The Destiny 2 community can disagree vehemently on a wide range of topics, from buffs and nerfs to cosmetics and everything in between. While fans can generally find a consensus that something is bad, it’s not every day they concur something is really good.
When it comes to The Coil, Destiny 2’s latest major seasonal activity, feedback seems to lean heavily toward positive. It’s a culmination of a year’s worth of experiments, bringing challenge, enthusiastic approval, and, more importantly, a metric ton of loot. In a game that’s sometimes criticized as being stingy, both the quantity and quality of drops in The Coil feel nothing short of miraculous. Developers wanted players to be rewarded for their time in this season’s biggest activity, a team of Bungie developers told Dot Esports at a roundtable last week, and to say it’s been a success might be an understatement.
“When we’re setting out to make an activity, we are putting the respect of the players’ time in the forefront,” staff designer Clayton Kisko said during the interview. “And so you can see that in The Coil, on getting paid out after every boss run.”
The Coil requires more time and commitment than your average seasonal activity. With four bosses and growing difficulty requirements, a full run can take you 45 minutes to over an hour, facing off against more challenging enemies every time. After all that investment, the “natural conclusion” was to have a room for players who achieved the highest score “and then to absolutely make it rain for them,” Kisko said. The Chamber of Wishes, as it’s called, showers players with a Borderlands-esque amount of loot, with multiple chests to open if players reach a high enough score.
The seven or so chests can grant multiple seasonal weapons, armor, and endgame materials like Ascendant Shards and Ascendant Alloy—fitting prizes for venturing into content that scales to a power delta similar to Master-level content (though with a few buffs on your corner). And then, even if you don’t make it to the end, your rewards also increase throughout the run. The Coil has four boss rooms, and you can open chests at the end of each battle. The Coil has excelled at letting players “progress up to a point where you are challenged and it feels like when you get to that point and you succeed, you’re rewarded,” senior narrative designer Nikko Stevens added.
The Coil was an immediate success, but its innovation hardly came overnight. Bungie has experimented tremendously in seasonal activities in Seasons of the Deep, Witch, and now Wish, flirting with the roguelite and breaking the mold in all three.
This triumvirate of seasonal activities may show a change of pattern, and Bungie seems to be listening. If “players are showing an appetite for longer, extended content, I think we can absolutely explore those ideas,” Kisko said.
When designing seasonal activities, Bungie also considers how it’ll fit within the season’s themes, stories, and fantasies, he added. Having more meaningful activities “is absolutely on the table and something we want to continue to explore,” so long as everything fits together, according to him.
Of course, the Coil’s charm isn’t simply in its length. At its core, the ace up The Coil’s sleeve is its boatload of rewards. The activity pushed the risk up by a notch and bumped up the rewards considerably. Feedback seems to point toward a good balance of challenge, effort, and rewards, and finding that sweet spot will be key to the future of Destiny 2 after The Final Shape.
This isn’t to say The Coil is perfect. Its lack of variety and reused pathways sever its replayability, and the activity borrows disgraced modifiers from other parts of the game. Togetherness, arguably the most infamous negative effect, was so dreaded that Bungie removed it from The Coil after overwhelming player feedback.
Despite its flaws, though, The Coil has quickly become a standard for seasonal activities, mostly because of how it balances challenge and reward. That may be the biggest takeaway in a year full of experimenting: Destiny 2 players want more meaningful ways to spend their time. And Bungie, thankfully, is aware.
