Pyramid ships. Planet eaters. A new alien race. Bungie is teasing a ton of upcoming stuff in Destiny at the moment, but so far, none of it looks like itâll arrive in time to save the current season.
With one week left on Season of the Worthy, the massive Almighty spaceship that was sent hurtling toward Earth back when the season first began in March is still on its way. Even after todayâs weekly reset, itâs not yet clear when itâs finally gonna hurry up and get here already. Players have spent the last couple of months powering up Rasputin, the Russian warmind AI constructed to help protect the solar system, so it can blow the Almighty out of the sky before it makes contact. After millions of tedious public events, however, it seems Rasputinâs still not quite ready.
Meanwhile, Bungie has been busy teasing Destiny 2‘s next big chapter. Last Friday, it dropped a one-minute sound file, full of quiet, ethereal tones, on Twitter. No one knows what the tones belong to, but people immediately began to speculate that they must have something to do with the giant black pyramid-shaped ships teased at the end of the main campaign. One was discovered on the Moon in last yearâs Shadowkeep expansion, and a bunch more are headed into the solar system, their continued approach tracked and updated weekly on a map in Rasputinâs bunker.
Following todayâs reset, players were greeted by a new, extremely brief cutscene showing one of the pyramids passing by Jupiter. Those who follow Destinyâs datamining scene have been aware of it for weeks. Now that itâs finally in the game, players are wondering whether it has anything to do with how this season will wrap up, or if is purely a tease for the next big expansion coming this fall. A now-deleted video on Bungieâs Instagram found yesterday showed Eris Morn trudging through the snow on what appeared to be Europa, one of Jupiterâs moons, potentially signalling that it will be explorable in the near future.
And still the Almighty hangs in the sky, falling ever closer toward Earth, its silhouette against the sun now twice as big as it appeared last week
As one person put it on the Destiny 2 subreddit, it certainly feels like this season was just an âanime filler arc,â like the episodes full of training, talking, and weird tangents in the lead-up to a big showdown in Dragon Ball Z. Unlike last seasonâs rescue of Saint-14, Season of the Worthy didnât really have a memorable story-based questline with a beginning, middle, and end. It didnât have a clear villain, either. Instead the last several weeks have felt mostly like a series of detours to keep players busy: The return of Trials of Osiris only proved rewarding for a small group of very skilled players, the Guardian Games turned out to be more work than play, and the return of Felwinterâs Lie was marred by a bugged quest step
I, for one, am excited to finally learn more about the black pyramids and their relationship to the Darkness, which is still the big mystery at the heart of Destiny. Getting to finally visit Europa, whose gorgeous concept art was teased for the first game but eventually cut, would also be cool. But all of that feels completely divorced from how the current season is currently unwinding. Destiny 2âs new seasonal model has been criticized for how it seems to hop back and forth between seemingly-unrelated story threads that donât help to shape a larger narrative. With Season of the Worthy, even its own mini-story feels incomplete.
Itâs possible that something still lies in store for players in the next few days. Thereâs already speculation that Bungie might be planning a Fortnite-style live event to cap off this season this weekend. Others are already searching Rasputinâs bunker for clues and comparing new audio clips of voices from the Garden of Salvation raid to old ones to see if theyâve changed.
Bungie has been more secretive about content updates this season. One result of this has been more subtle environmental storytellingâsometimes maybe too subtle. A returning player who has been away from the game for a while might not even realize that a giant spaceship is about to fall out of the sky. And a week from now, they might never know it did.
Update, 12:07 p.m. ET, 6/5: Bungie just announced that Rasputin is âat full powerâ and will be blowing up the Almighty on Saturday, June 6 at 1:00 p.m. ET. Itâs not clear if this in-game event will be interactive, something players can watch from the Tower, or something else entirely, but it certainly sounds similar to the live events used to conclude Fortniteâs seasons. Weâll know soon enough.
