Posted by Destiny 2 is one of my favorite, and most played, video games. While it pains me to say it, the game isn’t in the best state right now. The game is almost halfway through its current year, so I wanted to write up a retrospective on the current season. Season of the Deep only has a few more weeks to go, and even though I liked some aspects of this season, the game is starting to stagnate in terms of story and content.
The story this season has been mediocre at best, and downright boring and contrived at worst. The general premise was collecting egregore coral so Commander Sloane, the former NPC vendor on Titan before Bungie sunset the destination with the release of Beyond Light, could establish a psychic connection with a great leviathan named Ahsa who she encountered while trapped on Titan after the Witness took it. The final result is Ahsa telling us we need to resurrect Savathûn The Witch-Queen. I’ve been waiting for this narrative beat since the Witch-Queen expansion released last year. I’m very excited for next season’s story, which reveals the biggest problem with this season’s story: it was boring filler. It took weeks of drip-fed content just to receive the message that we needed to resurrect a former foe next season. The entire seasonal story could have been resolved significantly quicker than it was. Heck, one week the seasonal quest consisted of running a Lost Sector and watching a cutscene. So much of this season just felt like pointless filler and busy work. Then the ending event–Xivu Wrath capturing and attempting to “take” Ahsa–just comes out of nowhere. The pacing is poor and really doesn’t make much narrative sense. Finally, this season also marks the first time Xivu Arath, the Hive God of War and third sibling of Oryx and Savathûn, is beginning to directly interact with us. While we’ve fought her forces in the past, now we’re hearing her voice and she’s beginning to make bigger moves against us. But again, it’s frustrating because Bungie isn’t really doing much with this in terms of narrative significance and the game’s content.
The seasonal activities were Salvage and Deep Dives. Salvage is a six player activity where players performed various tasks before fighting a boss. I found it a bit overly long and repetitive. Deep Dives is the three player activity where players travel through three encounters before fighting a boss. I appreciate Deep Dives because they’re surprisingly difficult for seasonal activities, and offer a few additional optional difficulties. On the one hand, I like that Deep Dives aren’t the typical pushover activity like Salvage. On the other hand, Deep Dives aren’t fun with random matchmade players, especially when trying to do the harder difficulties since it requires the entire team to activate the optional difficulty. As a result, two players can waste their time trying to activate the optional encounters for better loot, or the new exotic weapon’s catalyst, only to have the third player waste their time and ignore it. The opposite is also true.
I have some slightly mixed opinions on the exotics this season, but by and large I think Bungie did a good job with them. Centrifuse, the exotic auto rifle in the season pass, is a solid addition that uses the arc blind debuff. Overall, it’s a useful exotic. Wicked Implement is the stasis exotic scout rifle that’s obtained through a hidden exotic quest. Wicked Implement isn’t great, which is disappointing because it’s a pain to obtain. You need to catch three exotic fish and then activate three hidden statues during a Deep Dive, which then allows access to a timed mission and boss fight. I actually enjoyed the secret mission significantly more than I thought I would. However, I can’t deny that getting to the secret mission is obnoxious. Catching the three exotic fish has no relation to obtaining a scout rifle from Xivu Arath and frankly makes no sense. The fact that you need to access it through Deep Dives is also annoying because there’s almost no way you can complete it with randoms. Aside from the beginning of the quest, I’m actually a pretty big fan of it. As for the exotic armor released this season, the new Warlock helmet is a useful support exotic, especially for Warlocks that want to use Divinity or the new Navigator exotic from the Ghosts of the Deep dungeon. I haven’t used Arbor Warden, the new exotic titan chest armor, or Triton Vice, the new exotic hunter gauntlets, but from my understanding neither exotics are particularly game changing.
Ghosts of the Deep is the new dungeon released this season, and I actually really like it. I think that in terms of difficulty, it’s balanced fairly well. While the final boss does have a lot of health and the additional enemies can be frustrating, I definitely enjoy it more than Duality and its Caital encounter. I also really like the lore of Ghosts of the Deep in which your fireteam disrupts a Lucent Hive ritual, traverses the arcology on Titan and a Lucent Hive ship, then defeat two of Savathûn’s lieutenants, of which one is a Lucent necromancer trying to resurrect Oryx with a Hive ghost. The atmosphere of the dungeon is very well-designed. Mechanically, the dungeon is also pretty straightforward and not too intensive. Overall, Ghosts of the Deep is definitely one of, if not my favorite, dungeons in the game, even if the travel section between the first and second encounters can be frustratingly long. The dungeon also comes with the new Navigator strand exotic trace rifle. The Navigator is more support oriented with giving your allies Woven Mail or giving enemies the Sever debuff. It’s a solid gun with good build potential.
The worst part of this season is definitely the Solstice of Heroes events. It’s identical to how it was last year. The gameplay loop of the event consists of running various activities to complete the event challenges and get one of the currencies needed to upgrade the Solstice armor. The other currency is obtained by participating in the event activity European Aerial Zone. The event is just a boring grind that doesn’t add much to the game.
Overall, I’m cautiously optimistic about Destiny 2′s next season because it looks like the narrative may actually pick up. Regardless, Season of the Deep has been a bit of a disappointment. The story is slow and lacking in substance. The gameplay loop hasn’t really changed much, and for the most part I’m ok with that. I enjoy Destiny 2‘s gameplay loop, but I can’t deny that the game is starting to reach a stagnant state. Ever since the release of Lightfall, the game’s story hasn’t been great. This trend has held true, but I’m hoping that finally changes in a few weeks when the next season releases.
Broad Scope Entertainment 