Hello dark, my old friend, please give me the cool look Destiny 2 arm wrestling before I became too angry, tired, and full of regret.
Destiny 2 has all sorts of grinds, but the annual Solstice of Heroes event has always felt uniquely hurtful to me. It should be an end-of-year victory round for the game and its players, but instead of feeling like a rewarding celebration, it feels like a list of tasks I need to do before opening gifts on my birthday. The list goes on and on, and on, and there’s always a 50 percent chance that no matter how Bullish I was at the end at the beginning I’ll just leave the two project two – thirds of the way.
This year Solstice of Heroes event, which started yesterday and lasts until September 8, is basically the same as last year, with a few tweaks. EAZ, the set of floating ruins above the European Dead Zone, returns as a matchmaking activity with three players, where you hunt mini-bosses in a given time to earn treasure chests that you can plunder for solstice keys and packages. Also back is a special set of Solstice armor that you must gradually upgrade by killing enemies and completing tasks throughout the solar system. These tasks include such stimulating hits as “Generating 200 EAZ Elemental Orbs,” “Hit 600 Playlist Enemies,” and “Earn 10 Solstice Packs.”
The only major difference between Solstice of Heroes of 2019 and this year is that the fully upgraded Magnificent armor-set players will not be immediately obsolete due to changes coming in the Beyond Light expansion this fall. Last year, end-of-summer players spent tens of hours getting a full set of Solstice weapons, only to become functionally useless when Shadowkeep launched major changes and added like a seasonal fashion system.
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This year, in addition to using Majestic armor for next year, players can also purchase Majestic Armor ornaments with bright fabric earned by playing the game as Silver, Destiny 2of premium currency. These ornaments can be fitted to any piece of weaponry to make it really cool and glow bright colors. It’s a drag that you’ll eventually have to go to the Eververse store for this fashion upgrade, and that players who bought Glory Solstice in recent years for real money, can not use these to pull off their new weapon sets, but so is the monkey paw logic that is ruled Lot since it launched.
There are also a lot of small wrinkles after the Solstice grind it makes frustrating and easy to leave. To upgrade the weapon sets, you must have each piece equipped while completing its associated challenges. That more or less means leaving your favorite custom equipment loadouts for the duration of the event. Meanwhile, some of the Solstice challenges seem almost designed to be incomplete, such as needing to re-follow old planetary adventures or patrols to just fill a random meter.
This time, the last leg of the grind actually requires playing Trials of Osiris, the highly competitive PVP mode that is not matchmaking and is tendency to cheat and asshole teammates. To unlock the fancy ornaments that will make their armor beautiful colors, players must win seven Trials matches. I may have been pushing myself for a few weeks to only hit a brick wall when a .25 Trials wind speed means I have to hate several nights to finally earn myself the right to look cool.
Earlier, this year, Destiny 2 director Luke Smith said the team visited Bungie to repair the game’s current FOMO (fear of fog) problem. Given the current underlying stimulus structure of the game, I doubt this is really possible. This year’s solstice is a good example: the rewards of the event are finally fixed and seem to have significance for the next 12 months (if you look at the game’s apparent evolution calendar). But at the same time, they are probably never harder to get, not only because of the number of steps involved in purchasing the loot, but the scope of it and the fact that a few actually challenge it. Just like I’m deep back Destiny 2To, I’m more likely than ever to fall back hard.
But the whole thing also feels inevitable, like the gaming equivalent of one of those “your meal is free if you can finish this heart attack-inducing amount of food”. As well as TechRadar‘s Samuel Roberts wrote on Twitter the next day, Lot is not good or bad, it’s just “something that happens to me.” And so, for the third year in a row, I answer the call of Destiny 2‘s Solstice of Heroes, despite my better judgment.
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