Destiny’s Current Season is one of it’s Best
Maybe 13 isn’t unlucky after all
As a frequent lover and hater of Destiny (I tend to flip flop back and forth more times than I unequip and equip guns in the game) I play a good bit of hours. The truest fans of this looter shooter, light MMO in space game, are the players that equally adore and criticize the game, and I’m one of those people. My journey started with many others back in September of 2014 when Destiny 1 first launched and I’ve played most of all raids, activities, events, expansions, secret missions, and the now current seasons, and like most avid fans I’d imagine feel, it’s been REALLY cool and also sometimes REALLY bad. Destiny’s current and probably unchanging method of rolling out new content comes in the form of Seasons, like a lot of games do these days. Even though, back when they were first introduced I wasn’t into them, I think they’ve finally convinced me that they’re the best way to deliver fresh consistent content to the game.
In the beginning of seasons, certain themed ones like Season of the Drifter turned a lot of players off because it mainly focused on one single game mode, the PvPvE mode Gambit. Which back then, and still mostly now, the mass majority of people don’t enjoy. Another more recent Season, Season of the Worthy, introduced just a public event as the main attraction, and if you’re not a Destiny player, we already have tons of these public events and they’re very unexciting. Coupled with the terrible roll out of the highly anticipated redesigned Trials of Osiris competitive PvP game mode, Season of the Worthy was a mess content wise, in my opinion. Seasons were originally marketed as a way to deliver content to Destiny consistently every week or so for three months until another Season began and to better evolve Destiny’s world and progress the ever-slow moving story. Each season changes something in Destiny, whether it’s a certain planet or character, introduction of locations, world events, etc, and although we have seen awesome changes before (like Season of Arrival’s giant ships destroying the planets) there’s always something negative during the season that takes away from those world building experiences. This is why I believe the 13th Destiny season, the current one, Season of the Chosen, is the best season in Destiny to date.
There’s nothing inadvertently bad this season. There’s no new event that just plain sucks to do, there’s no weird story beats that don’t progress anything, not all cosmetics are tied to Eververse anymore, the game is actively being fixed with patches, and the new content (with some returning content from D1) is actually a blast to play. Players are also as happy as ever because Bungie announced that they are removing sunsetting, a mechanic that forces you to toss away your old loot in order to cycle in new loot and keep the loot economy “fresh.” Almost everyone hated sunsetting so the fact that it’s now gone for good, incited massive amounts of praise for Bungie, and certainly curbed some of the sour tastes in mouths from previous bad design choices. This season is just… really cool, an all around good time no matter what you like to do in Destiny… except maybe crucible, we’ll get to that later.
The new storyline this Season involves the Cabal and introduces a new character, Caiatl, the Empress of the Cabal Empire. She wants to strike up a deal with the Guardians and of course Zavala says no and then the story goes on from there (no spoilers here). Every week returning to play the weekly story mission which usually consists of running the new seasonal event, Battlegrounds, has been refreshing. Not only is Battlegrounds a fantastic new addition to the game, mostly due to the enormous amount of enemies it throws at you, but witnessing the story take place and progress each week via the new H.E.L.M location is something I wish we had more of. Every week characters come and go to the H.E.L.M to update you on what’s happening in the world and to talk to each other about the best way to get through the current conflict, and there’s an interactable computer where you can listen to conversations for more lighter story beats, some of which give you an insight on Caiatl’s character. Now that the season is coming to a close and one of the last cutscenes is viewable in-game, I really believe this has been my favorite story in a season to date. Getting away from the light vs dark theme that has been consistent throughout the life cycle of Destiny has been really nice and I can’t wait for smaller, more intimate and personal stories like this in the future.
Activities are also great this season. Along with the aforementioned Battlegrounds, of which there are four different ones, we got two returning D1 strikes that are a blast from the past to play again. The Devil’s Lair strike was the first ever playable strike in Destiny and it’s still one of the best. Hearing the boss fight music again, this time with a heavy metal cover, is epic every single time. And the whole strike is jam-packed with enemies, so fights are never drawn out or boring and you don’t have to run through multiple areas to get to the objective. A brand new strike was also added called Proving Grounds where you fight your way through the inner workings of Caiatl’s massive land tank to challenge and best her champion. This strike is also not obscenely long and filled with long gaps in combat, instead it has some cool unique locations and one of the best boss entrances in any strike. One of the best additions this season was the surprise secret mission Presage, which takes place upon a ghost ship stuck out in the middle of space. This three team dungeon is unlike anything else in Destiny, it’s very dark, spooky, has some light puzzle mechanics too, and the story for why you’re there is very mysterious and only adds another layer to the weird plotlines in Destiny. Finishing this mission nets you a new exotic scout rifle called Dead Man’s Tale that quickly rose to one of my most favorite designed guns in the game. Doing the timed, harder version of the mission nets you the catalyst. The usual Iron Banner events and Trials of Osiris weekends (when they aren’t canceled) pad out the rest of the in-between moments of the season, with Guardian Games still to come a month from now. If Guardian Games is different from last year, and god I hope it is, this season will remain my favorite in terms of actual things to do.
Loot is also a big reason people play Destiny and loot this season I’d say is not too shabby. Lots of sandbox changes made rocket launchers the go-to heavy when they haven’t been touched in literal years. These adjustments also affected crucible like they usually do and shook up the meta game there too, although ever since stasis was added, I try my best to stay out of PvP. Speaking of stasis, an update was released this week to adjust how stasis acts in PvP, in lieu of people absolutely despising how overpowered and annoying it is to play against. I’ll be jumping in there later today for Iron Banner, so we’ll see if I don’t hate my life the entire time while playing. The seasonal legendary weapons and new perks introduced are a nice addition, Code Duello with Lasting Impression and Impulse Amplifier has become my new go-to rocket launcher and my Extraordinary Rendition sub-machine gun with Frenzy and Surplus is super speedy and fun to use as well. The new armor sets look a bit odd but I’m glad Bungie is trying new things because we have a lot of armor that closely resembles other armor, so weird is not necessarily bad in this case. More loot was added like new exotic armor pieces in master and legend lost sectors, a new exotic bow that has tracking and detonating arrows, the rather fancied umbral engram system from a few seasons ago, new weapons added to the playlist activities, the usual plethora of Eververse cosmetics, and the Guardian Games armor sets we’ll be getting next month. Lots of loot, lots of reasons to chase said loot, an all around fun time this season.
Unless you’re a fan of crucible.
As I close out this article we have to touch on PvP in general. This is the only thing holding back Season of the Chosen because of how problematic the PvP scene is right now. I don’t play PvP as much anymore because of these reasons, but I’m not overly frustrated about it like a lot of players are, rightfully so. Stasis has ruined PvP for a lot of people, period. Getting frozen sucks. Getting pulled out of cover sucks. Getting frozen out of a super sucks. Long distance ricocheting ninja stars suck. The Titan stasis everything sucks. Turns out, slowing down a fast paced mode with ice abilities wasn’t the best idea. Bungie is working hard to push out updates to stasis in PvP, that’s all I’m going to say about it, I hope it gets better. Trials of Osiris on the other hand is getting canceled every other weekend because either someone finds a ceiling glitch literal seconds before the event goes live, or groups of people are win-trading their way to victory. All of that is unfortunate but we can’t do much but wait for Bungie to fix it or hope for people to stop abusing systems in Destiny, but I think we both know which one is going to happen first.
All in all, minus the PvP conundrums, this season of Destiny has been a definite favorite of mine and the future of the game is looking great if they can stick to a formula like this for the seasons to come. There’s a lot of story threads weaving together currently and in the background and I’m intrigued to see where things go next.
Off I go to get frozen in Iron Banner
