Another Ramble About Destiny 2’s Shaders

A while back, I rambled on about how I didn’t really like the cosmetic system in Destiny 2. Since I was regularly farming gear over and over to upgrade my light level, I was stuck with ugly, default colours. While I did have the ability to change my looks with shaders, it honestly wasn’t worth it. I was just wearing whatever had the biggest number on it, and hoped I’d find something better.

In fact, one of the bigger turn-offs was how Destiny 2 shaders were one-use only. If I needed more shaders, I’d need to spend resources to obtain them. And that was often a bit tricky. After all, I needed shards to be able to level up items, and so I could regularly make purchases from Xur.

However, with the newer seasons, cosmetics were changed. Shaders were permanent items. No more having to rummage through one’s codex and spending legendary shards on extra shaders.

(Please ignore my godawful stats and light level)

I can finally be the colourful Guardian I always wanted to be.

The ability to quickly and easily apply a shader is wonderful. In fact, I’m genuinely surprised how long it took to get added. But the system is genuinely a massive step up, even if I am a bit late to the party. In one single menu, you can apply all your armour shaders at once, or pick and choose. It’s all easily accessible AND it comes with previews, so I can see what each shader looks like.

Having free and easily accessible customization has done a lot for me. Now I think I actually look cool. These shaders now mean I can look good no matter what crappy gear I’m currently using. AND I can apply the same shaders to my guns as well. Sure, I can’t really use shaders on exotics, they have their own cosmetic system. But at least it all matches.

There’s also a transmogification thing for armour pieces, but I’ve not really looked into that. I’m generally too busy trying to

There aren’t as many shaders as I thought.

Unfortunately though, shaders aren’t perfect. Sure, they let you colour yourself in, but you can’t alter any of the colours in a shader. The shader system is alright, but there is far less freedom in our choices. Warframe uses colour palettes and you can colour an item one by one. Heck, Borderlands 3 has a more varied customization system too. In Destiny 2, it’s shaders or nothing.

Getting specific shaders is also difficult. You can get shaders in a bunch of different places. But, unless you are buying from a merchant or bounty-giver, you just have to hope that the one you want drops. Case in point, I really want a particular yellow and black shader. But, according to the in-game info, I can only really find it by dismantling a weapon that already has it as a skin.

In the mean time though, I’m currently using Calus’s Selected, a shader from the Leviathan raid. It’s a white, purple and gold shader and it looks gorgeous. The gold kinda reminds me of Warframe’s Primed gold colours.

The colours lie.

What I dislike the most is actually pretty simple. The small icons for shaders aren’t consistent between armour and weapons. While the icons give an idea of how you look, once they are applied, who knows what’s going on. Trying out different shaders on my IKELOS SMG was honestly pretty damn annoying because the four colours on each shader weren’t applied in any logical way. The same applies to armour. I found a really nice red and gold palette. But when I tried applying it to my Warlock, some of the colourations didn’t make much sense.

Although I doubt we’ll ever get a much more complex shader system, I would at least like a way to shuffle the colours around a bit. I am sure the technology is there, we just need to pick and choose where the four colours on a shader actually go.

In the mean time, I ought to get back to doing bounties. I need legendary shards.