Destiny 2 has taken center stage in many online discussions since the Lightfall expansion dropped, but not every debate has shed good light on the game and its many new features and constant updates. A great example of this comes from Destiny 2's mid-season patch, which was recently released amidst critiques for the relatively shallow changes compared to some expectations, but more importantly, for the many issues that arose with its launch and that still linger in the game. However, a more recent fix to another issue that emerged with speedruns of endgame content was that players were weapon-swapping to achieve incredible DPS with guns like the Fourth Horseman Exotic shotgun, and Bungie's solution feels a lot like it's straight out of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
While the comparison might seem jarring at first, it's no mystery that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have been plagued by plenty of performance issues since their launch last November. The glitches and problems with the games' state went on unnoticed for a while, but eventually, Game Freak released a patch to improve the overall performance of the Gen 9 Pokemon games, but at a high cost. This approach is the same that Bungie used with Destiny 2's weapon-swap issue, and players are not happy about it.
Why Destiny 2's Fix is as Bad as Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's
The way Game Freak handled the Pokemon Gen 9 issues was by decreasing the number of critters one could see in the open world from 15 to 12, which not only made Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's region feel empty, but it didn't resonate well with fans. It was also an indirect nerf to Shiny hunting, as players relied on seeing more Pokemon at all times to find their favorite critters with a unique color palette. The fix didn't even improve the games' performance by a significant margin, and it seemed like a no-win situation at the end of the day.
In order to account for the recent surge in speedrunners making easy work of Destiny 2's Root of Nightmares Raid and other pieces of endgame content, Bungie opted for a drastic fix that could solve issues like weapon-swapping when it comes to bursting down bosses. Many players attribute this to the Fourth Horseman swapping techniques that were highlighted in several solo or speedrun clears of endgame activities, and while it's probably a good part of the reason, Bungie could have disabled that specific Exotic to fix the issue temporarily.
Instead, this Tuesday's patch introduced a hotfix that now imposes a 2-second cooldown on firing any weapon that players swap into their loadouts from their inventories. While this may not seem like a big deal, especially for those instances where players have a locked loadout anyway, such as Destiny 2's GM Nightfall Strikes, it is quite noticeable and impactful everywhere else. Essentially, players feel that to fix one issue in a select few instances, Bungie opted to instead "nerf" the overall experience for everyone. In a matter of two days, this quickly escalated into a controversy where some fans are siding with Bungie because they don't notice a difference and others are unhappy about the change.
The underlying problem is that this was probably the only blanket solution that allowed Bungie to prevent weapon-swapping to become too oppressive in the current meta, to the point that players could trivialize content that's meant to be hard. The company even issued a statement saying that a hotfix is being planned for Destiny 2's Season of the Deep launch to reduce the cooldown to just about one second. Even then, players feel this is not the right way to deal with this, which puts them in the same shoes as Pokemon Scarlet and Violet fans.
Destiny 2 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.