Today, after months of waiting, Destiny 2 players were finally treated to Season of the Lost’s big reveal, setting up next week’s massive Witch Queen expansion. At least, that is, the players who could get the new cutscene to work. For everyone else, the only way to partake in the big moment was to watch it on YouTube.
Season of the Lost, which began back in August 2021, saw its final mission, Exorcism, go live earlier today. In it, players venture across a sky bridge they saw pieced together one week at a time to defend Awoken queen Mara Sov’s inner sanctum while she performed a ritual to purge the worm god inhabiting the Witch Queen, Savathûn.
It’s a fun little mission with big stakes and an even bigger showdown against the Hive forces storming Sov’s palace. There’s just one problem: It’s currently busted. Some players can’t get the game to count them as having completed the mission. Others can’t get it to progress to begin with. And then there’s another group who can’t get the mission’s pivotal cutscene finale to play.
That’s what happened to me after I finished Exorcism. The screen cut to black and then…I was back in space on the selection screen. I replayed the mission and…the same thing happened. My mission progress registered but I couldn’t watch the finale, which was meant to have answered one of Season of the Lost’s biggest questions. I now know the answer not because I got to watch the cinematic but because an NPC on the last leg of the quest told me what happened.
It’s not entirely clear whether the cutscene isn’t playing for people because of bugs plaguing the rest of Exorcism or because players are exiting it too early after killing the boss. Because it’s a six-player matchmade mission, you’re at the mercy of the strangers you’re with, and it seems like whenever some players leave early it cancels the entire cutscene for everyone. Bungie confirmed on Twitter that it’s currently investigating the issues.
It’s a somewhat deflating wrap-up for what has been, on the whole, one of Destiny 2’s stronger seasons. Despite being the longest, it still had a healthy smattering of interesting character arcs, loot grinds, and fun refreshes with the mid-season addition of the 30th Anniversary update. The only real drawback was that it was stretched over half a year, double the normal runtime. Backloading the finale onto the week before Witch Queen goes live was clearly meant to help build hype for the new expansion, but now it also means players will only have one week to actually catch the closer before almost everything from the last year of Destiny disappears.
The studio was generous enough to lower the recommended power level from 1270 to 1170 so at least now everyone else can enjoy Season of the Lost’s conclusion, at least once it starts working.
Update: 2/18/22, 3:23 p.m. ET: Bungie elaborated on some of the issues currently plaguing Season of the Lost’s final mission on the Destiny 2 subreddit today and clarified that a hotfix wouldn’t be possible before the launch of Witch Queen.
As a result, Bungie is automatically completing the first step of the Exorcism quest for all players and posted the final cutscene so many players have been unable to watch in game on social media: