I’ve spent around seven hours with Season of the Worthy. That’s not nearly enough time to pass judgment on the changes and new content that will be reverberating throughout Destiny 2 over the next few months. But I can say that those seven hours have been some of the most underwhelming I’ve spent getting to know a new season in Destiny 2 in a long time.
Season of the Worthy got underway yesterday, introducing yet another existential threat for players to combat. This time, instead of an ancient Hive worm god or a giant floating Vex cyclops, it’s a humongous Cabal spaceship on a collision course with Earth. To do that, players need to call on their old friend Rasputin, the classical music-loving AI with a network of weapons, defences, and secret bunkers littered throughout the solar system.
The Warmind’s help doesn’t come cheap though, which means players must navigate a confusing web of new currencies, bounties, and upgrades in order to fully restore its power. The result is a convoluted new grind whose rewards don’t feel particularly worth the effort and which also feels oddly siloed from the rest of the game and the more interesting story beats that have come before it.
Season of the Worthy revolves around Seraph Towers and Rasputin’s bunkers. The first is a public event activity that awards armour, weapons, and a new currency called chipsets. The second is an underground location where you can trade in your chipsets to get additional weapons and armour directly from Rasputin. The Warmind also has bounties that award a second currency called bits which can be used to upgrade the bunkers to earn new loot and resources even faster. Taken together they feel almost exactly like last season’s Obelisks except the grind is longer, not nearly as fun, and in the service of a smaller pool of loot that’s not as exciting.
Part of the problem with Season of the Worthy isn’t just that it feels too familiar. It’s that a lot of the returning stuff is worse than when players encountered it before. The central example of this are the Seraph Tower public events. They consist of three platforms you need to defend as they power-up one at a time. At various intervals, if no enemies are on the designated platform, a round of charges will spawn that you can pick up and throw at a second ball of energy situated in the air between two of the platforms. It’s basically a version of the forge missions from Black Armory, but much more chaotic and frustrating.
Enemies need to be cleared quickly, but they spawn so fast and from so many directions that most of the time I’ve found myself spinning in circles trying to keep the horde at bay, only for a small dreg or invisible marauder to somehow sneak by me. Unlike the Black Armory’s forges, which were entirely new arenas with multi-level layouts, the Seraph Towers on the EDZ at least are just plopped down in the middle of a flat area near the marshes in the Winding Cove. Similar events will be added to the other planets in the coming weeks, but so far they pale in comparison to last season’s Sundial activity, or even Season of Undying’s mediocre Vex Offensives.
Unfortunately, the rest of the season feels pretty slim at this point. There’s only one ritual weapon and it’s locked behind Iron Banner. Meanwhile, the Vanguard playlist, Crucible, and Gambit don’t have any special challenges associated with them this season, making the thought of diving back into Nightfall Ordeals or going trying to make Legend in Crucible even less appealing. Also, the new weapons awarded by Rasputin pull from a weaker set of perks than previous seasons did, making them feel like unlikely candidates for trying to compete in Trials of Osiris when that starts this weekend.
The single best moment I’ve had in Season of Worthy so far came from its new exotic: Tommy’s Matchbook. The auto rifle has a massive magazine but hits like a truck and overheats the longer you hold down the trigger, doing more damage but burning you in the process. It feels like a beefier version of the Riskrunner submachine gun and is just as fun to use to melt through enemies. Still, I can’t help thinking that acquiring the gun would feel more meaningful if there was a quest behind it rather than it just dropping from the season pass (which it does instantly if you have the paid version).
All Destiny 2’s ever had to do to bring me back is supply a new set of challenges and mysteries to give me an excuse to shoot all the same enemies I’ve already killed thousands of times all over again. These days, there are fewer and fewer of either. While I’m still hopeful that the return of Trials of Osiris will give me a new end-game goal to strive towards, I’ve never been less interested in all the rigamarole I need to go through to get there.
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