Bungie hold Destiny 2 shotgun nerf to preserve work-life balance

After the numerous stories we've all heard about overworked staffers and the culture of crunch that's prevalent at a number of studios, it's nice to hear about a developer that's trying to take a more sensible approach to things.

Bungie has heard its vocal community talking about the Lord of Wolves shotgun in Destiny 2. The weapon was tweaked in a recent update, but in the process, it became lethal in PvP battles, in particular on PC. Faced with an over-powered shotty and a frustrated community, it seems that after internal discussions, the studio opted to fold this fix into its planned update schedule, rather than asking developers to work overtime to fix a problem that they don't see as being terminal to the online experience.

"Whether you've been tamed by it, or are running around as a pack in Iron Banner, we're going to bring the Wolf to heel later this Summer," the studio wrote in a post.

"Sometimes, Destiny is going to have goofy outliers, or periods of time where something is OP (like the Wolves howling right now in IB on PC). We don't want these periods to last too long (post-Forsaken launch Voidlocks), but they can be memorable moments.

"Internally, we had a bunch of spirited debate this week around whether or not we should just prevent players from equipping Lord of Wolves throughout the game. This is a blunt tool, and basically banning an item from being equipped isn't something we take lightly."

Elaborating on the point and as highlighted in this community stream (thanks, Polygon), creative director Luke Smith explained how the decision was made:

"We're having the conversation about, 'is it worth doing that or is it better to preserve the work-life balance and ship it later in July?'. To ask a team to do that back-to-back - full disclosure, it's not a thing we want to do. We try to be really careful about stuff like that."