Destiny’s Taken King expansion tackles questing and bounty issues

Despite being a day late this week, the Destiny Weekly Update is a must-see for all fans of Bungie’s popular FPS MMO. Continuing the trend of recent weekly updates, this week’s blurb contains information about the upcoming expansion, The Taken King. More specifically, this week’s blog entry focuses on questing, bounties, and the new log.

Quests Page Highlights:

• We’re increasing the number of Bounties players can carry

• Both Quests and Bounty slots will be tracked in the HUD

• Completed Bounties will be turned in from the Quests screen

• Reputations will be moved from Inventory to the Quests page

– Deej, Destiny Community Manager

Enter Bungie’s newest plan to ameliorate bounty congestion. In The Taken King, multi-stage bounties such as the Exotic or Expansion bounties will act as quests, rather than bounties. They will be stored in a separate place in the UI where they can be tracked without taking up a bounty slot. Additionally, Bungie is once again increasing the number of bounty slots from 10 to 16, which should allow a Guardian to pick up most, if not all, of their daily bounties in one fell swoop.

If the increase in bounty slots and the moving of quests out of the bounty slots into their own section isn’t news enough, Bungie has also stated that “completed bounties will be turned in from the quests screen”. Although the wording is just a touch ambiguous, this particular bullet point seems to suggest that it will no longer be necessary to return to the Tower to turn in a completed bounty, but instead that completed bounties instead can be turned in directly from the UI, out in the field. If future updates also include the ability to pick up bounties from the Bungie Companion App, this will go far to ease one of the longest standing complaints about the game.

A common complaint almost from the first day of Destiny was that the bounty log felt too small for the amount of bounties being offered. At the start, the log held five bounties, while nearly three times that many were offered daily by the bounty vendor. In addition, special bounties such as the exotic bounties could tie up a bounty spot for days and even weeks.

Bungie increased the size of the bounty cap to 10 in response to player complaints, which alleviated some of the congestion – however, each new expansion included more bounties and more quests (bounty lines which tie up bounty slots for a lengthy period of time), but did not further increase the amount of bounty slots available. This congestion has been making it difficult to take up all of the bounties at once, especially when tied up in an exotic bounty or expansion quest. The news that Bungie is once again addressing the playerbase’s concerns of lack of bounty space is quite welcome.

Although Bungie still has work to do to regain player trust and confidence after the Luke Smith and Taken King Price Point fiascos, their continued insistence on listening to player complaints and actively working with players to improve the game is certainly a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see what next week’s Weekly Update has in store for players.