It’s beautiful when video games break. It can also be incredibly fun for players and a nightmare for developers to keep everything humming along smoothly. Over the weekend, Fate 2 players they discovered an amazing glitch that allowed them to craft godlike weapons and breeze through challenging end-game missions with ease. Days later, Bungie is still trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Fate 2 is a sci-fi MMO shooter built around collecting rare, magical weapons and using them to complete space gauntlets with ever-increasing efficiency and grace. This “grinding” can feel like running on a treadmill at times, and Bungie spends a lot of time and resources trying to calibrate the variations in speed and incline to make it challenging and rewarding rather than tedious. A big part of that is balancing the game’s hundreds of weapons, with small changes in perk descriptions or numerical values leaving huge marks on the overall shape and trajectory of the experience.
Destiny 2 is bizarre weapon manufacturing glitch
A new crafting glitch started on September 15th make rounds on social networks and various Fate 2 subreddits. It effectively allows players to create a new weapon with any set of perks they want, slowing down the game and switching screens quickly. On PC, players dropped the frame rate to 30 frames per second to increase the time it took for the exploit to run, while console owners initiated massive background file installations to create a similar amount of lag. The result was the ability to create bows that shoot grenades and auto rifles that shoot shotgun shells, each containing a combination of the most powerful perks from standard legendaries like the Chill Clip to unique exotic weapon perks like the Dead Messenger Grenade Launcher and Osteo . Striga submachine gun.
These broken builds quickly began to proliferate in various mods. In dungeons and raids, this allowed players to clear encounters and destroy bosses in record time. However, in competitive PvP like Trials of Osiris, this gave players incredibly unfair advantages and made it easy to essentially fit into some Fate 2most desired achievements – such as completing the entire test run flawlessly (without losing). Many in the community assumed that Bungie would roll back the game to remove the glitch and everything players gained from using it. Instead, the studio gave players its blessing to have fun while it worked on a fix.
“We are aware of an issue that allows specific weapon perks to be embedded in other legendary weapons, and are investigating a fix that will result in these weapons being reset in the future,” studio announced on Twitter September 15th. “We currently have no plans to disable Trials of Osiris due to this issue.”
How Bungie Fixes Fate 2 weapon manufacturing error
Instead of banning players who used the exploit to earn in-game rewards or achievements, Bungie revealed the next day that it would be working to deploy two patches. The first would be a server-side update that would ban players from using any crafted weapons. The second would reset “illegal” weapons back to their default values.
“This is a complex issue, and as a result of testing, our original timeline for a server-side fix has been extended,” Bungie he tweeted September 17th. It disabled Osteo Striga, Revision Zero, Dead Man’s Tale, Dead Messenger, Vexcalibur, and Exotic class glaives, but more than 72 hours later, the second half of the patch is still being worked on to bring everything back online. “Please don’t ask a local Fate 2 developer triage, how was their weekend,” Joe Blackburn, game director, he joked on Monday.
Bungie even leaned into the chaos with Ted Lass TikTok memes encouraging everyone to go on and “live”. In response, the top comment reads: “Biggest mistake in FateHistory and Bungie lets us have fun…”
Word of the exploitative party has clearly spread because Fate 2Concurrent player increased over the weekend on Steam. Where it hovered around 80,000 for the past few weeks, it broke 100,000, a number usually reserved for seasonal updates. While the bug likely sent the team into crisis mode and undoubtedly ruined a few dev weekends, the unexpected bonanza was also a bright spot for a game that was caught in a bit of nausea as its flagship Final shape expansion comes earlier Fate 210 year anniversary. The integrity of the game and its loot hunt may have been fundamentally compromised, but at least for the moment players were having fun.
