Destiny 2’s Dreaming City Nostalgia Tour Has Fallen Flat

This is the last official season of Destiny 2, at least in their current form. The game will soon move to disconnected “episodes” after The Final Shape expansion, rather than having them be throughlines with one another.

That’s why this final season feels so strange. Not just because it’s going to drag being six months long after a Final Shape delay, but because of the kind of content it contains, and the kind of content it’s reusing.

This season has taken us on what I would consider to be a “Dreaming City nostalgia tour.” The Dreaming City was the highlight of Destiny 2’s famed Forsaken expansion, and expansion which was mostly murdered by content vaulting, stripping away the story and the Tangled Shore zone, with the dungeon, raid and exotics purchasable on their own, and leaving the Dreaming City itself intact as a playable space.

But in Season of the Wish, we are no just going back to the Dreaming City, we are going back to literally do all the Forsaken activities, or at least a sampling of them. So far we have:

• Had to do Blind Well completions as a quest step
• Had to do DC Lost Sector completion
• Had to do an entire weekly Petra curse quest
• Had to do an Ascendant Challenge

The most bizarre part of this is that almost nothing has changed here, other than perhaps a couple new lines of dialogue layered on top of the activity. A singular alteration is Blind Well getting its enemy difficulty bumped (barely) and it being a super inefficient farm for reprised Dreaming City weapons. But everything else is exactly the same, creating a sense of extreme déjà vu running through the exact curse mission or Ascendant Challenge from years ago.

Players are wrong when they say this is “vaulted content being sold back to us.” Technically, this content was never actually vaulted despite Forsaken being killed. But of course there was no actual reason to do it. And there still isn’t, given almost no changes and no meaningful rewards.

Newly unleashed former Destiny 2 community manager DMG had an interesting thread about this yesterday, based on a lighting bug he encountered in the Ascendant Challenge that made it close to pitch black, a bug that has been there for literal years. His point is that you need to A) fix bugs and B) change things to some degree when you bring old things back. Destiny has done this before, reprising old content or spaces in new ways. But this is a clone stamp to a degree we rarely see.

It’s not like the other weekly quest steps are so hot either. It usually goes:

• Do a mission that is literally just a Riven’s Lair
• Do a reprised Dreaming City activity
• Do pathways in The Coil or Riven’s Lair
• Listen to a lot of people talk.

I maintain that The Coil itself is a really, really great activity, but the problem is that it’s the only activity this season, so it’s overused for story developments and the rest has to be repeated Dreaming City content. With only one week left I suppose there’s little point complaining now, but it just hasn’t worked in a way that I think past seasons have. Now please don’t make us run The Corrupted next week.

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