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Bungie responds to Destiny 2 backlash by handing out overpowered, game-breaking gun

Bungie responds to Destiny 2 backlash by handing out overpowered, game-breaking gun

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It’s a clever move in response to overbearing outrage

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Image by Nick Statt / The Verge

The Destiny 2 community has been up in arms this week, even more so than usual, over the release of the new expansion, Curse of Osiris, and longstanding complaints with the way developer Bungie has handled its online-only shooter. The developer has a long list of changes it’s making, many coming next week in a post-update patch. But the community, which gathers mostly on the Destiny subreddit, isn’t having any of it. They feel that the sequel is irredeemably inferior to the original, and many have expressed how fed up they are with the state of the series.

Bungie’s response: let’s sell Prometheus Lens. The gun, a laser beam-like solar-powered trace rifle, shipped apparently with a game-breaking bug that makes it the most powerful weapon in the game by a long shot. That means that anyone who doesn’t have it — it only drops randomly from the game’s highest-level rewards — has been at a severe disadvantage since Tuesday with the expansion’s launch. Bungie has acknowledged the issue and plans to fix it next week.

However, to level the playing field and perhaps to shrug its shoulders a bit at the community’s perpetual outrage, Bungie stocked its in-game merchant Xur with the Prometheus Lens, meaning anyone can just go ahead and buy the gun, equip it, and take into the Crucible multiplayer mode. One unlucky Redditor even bet the community that if Xur sold the gun, he would shave his head and glue his hair to his face like a beard. So... we’ll see how that goes.

On one hand, Prometheus Lens has transformed Crucible into a game of high-speed laser tag, where the first person to aim down the sights and pull the trigger defeats their opponent in the blink of an eye. On the other hand, it’s a genius move from Bungie to spice up the conversation around the game’s toxic player base by tossing in a total wild card for kicks.

The developer knew everyone with the gun was going to use it until the fix came out anyway, and they didn’t want to cancel the competitive Trials of the Nine game mode that happens every weekend. So they just doled it out to everyone. It’s a clever nod to the community and a bit of a self-deprecation that we don’t usually get from a company like Bungie. And for once, the subreddit community seems to agree.