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.