Since day one in Destiny, bounties have been an area of interest for players to focus their efforts – they offered mildly different ways to play the game without drastically affecting anything else. You’d simply pick one up and complete it during a mission or two, depending on its requirements. The only problem, however, is that the game currently has 39 PvE bounties. This is enough for a short-term fix, but we need more. Destiny needs more.
In theory, bounties are small incentives for players to player Destiny. They don’t necessarily encourage players to come back specifically to do them, like the Weekly Heroic and Nightfall Strikes do, but they can certainly keep a player there long after they’ve completed the one Strike they logged on to do.
Integrating some of these bounties with patrol missions on each planet is equally genius – these encourage players to complete patrol missions and bounties simultaneously, thus further levelling up their chosen faction (Vanguard, Future War Cult, Dead Orbit, or New Monarchy).
Once you’ve played Destiny for a few weeks, these bounties become a chore. You pick them up because it’s a habit before going into a mission, and you stop actively pursuing them. This is not a feature that you want your game to have. 39 bounties is definitely a lot, but an upgrade to the roster would be far more preferable.
Reddit user ‘Kor_of_Memory’ has taken the time to draw up a shortlist of suggestions for more bounties Bungie could implement, and it’s well worth the read, given that they drew it up in “about 20 minutes”. It’s a bit too lengthy to paste in this article, so you can read the original post here.
The suggestions are quite similar to Bungie’s original lineup in theory, but in practice they actually encourage entirely different styles of play. Some weapons-based bounties encourage players to step outside their comfort zone and adopt a different class of weapon, while others require a certain distance between players and the target. Others read more like Achievements or Trophies (such as “Complete a Strike without getting a kill using a primary weapon”), and offer more of a reward-based incentive for players to complete them.
This style of bounties offer more of a reason to keep coming back and playing, simply due to their level of involvement – they require players to put more concentration and effort into stepping out of their regular playing style. I can’t say from experience how hard they would be to implement from a design perspective, but I hope Bungie is working on something similar for future updates.
Players need more reasons to keep coming back to Destiny, and while new bounties may not necessarily constitute an entire reason within themselves, perhaps they can make things more challenging and more enjoyable on the way.