After dragging its heels for a fair while, the ‘living world’ of Destiny 2 has really come alive again as Bungie start building to the next expansion. Four of its planets and moons will be removed from the game when Beyond Light hits, and the ongoing in-game events behind that are starting to get well doomy. As of last night, the vast and ominous pyramid ships of The Darkness are lurking over the four doomed places, zones are bustling with deadly foes, and we’re being sent on quests to check that everyone’s, y’know, okay. It feels like an apocalypse brewing, and looks stunning too.
Ahead of Destiny 2 shuffling five raids out of rotation next season, Bungie have relaxed restrictions on loot so you can fully rinse them before they go. Usually each character can only get drops from each raid once per week, but for the rest of the season these five can be repeated over and over for loot galore. This comes as part of the latest Moments Of Triumph event, which started last night. Players are challenged to complete a long list of accomplishments, including some raids, to claim cosmetic rewards plus a new title.
Every weekend, mysterious tentacle-faced merchant Xur pops up in a corner of Destiny 2 selling a selection of Exotic gear. For the past eight months, his stock has been a bit rubbish. He’s sold fixed armour rolls with bad stats, see, which are useful if you don’t have the item at all but worse than any random drop. Good news: Xur has started selling armour with new, better rolls, making him again worth visiting even if you have it all.
Bungie have now removed skill-based matchmaking from most of Destiny 2‘s PvP Crucible playlists, by popular demand. What kind of a pubstomping monster wouldn’t want matchmaking to factor in skill? Ah, it’s a tricky issue. SBMM has become a semi-controversial topic in multiplayer games, and in Destiny specifically its knock-on consequences have included longer waits for matches and some real laggy laggers lagging up the place.
The Season Of Arrivals started in Destiny 2 this week and while the whole season was kept a surprise up until launch, one arrival is a bigger surprise than the rest. Witherhoard, the new Exotic grenade launcher you can grab from the season pass track, will sometimes mysteriously spit enough damage to melt a boss. Most, if not all, of a raid boss’s health bar can vanish in the blink of an eye. Witherhoard already seemed strong to me but this, damn.
Amid the megablast of news about Destiny’s future yesterday, Bungie started the latest season, the Season Of Arrivals. After nine rocky months of decreasingly good seasons in Destiny 2, Season 11 feels like Bungie are starting to turn a corner. I don’t know how I’ll feel about Arrivals in two months, but right now I’m pretty excited about a lot of its newness. Not just because I get to spend a lot more time with my shady spaceuncle, Drifter.
A busy livestream has brought a whole lot of Destiny 2 news today. Bungie announced the next expansion, named Beyond Light, for launch in September. Today they also start the next season, named Season Of Arrivals, and launch a new dungeon. Looking into the far future, they’ve a further announced two expansions for 2021 and 2022. And to keep the game manageable, they plan to starting cycling out some older content into a ‘Destiny Content Vault’ – but also use that Vault to bring back older bits from the first game, with one area and a raid already confirmed. Whew.
On Saturday, Destiny 2 held its first live in-game event, inviting players to witness the destruction of a vast spaceship on a collision course with Earth. Perched on the gantries and rooftops of the Tower, we watched the ship looming large in the sky and… waited. What many expected to be a few minutes of fireworks turned out to be 90 minutes of watching projectiles move almost imperceptibly slowly. I genuinely liked the big, sci-fi slowness of it all – even if I did miss part of the climax because I’d walked away to do household chores.
It’s about damn time. After months of preparation, Destiny 2 is ready to blow up The Almighty, the massive Cabal spaceship that’s been threatening to smack The Tower all through this season. The fireworks kick off in a few hours – and in a new move for Bungie, it sounds like you’ll be able to watch the calamity as it happens in what may be Destiny 2’s first live, in-game spectacle.
Always acting, but never quite seen. It seems one of Destiny 2‘s most elusive antagonists is preparing to finally play its hand. Lurking in the shadows of Bungie’s space-knight loot shooter, The Darkness have finally put voice to their long-awaited return by broadcasting an ominous hum on the Destiny 2 Twitter account. Whether as another season or as the game’s next expansion, it may soon be time to work out what, exactly, The Traveller’s been running away from all this time.