthetically. Armor 2.0 has been a big boon here, allowing players to play around with mods at relatively low cost. There’s one big problem, though: it’s clunky as hell.
I’m not talking about the weird elemental energy mechanic, or the inability to easily check out a full list of the mods you’ve acquired — though those aren’t great either. The big issue for me is that putting a greater emphasis on flexibility has highlighted how limited the tools for organizing your gear are. Destiny 2 gives you ten slots per type of gear that you can keep on your person, as well as plenty of storage space. But the only real organizational tools you have access to are simple sort functions. You can order your Vault by Power level, type, and so on. But it’s just one big box you dump everything into. You even have to visit the Tower to swap things in and out of your Vault in-game, but at least you can use the companion apps to do it on the fly.
I’ve been keeping a few different pieces of armor on me at any one time, just so I can try out mods I receive regardless of their energy type. And I’m getting to a point where I’d like to have a few different builds with different mods, stats, and weapons I swap out for Crucible, Strikes, and so on. The problem is that there’s no easy way to build loadouts, so this gets confusing and awkward pretty quickly.
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Games like Monster Hunter World let you save sets of gear so that you can quickly get ready for whatever mission you’re headed on. Hunting a monster that uses lightning attacks? If you’ve already got a Lightning Resistance set built, you can easily swap to it in a couple of clicks. If I want to change out my Gambit loadout for my Nightfall one in Destiny 2, I better have all of that gear on my Guardian already — and even then, I have to manually equip each piece. Ideally, there’d be a list of loadouts in my inventory just like Monster Hunter‘s that would make changing things around less of a chore. Yes, you can use the third-party Destiny Inventory Manager to do this kind of thing, but it’d be nice to have the functionality available in-game.
That said, I’m inclined to believe this is just one of the growing pains Destiny will have to go through as Bungie pushes it in the direction of being an online RPG. It’s an annoyance right now, but a lot has changed this season — this stuff is still kind of a work in progress. I expect that as the next couple of seasons roll out we’ll see more quality of life improvements to bring the unsexy necessities of the game experience like equipping gear in line with the big picture that Bungie is painting.
