Bungie Prepares For Lightfall With Changes To Matchmaking, Airborne Gameplay, And New Community Socials

With Lightfall’s release just over a month away, Bungie is working hard to get everything prepared for our Guardian's next adventure with improved matchmaking, better community communication, and improved gameplay.

Bungie has focused on fixing various matchmaking tools in Destiny 2 for some time now in order to make PvP more enjoyable and more accessible to all players. Season 19 added major changes with the addition of fireteam-based matchmaking, which eliminated the need for freelance nodes and allowed a fair playing field for fire teams of all sizes. With growing confidence season after season, players should prepare to see fewer freelance nodes, beginning with Iron Banner. Later the fireteam matchmaking feature will extend to Trials and then eventually Competitive 3v3.

Once the fireteam-based matchmaking is taken care of, the next feature will be dynamic skill matchmaking that will hopefully improve matchmaking in low-population skill brackets or during low-population times. Bungie even mentioned, “we are aware of the current status of matchmaking, and we are continually working toward improving our features and systems.”

Bungie’s communication with their players has always been better than most, but this communication has heavily relied on the community managers' accounts sharing a majority of the information, context, and clarifications that Bungie wished to deliver. While it worked great, it also brought additional stress to the community managers and other Bungie employees who shared Destiny 2 specific information from their personal accounts. As a way to move away from using the community managers' accounts, new socials have been created.

• Twitter: Destiny2Team

• Bungie.net: Destiny2Team#7714

• Reddit: /u/Destiny2Team

Players that would like to stay up to date on all information to come should make sure to give the accounts a follow as it is here Bungie plans to be more proactive in delivering news to the Destiny 2 community.

This is the first post from our brand-new Destiny 2 Team Twitter account.

We created this account to be able to share more info and clarifications from the Destiny 2 Team on various topics about the live game.

Look for more details about this account in the TWAB.

— Destiny 2 Team (@Destiny2Team) January 19, 2023

With Lightfall introducing the new Strand subclass, Bungie has been working to balance weapon effectiveness while airborne in a consistent and comprehensive way. Instead of relying on accuracy and aim assist penalties, it will now be required for Guardians to be more precise to land crits while airborne. This means even while airborne, guns will behave similarly to how they do when grounded, except that a player must aim right at the head to get a headshot unless they really build for airborne gameplay.

Because of these changes, airborne gameplay on the controller should be easier since the airborne magnetism penalty has been reduced to what it was in the game before AE. Overall, these changes make baseline airborne gameplay feel better, and building into higher AE should feel more rewarding.

Players that would like to read more into This Week at Bungie’s blog post and learn more about weapon changes and bug fixes can do so on the game's official site.