For the first time this year, there's a glimmer of light ahead for Destiny 2 fans.
The launch of Season of Arrivals and upcoming Beyond Light expansion gave players a spark on Tuesday as multiple trailers and hints at what's to come for Destiny 2 were revealed on game developer Bungie's site and social media pages.
There's a lot to unpack going into Beyond Light's Sept. 22 release, from controlling the mysterious Darkness to hints that maybe the Traveler isn't as benevolent as we might think it is to the return of the infamous Stranger, who now seems to have time to explain things. We also have the game's new road map, which does not include Destiny 3 but does include further expansions in 2021 (The Witch Queen) and 2022 (tentatively titled Lightfall).
The brief quest opener for the new season, which took about three hours, sets Destiny up for a compelling plotline going forward. While the community has understandably become cynical regarding Bungie's recent content drops, reaction to Tuesday's release and what's to come this fall seems to be largely positive.
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The new Umbral Engrams and Contact public event are nice variations on existing premises and a vast improvement from Escalation Protocol Lite, otherwise known as Seraph Towers. The decisions to retire old weapons and add the upcoming Stasis subclasses are exciting and can bring variety to the meta in every game mode. Europa looks haunting, the new dungeon's Nine theme seems intriguing and the eventual return of the Vault of Glass and Cosmodrome gave me butterflies.
There's a ton of potential here, and with Bungie free of the pressure from Activision-Blizzard to push for a new title, it seems as if Destiny 2 is here to stay for at least three years, along with the return of some of the most memorable content from the start of the series.
However, we've seen Bungie do similar things in the past only to disappoint.
After a promising refresh with its Shadowkeep expansion in October 2019, Destiny 2 hit a monthslong lull with the next seasons, which relied heavily on bounties for progression, with little narrative substance. What was a rewarding grind became a slog through stale content in order to level up season passes and power up dull machinery. Strong content such as a new raid in the Garden of Salvation (lovingly known as the Vault of Grass) and Pit of Heresy were followed up by putting a fresh coat of paint on previous concepts and regions without changing much else. The lack of novel experiences continued an annual trend from Destiny 2 of content droughts in the summers that have become a source of growing frustration since the game's Year 1.
From January until Sunday, when Bungie put on its first-ever live in-game event, there was very little for Guardians to be excited about.
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That live event, however, also missed the mark. In true Bungie fashion, what could have been a short and satisfying 15-minute watch for fans was stretched into a 90-minute snoozefest. The final moments were scintillating, but much like the six months that came before, Bungie had stretched out too little content over too long a time frame and left fans wishing for more.
September is still a ways off, and problems persist. During a three-hour play session on Tuesday, I was disconnected from the servers seven times and lost progress on bounties and the new quest line in each of those instances. After finishing the opening quest for the new season, I was back on to do bounties again in the hopes of booting up another new contraption and grabbing some of the latest gear and getting ready for the new dungeon. However, there was some new energy to the process and an actual rush to get prepared for what's to come next.
The transparency Bungie put forward on Tuesday and the early trappings, from trailers to Day 1 of Season of Arrivals, is enough to instill some optimism in a fan base that has long felt dejected by Destiny's offerings. Whether the developers can take advantage of that momentum and keep players engaged for another 3½ months before the real battle kicks off, though, is as up for debate as what's actually going to happen to this whole Calus storyline.