During Destiny 2’s recent free Gambit mode trial, many players praised the new mode and its clever combination of PvE and PvP gameplay. However, there were two issues that kept cropping up and, unfortunately, compounding each other to a fair degree: players would often quit when they found themselves on a losing team, and the lack of any join-in-progress functionality meant that teams which lost players in this or any other fashion were stuck being town a man (or several) until the match ended. Fortunately, Bungie has confirmed that both of those issues will be resolved in time for tomorrow’s launch of Forsaken proper.
While the Gambit trial was live, the official Destiny subreddit was unsurprisingly filled with threads that either praised the mode or mentioned the rampant quitting issues and inability to join in-progress matches. One of Destiny 2’s senior technical designers, Peter Sarrett, took the time to directly respond in one of those threads (harsh language warning for the thread’s title), confirming that, when Forsaken launches, Gambit will have both built-in quitter penalties and a join-in-progress feature.
Bungie later added to Sarrett’s confirmation, saying that it always planned on including quitter penalties and join-in-progress functionality in the Gambit experience, but unfortunately such features had been left out of the free trial build.
Gambit will be one of the standout new features in tomorrow’s Forsaken expansion. The mode involves two teams competing to see who can eliminate waves of AI foes and gather the motes they drop more quickly. The twist is that, at certain points during the match, one member of a given team can directly “invade” the other team Dark Souls-style and disrupt their efforts. Judging from the Destiny subreddit reception, it sounds like the Gambit free trial was quite a hit despite the lack of quitter penalties and in-progress match backfills.
Bungie has big plans for Destiny 2 beyond the Forsaken expansion, and you can get an in-depth look at those plans by checking out this new ViDoc that outlines several post-Forsaken content updates and expansions.