Destiny 2 Breakthrough Crucible Mode Competitive

Bungie Pulls the Breakthrough Mode From Destiny 2 Competitive PVP, Again

Bungie had to take Destiny 2 PVP mode Breakthrough offline again this week after players complained of numerous issues with scoring and balance. The catch is that this isn’t the first time Breakthrough has been removed from the game, having been taken down for a period of a few weeks during October. At this point, six weeks after the new mode was launched, it’s been offline for longer than it’s been active.

Shortly after the Forsaken expansion launched for Destiny 2, the Crucible—Destiny 2’s PVP mode—was updated to include a few new maps and a brand new game mode called Breakthrough. This mode sees players fighting over a central point. Once that point is captured, the dominant team then pushes up on their opponent’s point and attempts to capture it in order to score a point. If they fail, the defending team scores a point instead.

It didn’t take long for players to begin criticizing the new mode. In particular, there was an issue where a dominant team could exploit the losing team by farming spawn kills off of draws. Breakthrough was pulled by Bungie pretty quickly after its release, and returned with Destiny 2 update 2.0.5 on October 30. Less than a week later, it’s offline again for complaints regarding balance and scoring that doesn’t make sense or accurately reward the team that actually performed better. Breakthrough is still available when the weekly playlist rotation features the mode, but will no longer be part of the Competitive playlist.

Bungie announced this second removal via their Twitter, and invited players to give feedback about the mode so that they can improve on it. The strange part is that Bungie recently also released the Crucible Labs in Destiny 2, a public test realm that was supposed to avoid problematic modes like Breakthrough making it through to public release in competitive playlists. While the studio has been testing a number of interesting new game modes through Crucible Labs, Breakthrough was never one that made it through the public testing gauntlet.

Without the new mode, the Crucible hasn’t seen all that much of an update for Destiny 2’s second year. Meanwhile, fan-favorite modes from Destiny 1 like Rift have been left behind. The Crucible is one part of the game that Bungie is committed to being available to all players, regardless of DLC and expansion ownership. Breakthrough was part of a free update made to PVP and not included exclusively with the Forsaken expansion.

Were you a fan of the Destiny 2 Breakthrough Crucible mode? Do you agree with Bungie taking it offline again? What changes do you think the team can make to it in order to balance things out? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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