‘Destiny 2’ Lightfall Raid Change Transforms The Day 1 Emblem

Bungie has just announced that in an effort to keep certain members of the community from borderline killing themselves in order to beat a brand new raid on contest mode on day one for an emblem, they are now changing the requirements for the day one emblem to…two days.

“The Lightfall raid will launch on Friday, March 10, 2023 at 9am PST (Pacific Standard Time). Contest mode on the Lightfall raid will be active for 48 hours ending on Sunday, March 12, 2023 at 10am PDT (Pacific Daylight Time).

We are extending contest mode an additional day to allow teams pursuing the emblem more chances to take breaks, as well as allow anyone who has commitments on Friday to still have time to participate. More details will be available in a future TWAB.”

It was initially predicted that this would draw backlash from big streamers who gained fame by getting world’s firsts and beating raids not just on day one, but within hours. Generally that…hasn’t happened. Here’s the always controversial world’s first raider Saltagreppo supporting the change:

This does help Friday players, those with real-life responsibilities and it may benefit the health of the game itself to potentially avoid any day one meltdowns. Really, the only pushback I’ve seen are from no-lifers (I say that as a term of endearment) who sort of liked the insane day one grind:

Or, there are those who wish that this wasn’t happening because they’re more casual players who would rather be able to play the normal raid earlier and not wait 48 hours for contest mode to be over, up from 24 hours now.

Overall this seems…fine. Debating what makes a day one emblem “prestigious” or not feels pretty pointless, and if you want to play that game, we probably have to go back to the infamous Last Wish raid race where only two teams finished in a day because it was before contest mode existed, and everyone was hilariously underleveled. That may have been “epic” (for everyone but Datto, who missed day one by two minutes and created an eternal meme), but it wasn’t very sustainable, so I’m not surprised to see gamer-heath-focused Bungie make this less taxing over time.

I sort of get the argument about 48 hours of contest pushing back casual players from trying, but at least with the Friday start, that means Sunday can still be raid day on a weekend, so it should be fine.

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