Bungie explains exactly why Destiny 2 updates take so long
Fans have been waiting a long time for some Destiny 2 updates, and now the developers are explaining why.
There are a lot of issues fans want fixed in Destiny 2, and Bungie has finally responded with a lengthy write-up of changes that will be arriving in the game shortly. Fans still have one major question, though: Why did it take so long for Bungie to respond?
As part of a further response, Bungie has now released a podcast where the team dives into the details of the entire progress.
“What does it take to update the game?” project lead Mark Noseworthy said on the podcast. “Something I’ve seen online is ‘how is it that you guys can fix this one thing but not this other element?’ Any time a bug in the live game comes up we have to evaluate it. There are three questions we ask—’how severe is this thing?’, ‘how quickly can we fix it?’ and ‘when can we test and deploy it?'”
Noseworthy added that fixing bugs depends on several factors, including whether the bug or needed balance tweak is something server-side, like matchmaking, or client-side, such as how much damage weapons do. Client-side problems require patches, while server-side problems can be fixed by tweaking numbers. But even then, changing problems can be difficult.
“What’s it going to take to fix this?… Something could take one minute for us to fix, and three weeks for us to test and deploy,” Noseworthy continued. “Just because something is easy to fix doesn’t mean it’s easy to deploy to the world… A bunch of the game runs out of our data centers and bunches of code and content have to make it there as well.”
Noseworthy cited the recent Bureaucratic Walk glitch as an example of an issue that’s more complicated than it seems. He called it a “medium difficulty” problem to fix—Bungie couldn’t just pull the client-side emote out of the game. Once the glitch was straightened out, though, it became a question of when to deploy the fix. At the time, Destiny 2 was about to launch on PC, and the team wanted to change as little as possible. At the same time, the bug was interfering with PvP. The team’s ultimate solution was to “punt Trials for a couple of weeks.”
“Our actions speak louder than words and in the long term, it’s on us to make sure those who play the game feel rewarded, that their time is well spent,” Noseworthy concluded. “We’re going to deliver on that but I don’t think people need to take us at our words—the proof is in the pudding.”
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