Prelude to Beyond Light
So it’s been a while since I’ve written about Destiny 2 and with that comes a bit of an explanation.
After finishing Shadowkeep and it’s main story campaign last year, the new season rolled around bringing with it a new 100 rank reward track and a rather mindless multiplayer activity called the Vex Offensive. This was all well and good, for a while, until the fatigue set in. Around Christmas, during The Dawning, I received an email from Sony. It’s one that every PlayStation user gets every year showing off what game(s) you played through out the year and how long you played them, what genre(s) you played, etc. I got mine and was excited to see my annual report card but was not happy with what I saw. By the time December rolled around, I had put in a grand total of 1,498 hours into Destiny 2. I decided then that it was time to take a nice, long break and so I logged out around then and didn’t come back for many, many months. I felt like I had been gypped a little since this was content that I had already paid for but wasn’t actively playing. From what I was hearing from Matt and the others, I wasn’t really missing out on anything. After the Vex Offensive was gone, it was replaced with another multiplayer activity called The Sundial. Then the next season after the Sundial, came the Rasputin Bunkers. This sounded a bit interesting so I logged in and gave it all a whirl for a couple days only to find that, nope, I was NOT interested in this either. And that whole thing was leading up to this:
You see, the story for that season was all about how the Cabal were on a last ditch effort to try to destroy the Last City by crashing The Almighty into it, only to fail spectacularly when Rasputin’s warsats turned the ship to scrap. The only reason I logged in was to watch and see if the (new) Tower was destroyed. Got treated to a fantastic show and got an emblem for bearing witness to the event. But after that I went back on “vacation” until it was time for the new season: The Season of Arrival. This got my attention because it seemed that the Pyramid ships’ arrival was coming a lot faster than we anticipated. Since it was summer, I knew that the new expansion was on the horizon so now was as good a time as any to jump back in. And with summer also came:
Yeah, this again. I know I swore I wasn’t going to do it again this year if they did it, and I honestly didn’t think it was going to happen with everything going on in the world, but I did anyway. Partly because I needed some familiarity and peace of mine and an escape from reality. Partly because this year the grind was nowhere near as bad as the first 2 years. Plus I wasn’t about to break my streak of getting every Moments of Triumph shirt.
For the most part, this season has been the usual Destiny faire, doing the same repetitive mindless task week after week while being drip fed a weekly dose of lore. It’s been both irritating and rewarding in that, until a couple weeks ago, everyone was convinced there was a bug since some of the lore (apparently) wouldn’t unlock. Turns out that the quest that it was tied to hadn’t been implemented yet. This season has also been about the impending doom that’s coming.
Mercury
Titan
Mars
As you can see, the ships are nearly everywhere in the system. Each planet they inhabit is slated to be removed from the Director come November and they will no longer be accessible. They’re being moved into what Bungie is calling the Destiny Content Vault and I personally couldn’t be happier that they’re going away since I’ve looked at these places ad nauseum since the game launched. Mercury and this iteration of Mars were disappointments and Titan was kinda cool for a while but didn’t have a lot of substance. Maybe if the arcology had been fleshed out a bit more I would have found Titan a more interesting place. But the one place that started the madness with the ships this season and the one place that I am a little sad that’s going away is Io.
I’m both happy and not happy that they decided to use the Cradle in the game, I just wish it had been for something a little more interesting. Week after week we’ve been fueling this season’s artifact - The Seed of Silver Wings - so Eris can use it to commune with the “darkness” to try to discover what’s going on or what it is they want from us. Even though I’ve completed the event, what it is they’re after is still a mystery to me. I think they’re just trying to distract us from whatever scheme they’re cooking in the background until they decide to strike. Salvation indeed. It was a nice surprise last week when the end of the line finally arrived and we were greeted with this:
A nice flashback for long time players to the Court of Oryx in the Dreadnaught. The other, real surprise that came after killing Nokris in the wanna be court was yet another intervention from the “darkness” trying to convince us that they’re here to help.
This room is very creepy.
If I had been thinking about it I would have taken progress pics each week showing the growth of this mysterious tree that’s in the Cradle. This is - as far as I know - the end result.
I do have to say that I’m not too pleased with Guardians using whatever power(s) that the “darkness” offers us. No good will come of it I’m sure and it’s a trope that’s been used to death in fiction where the hero/heroes wield a power/gift/weapon given to them by an enemy or someone perceived as an untrustworthy individual only to have it bite them on the ass sometime down the line. I realize I’m reading a bit too much into “hey we need to come up with new abilities/powers to keep players interested in the game” but I feel like it’s a valid complaint. All I can really do at this point is take a short break from Destiny 2 again (now that I’ve finished this years Festival of the Lost) and hope that I don’t get burned out and skip out on 3 seasons worth of content again after I’ve already paid for it.