The latest season of Destiny 2 is now entering week two of its release and it has its highlights and lowlights. Season 18, called ‘Season of Plunder’, allows you to live out your pirate fantasies – in space. Utilising the Eliksni once again as the main character race for the season, the story revolves around that giant frozen statue, Eramis, that we left standing on a landing platform way back at the end of the Beyond Light campaign. Only she’s finally been thawed out by The Witness and has assembled a collection of old Pirate lords to seek out a collection of Eliksni artifacts dotted around the galaxy. As newly promoted ‘pirate captains’, we have joined forces with Misraaks. Yeah, that’s right: according to him we’ve been pronouncing his name wrong all this time. We’re also joined by his daughter Eido and our main point of contact, Drifter. Spider is also back, but this time round he’s opened up a shop in the Eliksni part of the city. Our job is to stop Erimis from getting her hands on the relics, the function of which is an underlying mystery throughout the season. It’s only now, in week two, it appears Spider may have nefarious reasons for helping us.
As with every season, we get the usual season pass track, filled with glimmer, exotic engrams and cosmetics. As you’d expect with a pirate themed season, we have have pirate-themed cosmetics, ranging from seasonal activity armour sets and a special armour cosmetic skin acquired through the higher tier of the pass. Along with the themed armour, we also have a whole new set of weapons, all unmistakably Eliksni but also bearing resemblance to old weapons utilised by traditional pirates, from blunderbuss style shotguns to flintlock pistol-styled sidearms.
The main repeatable activity for the season is actually broken into two separate ones this time around. The main repeatable one is Ketchcrash. This involves flying to the aid of a besieged Eliksni Ketch ship that belongs to our merry band of ‘good’ pirates, in a six man, matchmade fireteam. Your task is to repel the attack, then board the enemy ship and fight your way through to the final captain. Taking him down allows you to collect ‘treasure’ from a chest using the seasonal artifact as a key.
The second activity takes the form of an amalgamation of the glimmer mining public event and the mote collection mechanic of Gambit. You’re tasked with following a floating craft whilst throwing objects that resemble exotic engrams at it, as they spill from a glimmer drill.
To be honest, both activities obviously become repetitive, as is the case with most, if not all, seasonal activities. However, they’re still fun to play with friends and a perfect way to test out builds and abilities. And this brings me to the other new feature introduced to this season: Arc 3.0.
As with the last three, this season brings a rework to another subclass. This time round, it’s the last one to receive the same treatment as Stasis, Void and Solar, allowing you to live out your Palpatine fantasies.
So, all in all, a pretty impressive new season. But – and it’s a big but – the season launch hasn’t been a completely successful one. Within a few days of launch, it was discovered that the resistance level of your armour on Titans and Warlocks was, well, to put it simply, useless. For some reason the game was completely ignoring the stats of resistance and leaving Titans and Warlocks out in the cold and being taken out quite easily by even the lowest level enemies.
UPDATE – This issue has since been fixed.
The other major issue faced in this new season was a new weapon that was a reward for pre-ordering the new upcoming DLC – Lightfall – releasing in February. This weapon unlocks in game the moment you’ve placed your order for the DLC. However, within two days of this going live, the weapon has now been deactivated, meaning players couldn’t use it in game. Usually if a weapon isn’t performing correctly and has to be deactivated (I’m STILL looking at you Telesto) it’s not that much a deal. There are rumblings within the community, but that’s to be expected. However, this new weapon was paid for with real money, and now unusable. As you’d imagine, the community is in an proar. There were A LOT of very angry tweets flying around. Not a good look, Bungie.
And so, this brings me to to my final thoughts of Season of Plunder. I like it. I applaud the theme: it’s fun, fresh and the continuing story is pretty interesting. Compared to the last season, I had very strong thoughts about the recycled content, see my review of that here – I’m thoroughly impressed with this one. Well done Bungie, you listened to the community and delivered something fresh and fun.
If you’d like to see what the seasons like or even my Dungeon team tackle the latest one – ‘Duality’ check out my Twitch page – www.twitch.com/lemur_tango.
Written by Lance.
Edited by Catherine.