Season of Opulence, or Destiny 2 Season 7, has been out for a little under a week, and we’ve spent some time playing pretty much everything except the raid. Here are our thoughts on what’s good, what’s bad and what’s ugly about the final season of Destiny 2’s second year.
The Good: Menagerie
I’ll get this out of the way now: Menagerie is an exceedingly difficult mode, in the vein of previous tasks like Reckoning. If you’re underleveled, which you’re almost guaranteed to be if you weren’t frantically trying to beat the raid last week, you can expect to die. A lot.
Where Menagerie differs from Reckoning is in how it handles deaths and fail states. There is a timer for each activity in the mode, and when the timer runs down, you don’t get booted (like in Reckoning), you simply move to the next activity. In a particularly brutal match, my random six-person team and I spent over an hour running through each activity until we had enough progress to get to the final boss.
While this certainly can be frustrating for other reasons (like being sick of fighting the same four enemy types over and over), it actually reduced the stress I felt about the mode overall. You can be absolutely garbage toilets at the game and still get a reward in Menagerie, as long as you’re willing to throw your Guardian’s body at enemies dozens, if not hundreds of times.
The Bad: (Mostly) Everything Else
Destiny 2 is… ultimately still Destiny 2. It has some major infrastructural issues it needs to deal with, mostly relating to its PVP modes, lack of meaningful non-raid endgame activities, and the severely unbalanced in-game economy.
Menagerie aside, Destiny 2 is stuck somewhere between tedious activities with barely any reward at all, and maximally frustrating activities tied to a reward system that relies too heavily on randomness. With at least a dozen different powerful gear activities each week, being able to raise your light level should be at least a bit easier than it is currently. On the other side of this coin, activities like patrols and public events barely offer anything at all. The gap between these types of tasks is vast and deep, and it can make playing Destiny 2 feel like clocking into work.
Maybe Shadowrift/Season 8 will make changes to this situation, but Bungie has kind of backed itself into a corner here. We’ll see what happens in September when Shadowrift comes out.
The Ugly: That Pursuits Tab
I might be the only person who liked how Bungie handled pursuits in Year 1. I didn’t hate when they moved pursuits to the inventory, either. An ideal system would be some combination of those two setups, but instead we’ve moved everything to its own tab in the Director.
I hate it. It’s cumbersome, awkward and a bit ugly. There’s no discernible flow to it. And I’m not looking forward to dealing with activities in there as Season of Opulence carries on.
The Takeaway
It’s too early to tell how this season will go. Level progression is slow going right now, but Menagerie has remained consistently fun. A new enemy has been announced for next week’s iteration of Menagerie, and we’re also supposed to get the Truth exotic quest as well. That said, all eyes are on Shadowrift and Destiny 2’s next season.