Update: ‘Frankengun’ Destiny glitch has been patched, hope you had your fun
Update: It was fun while it lasted, but Destiny 2’s assault rifles and grenade launchers won’t be blasting away like shotguns any more. A hotfix—the first of several—has disabled a selection of frames and perks on Exotic and Legendary crafted weapons, including “Osteo Striga, Revision Zero, Dead Man’s Tale, Dead Messenger, Vexcalibur, and all three Exotic class glaives” Bungie has announced.
“In a future update,” says an in-game message, “we plan to replace the illegitimate perks on crafted weapons.”
Original story: It’s always a challenge managing a meticulously crafted MMO sandbox, but Destiny 2’s eternal struggle for a meta no one will whine about has been absolutely turned on its head by yesterday’s discovery of Frankenguns. Thanks to a crafting glitch, players have been churning out ungodly firearm chimeras to melt raid bosses in seconds. Bungie’s taken it in stride, acknowledging the absurd fun of it all, but is also quickly rolling out a fix to bring all those wacky guns to heel.
Destiny content creator elder statesman Datto has a video highlighting the situation and some standout chaos guns, including various assault rifles firing grenades and a plethora of multi-stage bosses crumpling like crate paper. The community’s go-to combo seems to be giving weapons the shotgun trait Aggressive Frame. That perk is responsible for those shotguns’ spread of 12 pellets, and when applied to say, a grenade launcher, you’re all of a sudden firing 12 explosives with every pull of the trigger.
The chaos began with a clip from user Xíngzǒu de hūxī on Chinese social network Bilibili. While crafting weapons, they accidentally combined a perk from the exotic grenade launcher Dead Messenger with the fusion rifle Midha’s Reckoning, producing a weapon that could one-shot difficult Champion enemies no sweat. That video was then shared to YouTube with commentary by Destiny 2 content creator Cheese Forever, which set off a race to replicate the exploit.
It’s hard to determine who first cracked the code, but this video from Hyrna provides a step-by-step guide on how to replicate the glitch with the specific example of doubling up on the Eager Edge trait (you’re usually limited to just one instance) on a single sword to create a lunge machine capable of launching you halfway across a given map with one swing.
The glitch seems to involve effectively juking the crafting menu, rapidly switching from one weapon to the other to get the splicing to occur, and is most easily performed by capping Destiny 2 at a low frame rate.
Bungie has stated that it will not ban or otherwise discipline players for glitching their guns, and the weekly, uber-competitive Trials of Osiris mode has proceeded as usual, funky guns and all. In order to bring the game back down to Earth, Bungie’s rolling out two hotfixes: the first, set to be deployed before the end of this weekend, will lock players out of using any crafted weapons, with a second coming later that will reset “outlier” crafted weapons instead of deleting them entirely.
Overall, it doesn’t seem like a bad weekend to be a Destiny player: the Frankengun shenanigans are reminiscent of the game’s infamous “Laser Tag” weekend when the bugged trace rifle Prometheus Lens took the game by storm with its instant-deletion beams.
I’m also impressed with the fix Bungie has in store—there was some worry that the studio would have to do a rollback to take care of the bugged weapons—a reset to a stable point before the glitch’s discovery.
This measure was last deployed in order to help resolve a 20-hour downtime and player progression bug in January, but also meant that anyone who played during the window between weekly reset and the game getting shut down lost their progress. Now it appears that the Destiny community will get another solid day of goofing off with overpowered weapons before a minimally invasive solution is implemented.