First Impressions With Destiny 2's Season of Defiance

It’s been a week since Lightfall dropped, and the general consensus amongst people I know is that it’s a Beyond Light situation: the campaign was mechanically fun but felt a bit unsatisfactory from a narrative standpoint. While I personally felt like it was more set up for what’s to come down the line, I can see where others would feel different. But I’m not here to talk about that, I’m here to talk about the new season of content that launched alongside the expansion, alongside some other stuff that’s worth pointing out. Let’s get to it.

The main story of the season so far runs both concurrently and after Lightfall’s campaign. After establishing contact with the Cloudstriders on Neomuna, you get a message from Queen Mara Sov. She details that the Shadow Legion is making attacks and taking prisoners on Earth to be taken to the newly risen Pyramids on the planet for some as of yet, unknown purpose. To aid us in keeping the people of Earth safe, Mara inducts us into her Queensguard and offers to give us any help we need to get the job done. So far this story feels like a companion piece to the main expansion content in the same way that Season of the Risen did so for Witch Queen. It so far does a good job of giving us a boots-on-the-ground perspective of the major conflict and seeing how it affects the people living in these spaces. Established characters like Mara and Mithrax are leading up the whole operation, with less focused on characters like shipwright Amanda Holliday and Sir Devrim Kay from the EDZ getting involved as well. The latter in particular is invested because he’s one of the most direct lines to normal humanity that we have, so seeing him bounce off of these other, more “high-level” characters so to speak is great.

There are also some post-campaign quests on Neomuna and Neptune that do a good job of fleshing out the story and characters introduced there as well. The standout is Unfinished Business: a quest chain that goes into further detail about the Veil, as well as serving as a vehicle for growing Nimbus as a character. This is explored by helping them work their way through their grief following Rohan’s death in the campaign. It’s capped off with a trip to the Black Garden where we follow the leads to a weapon Rohan was working on called the Deterministic Chaos, an Exotic Heavy Machine Gun that brings the boom (quite literally).

The main seasonal activity is the Defiant Battlegrounds. These work in similar ways to the Chosen, Psi-Ops and Heist Battlegrounds in that you and two other players fight your way through hordes of enemies (This time, it's Shadow Legion) to get to the main objective. The main twist is that the second half takes place in the Ascendant Realm, an extradimensional plane of existence tied to the Darkness. After that, we go through and fight through a Horde of Taken, fight two bosses and free the hostages. Battlegrounds have been in Destiny 2 for the better part of a Year at this point and I’ve somehow managed to not get tired of them yet. I think a lot of it has to do with it appealing to the power fantasy of just letting us go through and run roughshod on entire armies with our ridiculous builds. Strand in particular shines, but I’ll be giving my detailed thoughts on that next week. This also brings us to the changes made in the buildcrafting.

Buildcrafting starting with this season has changed significantly compared to how it’s worked in the last few years. The mod system and the Charged with Light mods have been changed to Armor Charges. Armor Charges are obtained from a variety of methods, but the main one that the community seems to be going with right now is through collecting orbs of power. These let you do a lot of things; boosting stats, increasing weapon damage of a specific element type, and granting ability energy are the key ones so far. While it may not be as potent as the old system and Font of Might stacking, it all feels easier to comprehend because you can lean into a very specific part of your guardian’s abilities and do that one trick very well. Case in point: My Warlock Builds for Void and Stasis all focus on giving me as much discipline and as many elemental weapon damage boosts as possible. And that’s before taking the seasonal artifact perks into mind. These are always on and not mods anymore, which is awesome, but you can only take 12 at a time because these are more potent than the old artifact mods were.

So far, Defiance is shaping up to be a decent set of Destiny 2 content. I’m interested in seeing where the story goes, especially as a sucker for the Awoken stuff. This combined with the quality of life changes will be more than enough to keep me logging in every week to see where things go.