Five Things We Want In Destiny's Next Sparrow Racing League

If you play Destiny, it’s likely that you at least took a shot at the inaugural Sparrow Racing League that ran throughout this month.

If you play Destiny, it’s likely that you at least took a shot at the inaugural Sparrow Racing League that ran throughout this month. Seemingly in response to player demand, Bungie crafted a dedicated racing game mode with two lengthy tracks to learn, and set us loose to learn the ropes of hitting high speed. We liked the addition, but with additional fleshing out, it could be a far more robust and full-featured game mode.

Like most gaming communities, those of us who play Destiny can vacillate wildly on how we feel about a new feature in a favorite game. The reality is often somewhere in between the extremes of hot and cold. Sparrow Racing League is no exception; the game mode has been a fun and surprising activity in recent weeks, but the sense of repetition, as well as gameplay inconsistencies, holds back the experience.

It seems very likely that Bungie will bring back Sparrow Racing for a second season. When they do, here are five features, additions, and changes that would make it even better, as well as a bonus idea for how sparrow racing can expand beyond the league.

Increased Recognition of Player Investment

Let’s head this one off at the pass, because the other suggestions below are dependent on it. I’ll be the first to praise Bungie for introducing a new game feature like SRL, which feels so dramatically different from everything else in the game, and yet still ties back to the core character improvement experience. But it’s a mistake to say that SRL is simply a diversion and doesn’t need to be more fully developed in the future, at least if it’s still going to offer high-end rewards that might pull players away from other in-game activities.

Players are strongly guided to in-game activities for several reasons. Certainly, the intrinsic fun of an activity plays a big part. But in a loot-oriented game, players (sometimes subconsciously) consider three big things – exclusivity of the rewards, aesthetics of the available items, and the opportunity for character progression. In the case of SRL, Bungie included items that were exclusive to the experience, with cool visual aesthetics, and with time and effort, the items on offer could offer progression and power on par with the best items currently in-game. In other words, the rewards were highly valued. As such, time investment with SRL should ideally provide a similar level of fun and diversity to activities like Trials of Osiris or King’s Fall, which it currently does not offer.

Bungie should keep the high-end rewards (and expand upon them) but in subsequent iterations of the event, the player base is right in demanding more complexity and variety. Bungie should examine how much time players were willing to pour into SRL, (based on my friends list, a lot), and continue to grow this new mode to recognize that investment from the community.

Greater Track Variety

I’m not blind to the tremendous amount of work that must go into crafting a new play space, much less one that needs to be fun for a high-speed futuristic race. Nonetheless, no single feature would do more to help the SRL experience than having additional courses upon which players might find themselves, and making more significant changes to existing courses as each is played.

The most obvious choice for new race courses would be on Earth’s Cosmodrome and Earth’s Moon – both are playable spaces that already allow for Sparrow usage. I’d love to see both, but I’d also be thrilled to see more adventurous options, even without Bungie having to create entirely new environmental backdrops. The Vex-infested environs of Mercury are currently only viewable in Crucible matches, and it would be exciting to see races set on that mechanical world. The European Dead Zone has likewise made appearances in Crucible matches, but a race course would let us see more of that blasted area of the planet. Players have yet to use sparrows on the massive Dreadnaught – it’s easy to foresee a trap-laden race course in the bowels of the Hive ship.

Whether it’s on new maps or the existing maps on Venus and Mars, Bungie could roughly double the variety of turns and jumps to learn by adding reverse versions of each course. Obviously, in some cases, this would involve dramatic reinvention of a course’s structure, like on Venus’ Infinite Descent. But adding additional jumps and ramps for a reverse direction course is far easier than adding entirely new courses.

The track layout itself needn’t change to inject variety. Bungie could also explore greater variation in boost gate locations on the map, forcing players to think on their feet as they zoom between gates. This doubles as a way to ensure that frequent players don’t just memorize everything about the gate layout, and dominate the competition.

Next Page: Smooth out the racing gameplay, and ideas for new racing game modes