Destiny‘s Winter Update Is Slim, But Fun

Destiny, a video game in which players travel through the galaxy waiting for Destiny 2, got a new event today called The Dawning. Like so many live events before it, The Dawning is insubstantial, but fun.

In addition to a bunch of new quality-of-life changes (like green engrams auto-dismantling, finally) that you can read in the patch notes, there are three main features in The Dawning. One is the return of Sparrow Racing League, which I continue to be terrible at. There are a couple of new tracks and a bunch of bounties attached to the SRL for its second year in Destiny

The second major feature is strike scoring, which will let you rack up points and earn medals, Prison of Elders-style, as you play through nightfalls and strike playlists. Zavala now has weekly bounties for hitting different point and medal goals, and it’s a neat new way of keeping strikes interesting even when you’ve done them each a few hundred times.

They’ve also updated three old strikes—The Nexus, The Shadow Thief, and Will of Crota—with some fun new dialogue and mechanics. I’ve only done The Nexus so far, but they’ve added a couple of twists and some Very Good Cayde-6 banter.

The third feature is a free new record book that lets you collect achievements in strikes and the Sparrow Racing League, then use those achievements to unlock various pieces of loot. And gifts!

Just look at those big fucking present boxes. They’re just sitting there in the Tower, waiting to be opened. To unwrap them, you have to fill out the new record book and get three different items (Amanda’s Tag, Xur’s Tag, Saladin’s Tag), each of which opens one of the gifts.

There may be some other secrets that players haven’t found yet—intrepid Redditors have already found a hidden Sparrowand maybe more—so I’m looking forward to poking around a bit. And yeah, there’s also lots of new Eververse stuff if you feel like giving Bungie more money.

Strike scoring is a smart move, but there isn’t enough new content here to bring most lapsed Destiny players back. It’s likely we won’t see much more from Destiny 1—other than maybe some old raid refreshes in the spring?—so for those of us who are craving more from Bungie’s shooter-MMO hybrid, the wait for Destiny 2 is on.