Gambit Was Meant To Be Trials Of Osiris For PVE

I don’t know how you’ve been spending your time in lockdown, but I imagine that there has been a lot of Destiny 2 related activity. Whether that’s thinking about Destiny 2, playing it, or watching someone else play it. For one Guardian, watching old GDC talks on the game was what they did, and it seems to have paid off with a little fact that not everyone will know.

Reddit Guardian MrCalebL shared a GDC talk that they came across recently. It shows bungie staff discussing Gambit, and how the game mode actually came to be.

If you’ve read this site for a while now, you’ll know that I love Gambit. Unfortunately the game mode might not be long for this world, or one of the versions of it isn’t. However, the more interesting point here is how Bungie actually came up with Gambit, which was originally meant to be the PVE equivalent of Trials of Osiris.

To briefly summarise the talk, which you should definitely watch at the end of this article, Bungie wanted to offer a Trials of Osiris experience to Guardians who didn’t want to play PVP. I think that this is a great idea, because I don’t personally love hooking up with people to try and go flawless in PVP every week, it just isn’t Destiny 2 for me.

Gambit was going to be this new offering. It was originally intended to only appear at the weekend, as Trials of Osiris does, and act as the pinnacle event for you and your friends to fight through each and every week. The rewards would have been on the same level as Trials, but then Bungie changed their minds.

When the plan was for Gambit to be a pinnacle event, there were no invasions. But as they found that the game mode was quite a lot of fun, they decided to change it quite a bit.

Gambit went from having no invasions, to having them. It also gained that second team of Guardians that you’re constantly fighting against. This is a key part of the game as it is today, and I can’t really imagine it without that mechanic. I think that it would still be fun without invasions, because the idea that you’re competing against another team, but never actually see them, would be a weirdly awesome way of competing. You never know how well they’re doing apart from the bar at the top of the screen. It would drive me wild.

Alongside the PVEVP change, the matches were reduced from 3 out of 5 to 2 out of 3. This makes the game mode easier to drop in and out of, and generally fun to enjoy every day in Destiny 2.

I think that it’s quite cool that Bungie had this idea for a pinnacle PVE activity. I’d like to see them revisit it as a harder form of Gambit. Ultimately I’d love to get a PVE version of Trials of Osiris in any form.

Let us know what you want from a pinnacle PVE event in the comments. Check out the GDC talk below as well.

Image Source: Eurogamer