‘Destiny 2’ delays Witch Queen, kills sunset, announces new expansion

Well, we’ve heard that this is happening at some point during the Season of the Chosen, and today, a day after Anthem died and the Outriders demo started, Destiny 2 sparked a huge article on game state with information overload.

There is bad news to begin with, but mostly good news after that. It’s a your to go, but I’ll try to give you the highlights of Joe Blackburn’s sprawling play here:

• The Witch Queen has been delayed until 2022. This is due to a great combination of factors, namely the fact that the COVID delays of the start of the pandemic inevitably affect future content, and they aim for it to be released in early 2022. Overall, it looks like they can start moving the big expansion release to the new year rather than the fall / holiday from here.
• In the same breath, Blackburn says that they realized that to complete the “first saga” of Light and Darkness that started with Destiny 1, they are going to be doing another Destiny 2 expansion after Lightfall, although it has not. no name yet. And the “first saga” certainly indicates a “second saga” waiting on the road, although whether that is Destiny 3 or positioned in some other way is not clear here.
• The sunset is dead. Like completely dead. No ambiguity. From now on, anything you have that isn’t already capped will never be capped (RIP Breachlight), they kill the concept completely. They realized it was a detriment to how the rewards felt to be earned, and the procrastination didn’t even survive the year as they look for other ways to keep the game balanced, including including nerves ahead for things like the Felwinter and Warmind cells, this section involves. I must applaud the relatively quick action here, and the total dismantling of the system. Fantastic.

• People exhausted by the power of the grind will rejoice in the return of the small increase in the power gap of 10 between seasons instead of the 50-60 we have now. This means that the peak power is essentially the all grind now, similar to how things used to work in Season of Dawn. I have a few questions on how this is going to play out (power of the artifact?), But for now it seems like most people wanted a version of this.
• There is a whole giant section on PvP that includes its own set of highlights. Bungie kills three spikes in competitive modes by disabling emotes and removing “third person weapons” (hmmm) without ammo. They double the size of their player security team to avoid cheating. They will deal a lot of damage and stasis subclass effects for PvP. We won’t know how it goes until it’s done, but that’s a lot people are asking for.
• The Trials, and later Iron Banner, are getting bigger tweaks to encourage more people to play them, and Trials in particular are trying to get people to stop resetting after a single loss and bring in more people to win 3 and 5 awards. Few details are provided, and testing changes will come before the IB.
• Vault of Glass will launch next season and will have a contest mode raid race which is a bit controversial, given that this is a resumed raid. In the coming seasons, it will eventually get a master mode, implying that Bungie could start making raids more difficult with a new difficulty setting in the future.

• Ada-1 will be the Transmog Cosmetics Vendor when she returns to the Tower. She will give you currency quests that you can earn to turn any gear into an ornament. It’s not Bright Dust. She will also sell this currency for cash if you want to jump the line. Since it’s cosmetic, no problem, I guess.
• I’m not sure how I forgot this in my first draft, but shaders are now permanent unlocks, not consumables, which could very well be the best news of all of this.

Quick shots:

• Ikora has more to do next season and a big role in the Witch Queen.
• Stasis is being developed more and more as a damage type, and soon we’ll have stasis energy and powerful weapons (and enemy stasis shields, I imagine?).
• More golden titles are coming, and they will now show how many times they have been golden, depicting works from past seasons.

So, will I trade a Witch Queen delay for all of these other positives? Yes, yes I would. Almost everything listed here sounds good in theory, and while I guess we can see how it works in practice, I’m encouraged by the management here, both in terms of quick action like the insta-delay. kill and longer term plans like new “sagas” of the Destiny franchise.

Okay, my brain is on fire trying to process this. Back to the Outriders for now.

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