Destiny 2 devs don’t plan to ‘turn Checkmate on across all of Crucible,’ and players are breathing a sigh of relief

In Season of the Wish of Destiny 2, Bungie rolled out Checkmate as a core six-vs-six mode in PvP and if you, like many other players, already miss space magic in the Crucible, we’ve got some good news for you.

In a weekly TWID on Nov. 30, Bungie said it wants to “roll out Checkmate to a wider audience” but allow players who love the vanilla Control to still play it. This is why the Destiny 2 Team on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Nov. 29 announced the Control will be a selectable mode when Checkmate Control is active. The same also works for Sparrow Control in case you don’t like sparrows in your matches. Bungie didn’t specify when the change will go live, but it’s likely to happen with the next weekly reset on Dec. 5.

Bungie was putting a lot of effort into Checkmate over the past months and players started speculating the developers wanted to make it the new standard of PvP, to which the team responded: “We have no plans to turn Checkmate on across all of Crucible, instead we’re aiming for a midway point for ability cooldowns, and weapon tuning that doesn’t result in specific weapons dominating.”

It comes with great relief to players as frequent feedback regarding Checkmate (especially this week when you can only play Checkmate) was that games can get too sweaty and simply not as fun as regular PvP. “Not everyone is a fan of checkmate and simply replacing the control playlist that we’ve known and loved since D1 is not the move,” one player said.

The devs also revealed some insights regarding Checkmate tuning. Namely, they’re looking to try various new approaches to improve the special ammo system and reduce body shot damage to create a skill gap. They mentioned, however, that time-to-kill will be regularly tuned regardless.

It’s still unclear to me what Bungie plans to do with Checkmate. From what I can understand, the devs will use it to figure out that “midway point” and then apply it to the rest of the Crucible to create a balanced sandbox—but that’s just a theory. In the meantime, we’ll be able to kick back and relax in regular Control.