Season of the Witch comes to a close tomorrow, and it’s been a season full of ups and downs as always. This season feels a little different with extremes on either end of the scale; on one hand we’ve had one of the best stories in seasonal content for a long time, on the other hand player sentiment and player count is at an all time low and Bungie have laid off 8% of their staff. Today I want to take a final look at Season of the Witch, as we look forward to what’s coming next from Destiny 2.
Without further delay let’s dive right in.
Story
This season Eris Morn became a Hive God, with power rivalling Xivu Arath and Savathun. Immaru, Savathun’s Ghost would play a crucial roll this season, passing on Savathun’s video messages to us, in what appeared to be Savathun manipulating us from beyond. Ikora spent some of the season doubting Eris, however, Eris proved to be able to handle the pressure, with a wide-eyed Drifter supporting her from the sidelines.
Eris instructed us, The Guardian, to gather tythes for her, to essentially power her up, as we searched for the way to get into the Traveller’s portal created by The Witness. Eris would break Xivu’s connection to her Throne World, ressurrect Savathun and then instantly kill her once again to gain the ultimate Hive power, only to turn her back on the power in favour of weakening Xivu Arath. It was a story-rich season, and one of the best seasons for a long time regarding the narrative.
While the story content itself was good, the method of telling the story remains tired. The formula would be go to the H.E.L.M. speak to an NPC, then go to the holoterminal to receive another message, do an activity and then get another message. This is a well-trooden path for Destiny 2 seasonal content at this point, and we’re due for a change.
Activities
Activities this season were good. Savathun’s Spire had us climbing a new area of the Throne World is a multi-part encounter filled with a variety of enemies. We had secrets to uncover each week due to the Deck of Whispers, which added an element of Deck Building into the activities. Altars of Summoning was a Court of Oryx style activity with players taking on different encounters with a hub world connecting the different arenas. The Immbaru Engine was introduced later in the season which saw us solving puzzles, and would ultimately reveal the 15th Wish, which came as a major shock and set up the events of next season.
Loot
Loot this season saw the introduced of seasonal weapons as always, but this set of weapons were different. On paper they shouldn’t be very good, but they felt very good, with the hand cannon being a great example of this. The Ex Diris was introduced as the seasonal exotic weapon, which is similar to a hive knight’s weapon, and finally we could live out our fantasy of becoming a boomer. Mothkeeper’s Wraps, Pyrogale Gauntlets and Briarbinds were added as Exotic armor, with Briarbinds being the pick of the bunch for this Warlock.
Raid
Crota’s End returned this season, which was very fitting given it was a Hive focused season. Crota’s End had become a meme in many raid groups, but Crota was back to show he wasn’t messing around in the world’s first race, with many teams shocked at the level of challenge. This was particularly pleasing to those fans who wanted more of a challenge after a lacklustre Root of Nightmares raid, which had the largest day one clear rate ever. Saltagreppo and his team was back to claim world first in 5h 50m 12s. Crota’s End Challenge mode was the lowest success rate day one experience in 4 years (since Garden of Salvation), with just 3% completion rate in 24 hours.
Events
Festival of the Lost was back again this season, with little change. Haunted Sectors were back with an added difficulty mode. Personally I didn’t play much of Festival of the Lost this time around, as my appetite for Destiny 2 events has dwindled.
PVP
This seaosn we had the announcement of the PVP strike team from Joe Blackburn, plus news of a map pack coming to Destiny 2. PVP has been neglected for such a long time, and now it’s finally looking to get some love. Checkmate came to Destiny 2 this season, which has single handedly had the most positive impact on Destiny 2 PVP for some time, with many player returning to try it out.
Craftening
Word started to spead of this issue on 15 September, which Cheeseforever (a well known Destiny 2 glitch hunter) making a series of videos. It started with exotic weapons, specifically Dead Messenger, with people taking the Exotic perk Trinary Vision and placing it on legendary weapons. Things then ramped up a notch when players figured out how to apply an aggressive shotgun frame to auto rifles, which essentially would dish out shotgun level of damage on an Auto Rifle rate of fire weapons. Imperial Decree and the Ammit-AR2 turned into a very popular combination, allowing a team of 3 Guardians to breeze through Grandmaster Nightfalls, which wasn’t a bad thing last week because it was double nightfall rewards with the returning Warden’s Law Handcannon.
Once word got out the Destiny 2 community got to work to find the most deadly, damage inducing combinations. Grandmaster Nightfalls were a breeze, the recently added Crota’s End Raid was being beaten in record time with Guardians absolutely melting Crota at the end of the raid in double quick time. Mnay Guardians took this opportunity to farm Essence of Oversoul, a valuable currency needed to acquire Necrochasm, the returning exotic auto rifle added as part of the returning Crota’s End Raid.
Trials of Osiris went live around a similar time the news started to spread like wildfire and many expected Bungie to cancel Trials. Many people had been looking forward to Trials last weekend because it had recently 2 weeks off, plus the Igenous Hammer was returning. However, Guardians soon realised, this was much more fun, and everyone waiting with baited breath to see what Bungie would do. Would they cancel Trials? Guardians were being one shot from across the map and PVP was turned into a killing field of dead Guardians. Would Bungie do the unthinkable and roll back the game? No, they did something very unexpected.
The key statement here is ‘too wild’. I don’t know exactly how ‘wild’ things needed to get because PVP had turned into a wasteland of dead Guardians, Trials was effectively ruined for the majority for the weekend, and endgame PVE bosses were being destroyed by over powered Guardians with funny guns. With Bungie saying ‘have some fun’, they were effectively saying go out there, use these weapons and go crazy. It was like the parents leaving the teenagers the house for the weekend and saying have a massive party. We did party all right, all weekend.
Bungie then confirmed there would be no rollback. This meant players could keep the loot they earned. For example, many Guardians had been farming Grandmaster Nightfalls for their god roll Warden’s Law, others has been farming Dungeons for artifice armor, plus more Guardians had been farming raid bosses for exotic loot. The fact the game wasn’t going to be rolled back meant we’d get to keep everything.
Sadly, this signalled the end of the funny guns crafting glitch, and things would slowly go back to normal.
Showcase
The showcase kicked off the season. It seemed to be well received, but shortly after the backlash started, with less fans than normal preordering copies of the Final Shape. Normally the showcase would be the place where Bungie would bring the hype, but this year it felt a little flat. They talked about The Final Shape, Season of the Witch, plus the next steps for the Destiny 2 story, Episodes. Bungie are doing away with 4 seasons per year and moving to a 3 episode structure, which will have more stand alone stories, as Bungie looks to introduce a new saga following the end of the light and darkness saga with The Final Shape.
Bungie layoffs
Bungie laid off 8% of staff in October. As well as the layoffs, Jason Schreier also confirmed The Final Shape has been delayed from February 2024 to June 2024 (still yet to be confimed by Bungie).
The effect of this delay to June 2024, means our final season in the Lightfall DLC is going to be 7 long months, plus that pushes back the start of the episodes narrative framework. Delays aren’t neccessarily bad, it means Bungie has had a hard look at the content and said that isn’t good enough, or it isn’t ready, therefore it needs more time.
According to another report from Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, revenue is down 45% against projections for the year. Bungie’s CEO Pete Parsons put the poor performance down to poor player rentention following a lacklustre major expansion in Lightfall, and less than expected pre-orders for The Final Shape, the upcoming DLC, which is also the final expansion of the light vs darkness saga. Bungie staff were told player sentiment is at an all time low, which had been flagged to leadership in the months leading up to the layoffs. Staff wanted to turn things around and work on features to bring back Destiny 2 fans.
At the time of writing player numbers are at an all time low with average players at 32,000 over the last 30 days, comapred to a high in March 2023 of 135,102. Thing have been on steady decline since the start of this year, which puts an emphasis on Season of the Wish and Bungie needing to pull an absolute blinder to recover for The Final Shape.
This quote from Paul Tassi really sums things up.
“Internally, really no one is blaming Sony for this, even management. Some employees were told that if the Sony buyout did not happen, that with current Destiny 2 performance the studio itself would have been in jeopardy if they were still independent.”
This puts eveythings into perspective. While I may be unhappy with some of the seasonal content, for me Destiny 2 still remains a great game to play, albeit a little more casually than I played before. I still enjoy Dungeons, Raids, creating builds and playing PVP.
We’ve hit points in Destiny 2’s lifecycle before where it felt like an important moment. Non moreso than this moment, where it feels like Bungie has to turn in a 10/10 season, leading up to the best expansion they have ever released, otherwise it could be curtains for Destiny 2.
Let me know in the comments what you think.