Being a pirate is alright with me. (light spoilers)
Destiny 2’s new season is here and that means it’s time to swab the poop deck. Season of the Plunder is appropriately named because it’s a pirate themed season with a literal boss creature named Privateer Aye-I.
The season kicks off with the player going on a mission to retrieve some cargo for the Drifter. Turns out that cargo has a pulse and a name, and it’s none other than Spider, our good friend drifting about ever since the Tangle Shore was lost to us. The Spider isn’t happy about the guardian seeing him in such a compromising position, and even less so when Drifter offers to ship him back to the Tangled Shore where there’s a big bounty on his head when he initially refuses to renegotiate his hazard pay fees. In return we get access to The Spider’s ketch pirate ship.
My biggest gripe with last season was the open world activity that took the place of the main content loop. Not because of the activity itself but because the open world nature of it meant that you could zone in and not find a single person playing the activity, which means zoning out and hopping into a new instance hoping that this one would have people playing, and doing that over and over again until you got lucky. It sucked. It’s the first season in a couple of years that I lost all enthusiasm for playing halfway through.
The big activity this season is Ketcrash, a 6 player offensive mode where players go through a series of battle arenas, defeat the boss, and come out of it with loot. Ketcrash is the meat and potatoes of Destiny 2 content and I’m fine with it. Outside of Ketcrash you have expeditions where teams of 3 players escort a loot ship and collect loot. This feeds into Destiny 2’s other major gameplay trope; throwing orbs into a thing. This mode is similar to a few other we’ve seen in prior seasons because the player collects treasure map pieces from Ketcrash and uses it to build a treasure map, which can then open a bonus chest at the end of the session.
Finally you have pirate hideouts which feel similar to the sever activity from last season. Solo missions where you take down a pirate boss and collect their relic, which is used to power the thing and get more bonuses for the seasonal activity. The major difference this time is that while Sever was a repeatable activity and had weekly bonuses for playing it, the pirate hideouts are one and done and presumably updated weekly.
Other than that it’s the usual seasonal grind that you either love or hate. Grind bounties, grind reputation, grind currencies, grind craftable weapon recipes, grind challenges, grind power levels, grind weapon levels, do dungeons and raids and stuff. It’s very much Destiny 2.
But I’m really happy that the seasonal activity is one that everyone involved is actually wanting to take part in. And I haven’t even gotten to the Arc 3.0 update.
MMO Fallout 