Before the House of Wolves expansion touches down, Bungie will release update 1.1.2 for Destiny, which adds some new features to the game and fixes some old ones.
In their latest Weekly Update, Bungie noted that 1.1.2 doesn’t have a locked list of guaranteed features yet, but they are excited to explore these priorities for the new update:
- Vault Space – We know you need more space to collect all the treasures you gain from your missions, and more gear is on the way.
- Raid Fixes – There are times when Atheon and Crota can be uncooperative, so we’re tackling their worst bugs.
- Audio and Visual – Not everyone wants to see or hear a game the same way, which is why we’re looking at providing more options.
- PvP Ammunition – The Crucible team wants to change the way ammo crates dictate the flow of a battle.
- Strikes – The numbers tell us that there are some missions that are successfully completed far less than others, inspiring us to look at why people quit.
Also in the Weekly Update, the team that supports the Live Game was given a chance to talk about Destiny, with Design Lead M.E. Chung discussing how they decide what to include in each update:
There are a lot of things that factor into which features make it into a release. We get feedback from everywhere. We meet with our Community and Player Support Teams every week. They bring up the latest topics and top sentiment from various forums (b.net, reddit, etc). The User Research team gives us a regular report on how the community is spending their time in the game. We have conversations in the halls with our coworkers who ask for changes. We get friendly peer pressure from our buddies outside the studio when we’re online, playing the game for ourselves.
Our goal is to figure out what will result in the best experiences and make the most players happy. Every day, we have to think about how we allocate our time. Some plans can be surprisingly complicated to execute. At the end of the day, we want to continue to make the experience of playing Destiny better and deliver content to keep things fresh (and boy, do we wish we were faster). It’s been a huge learning process for us, and we are committed to improving.
Lead Producer Matt Priestley continued by talking about the challenges in deploying new content:
We need to pick improvements that we can design, build, test, and release with quality in a given timeframe. That starts with Design and Player Support nominating a set of changes. We put our ideas on the whiteboard and try to drive an acceptable Design and Test plan for each of them before our internal cutoff date. Our first job is to start with a big ambition. Our second job is to scope to what we can actually get done. Many ideas don’t meet our standards for the time we have.
With a game as complex as Destiny, that process can be tough. Take, for example, our fix for losing heavy ammo on death. That bug arose from the way in which several major gameplay systems work together. We engineered several fixes, but always wound up creating new bugs. We didn’t think it was acceptable to create new problems for a minority of players. Eventually, one of our engineers had a clever insight for how to fix the bug, and we patched it in the 1.1.1 Update.
Update 1.1.2 is still “weeks away,” with more details expected next week.
[Source: Bungie]
