One of the reasons that Destiny 2 is in such a good place right now is that it’s kind of done simply catching up to where Destiny 1 used to be, which was the saga of most of the last year. Rather now, it’s actually gotten better than D1 in many ways, pushing forward with new mechanics and activities different than anything the series has seen before.
And here I am, proposing one more way in which the game could evolve going forward. It’s time for armor transmogrification to come to Destiny.
For those of you who don’t speak nerd, transmogrification means that you can reskin one item to look like another. Many loot-based games have this, the most prominent example in my own gaming history is Diablo 3, which eventually introduced the feature that was much beloved by fans.
Why bother reskinning gear to look like other gear? Aesthetics, so your character doesn’t look like a weird pile of garbage in order to retain the armor abilities you want to use frequently.
This would be especially useful for a game like Destiny in which a subset of players very much care about making their guardians look as cool as possible, but that doesn’t usually line up with what gear is the most useful to you.
This problem has now been amplified in the Forsaken era. Previously, the only thing stopping you from looking how you wanted was that you just had to infuse your armor up to the right power level. With armor having no perks, practically all armor was identical and almost purely cosmetic, meaning it was a lot easier to interchange to make yourself look how you wanted. That’s still something of a barrier due to super high infusion costs now (an issue for another day), but it’s only half the problem.
Armor is no longer just cosmetic. It now not only has perks, but randomly rolled perks, which means that it takes a lot of work to find the one piece of armor that works with your “build.” Say you finally found a hunter helmet with hand cannon targeting and grenade launcher reserves and it even came with a built-in mod. And yet it’s literally the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. Do you wear the helmet because of the perks and suffer through its awfulness, or do you equip something else instead and sacrifice the perks?
The point of transmog is to be able to get your “god roll” armor and the make it look however you want through reskinning. That way, you can farm for the exact set you want, and you don’t have to worry about looking like a total hot mess once you finally assemble a kit. Otherwise, trying to get the exact roll you want on every piece of armor and have it be the exact set you want is nearly impossible, it’s just never going to happen. Also, this would help solve the problem of leaving several dozen armor sets behind from year one just because they can’t roll new perks. At least they’d be able to be put into the transmog pool.
This current system hurts Bungie’s bottom line as well. One of the key features of the Eververse store is that it offers a unique set of armor you can only get there. The Dragonfly set this season is actually really cool looking, but with how often engrams drop, I’ll be lucky if I can assemble even one set per character, and I would be stuck with whatever rolls it has. But if I could use it for transmorg? You can bet I would probably be shelling out money to ensure I had the full set. The same goes for armor ornaments sold by Eververse. If it unlocked not just a skin for one specific exotic you may or may not wear, but a transmog option for any item in that slot, that would be a huge reason to try and collect them. Some of the coolest ornaments in the game are for gear I will never wear because I don’t like it, ie. The Stag, but transmog would fix that problem.
I would have to draw the line at transmorg for weapons, because even though that was possible in a game like Diablo, I don’t think that would work nearly as well for first person gunplay in Destiny. You can’t just reskin Better Devils to look like Trust and expect it not to feel weird and off with the animations and sound.
You can say that there’s another option for this, the ability to bring back reforging so that you can re-roll perks on an item, which would mean that you can try to get god rolls on your favorite pieces. And yet I feel like this is a much worse solution, a really mind-numbing currency sink that would do nothing but drain you of materials and feel like a slot machine. Transmog is the more elegant solution that could still be somewhat of a currency sink, but not have you sit there at the gunsmith re-rolling items a hundred times until you get the perks you want.
In the era of armor perks and random rolls, Destiny 2 needs transmorg now more than ever. I love that armor is now functional, but the trade-off has been that all three of my characters have looked disjointed and terrible since Forsaken started as I blend Scatterhorn, Dreaming City and seven other armor sets together to get the perks I want. It doesn’t have to be this way.
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