Destiny 2 - Akimbo Sidearms?

Will Guardians Be Dual Wielding Sidearms?

We got the strongest hint at Akimbo weapons from the Bungie Podcast released 9th June 2017.

Here's a direct link to the latest Bungie podcast on iTunes featuring @thislukesmith @sharkeatsman @UrkMcGurk https://t.co/V07PIqRCqc

— Mark Noseworthy (@knowsworthy) June 9, 2017

Here is a snippet from the podcast (starting from 35:22)

JON:
It's interesting because one of those hard questions we asked ourselves when we were putting this out there was like: "well there's sidearms... is there any reason to run sidearm, sidearm?"
That sounds really dumb. That sounds like a bad game *chuckles*

LUKE:
It's not. It's really fun! *more laughter*

JON:
And yeah! It's pretty cool.

LUKE:
And we won't... We won't talk about why...

What's interesting here is that:

• Simply having two sidearms which you switch between is deemed dumb
• There is some reason why that combination is really fun
• This reason is being kept secret from us

So what is the big surprise in store for us? Well let's take a look at what Mark Noseworthy said on an interview on Gamertag Radio (starts 1:07:22):

MARK: The first two slots, Kinetic and Energy, they can have the same weapon types. So, you can have a Handcannon in your Kinetic slot, and then like a solar Handcannon, if you want to rock two Handcannon, in the second slot. The reason we've done this is because it gives players more choice, right, you can play the way you want to play, and really change things up. You know, we might even have some interesting interactions between weapons sometimes.

Put this all together and it strongly implies that something "outside of the norm" happens with certain weapon pairings. My best guess is Destiny 2 is going to introduce dual wielding! Sidearms are an excellent candidate for this but there are things to consider though...

Time to Kill

Bungie have consistently made PvE and PvP as similar as possible. Every piece of gear that your Guardian can equip in Destiny 1 can be used in both PvE and PvP. This would imply that if dual wielding is in Destiny 2 then it is available in the Crucible too. This means that the weapons will have to be carefully balanced, otherwise they could become the D2 equivalent of D1 shotguns. Being able to blast away with two Sidearms at the same time could in theory half your normal TTK!

Firing Mechanism

So how might Bungie balance things? One possibility is to simply make it so that you cannot fire both weapons at once. Hitting fire repeatedly could make the weapons alternate which gun you fire: i.e. left, right, left, right...

This firing mode could still be faster than a vanilla Sidearm though. There is a possibility that we could still fire the weapons independently as well, the ADS button might fire our left weapon and the standard fire button would fire our right weapon. This would bring us neatly onto the next point...

Range & ADS

Dual wielding could negatively affect the range of your weapons to tradeoff against the benefits of extra ammo and damage. It wouldn't be surprising if you lost the ability to Aim Down Sights (ADS) as that is very common in other games and serves as a sensible tradeoff.

Removing the ability to ADS from dual wielded weapons seems like the most sensible option because ADS increases the range of your weapons in Destiny (citation needed). This means the effective range of the weapons is decreased and dual sidearms are limited to CQC.

Conclusion

I'm really hoping that the Destiny 2 Beta will give us the opportunity to try out the Sidearm + Sidearm combination. I doubt that every pair of Sidearms will be able to be dual wielded but I'm hopeful that some will be. You never know, we might all be getting super excited about Sidearms dropping again :D

Imagine blasting away with two of these in Destiny 2 :D