Bungie’s past two This Week in Destiny blogs announced that the base version of Control will finally be available as a selectable mode in the Crucible. This is great news for those who don’t want to delve into the Checkmate or Sparrow Control versions, but still want to participate in the Control playlist. The Destiny 2 Team account announced this as well through a series of tweets.
Before Season of the Wish launched, the Crucible Strike team announced a major overhaul to the way playlists are displayed in the Crucible menu. This overhaul involved consolidating Crucible modes for both 3V3 and 6V6 variants into two categories, a Quickplay node and a ranked or unranked node depending on the playlist. Bungie stated that this change would “prioritize different matchmaking elements, integrate varied gameplay rotations” with some nodes making room for playlists like Trials of Osiris and Iron Banner whenever they are in rotation. Bungie’s blog post also revealed that Checkmate Control would be the primary Control mode for the first few weeks of Season 23.
That being said, turning Checkmate Control into the main Control mode wasn’t received well by players since many aren’t sold on Checkmate or used to how it plays over “vanilla Control.” Players cite that TTK shifts in Checkmate aren’t the best and that they force people to use the most profitable weapons more than anything. On the other hand, some aren’t happy with it forcing the initial portion of a match to be primary weapon-only and how special ammo’s dependency on a meter is being handled in the mode.
In a recent video about what’s to come after the Season of the Wish to cover The Final Shape delay, game director Joe Blackburn even mentioned that the aspects of Checkmate modifier that are being received in the PVP player base will slowly make their way to other Crucible modes in the future.
Ultimately, many players enjoy the original version of Control, and not everyone is acclimated to the Checkmate modifier or riding Sparrows in PVP.
