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After Two Years, It’s Time For Destiny 2’s Artifact System To Change

Paul Tassi

Back in October 2019, Destiny 2 introduced a new seasonal system with the Shadowkeep expansion, an artifact full of temporary mods that you would unlock over time.

The artifact, I would argue, has generally been a success. We have seen many meta-defining mods come and go throughout this system, whether that’s Oppressive Darkness ages ago or Breach and Clear this season. Some of them are stupidly strong but because they only hang around for a season, they’re not so broken they need to be nerfed or patched, and they can just periodically show up to create unusual metas for a few months before leaving. It’s fun!

What’s not fun? The fact that other than the mods themselves, the way the artifact works has not changed since literal launch, almost two years ago.

You may know where I’m going with this. The first and most obvious annoyance with the artifact system is the fact that it costs an increasing amount of glimmer to reset the artifact and pick a new 12 mods to use. This often happens when you simply want to change one mod in the final two rows, and the escalating cost is an annoying glimmer sink that serves no real purpose other than to discourage people from playing around with different builds.

But we wouldn’t need this system at all if the artifact just did the next most logical thing: allow us to unlock every mod in the artifact over time.

I am okay with the way the system works right now. Get XP, earn unlocks, make your way through the different columns. Yes, this means you have to buy some garbage mods you don’t care about to move forward, but the point of this new system would be once you hit that final row and got 12 unlocks, you could then just…keep earning more unlocks until you managed to get all 25 mods for the season. Maybe this takes like, 100 ranks worth of season pass XP, but the point is, I see no reason not to give people full access to all the mods.

If Bungie’s concern is that too many mods could create too many unstable interactions, I think the design of the mods themselves prevents that. For instance there are loads of key mods stacked into the class item slot where you can’t even use more than two at a time, and ones like Breach and Clear that cost nine essentially can’t be stacked with anything. The system itself deters some kind of ultra nuts build using like 15 seasonal mods because of slot limits and energy costs, and allowing unlocks of all 25 mods every season wouldn’t change that. You can already combine almost any couple of mods in the game, but the current system heavily limits experimentation because of how annoying it is to both reset the artifact for glimmer and spend unlocks on useless mods you don’t actually want.

If there is some grand rationale for why we can’t unlock all season mods that Bungie has, I would love to hear it. But I have been racking my brain about this for nearly two years now, and I can’t think of a good reason for this current system to exist unchanged all this time, after this was a common complaint about the artifact from its very first season. Bungie is good at listening to feedback in many instances, but why they have not changed how the artifact works in any capacity after all this time, I have no idea.

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