Yesterday, Destiny fans were gearing up to donate a bunch of fractaline at the Tower obelisk when they were treated to a surprise cutscene when they logged in. The new footage features Osiris marching into Rasputin’s core and yelling at the AI Warmind that he’s been a traitor and murderer in the past and that he better get off his rear end and start protecting humanity again the coming threat of the Darkness. He asks him which side he’s truly on.
It’s a pretty massive moment, setting up the story component of season 10, aka Season of the Worthy, as we know that something will be happening alongside the arrival of Trials of Osiris. It’s rather cool to see the first two year one DLCs colliding like this directly, and now it’s time to speculate about what this means for the coming season.
The main question most players have after seeing this scene is if we’re possibly being set up for another type of “loyalty” season, where we choose sides in a micro civil war between Osiris and Rasputin. This could be similar to when we pledged ourselves to either the Drifter or the Vanguard, which ultimately didn’t move the plot forward much (the Drifter wasn’t really evil after all, just lonely), but it was a cool experiment all the same, and it still has ramifications to this day with different in-game dialogue depending on what you picked way back when.
Bungie knew that players liked that quest, so setting up another one seems like it might be in the cards. For me, it would be a no-brainer, because I find Osiris annoying and Rasputin to be awesome, so I’ll be picking the AI. Well, if it’s like last time, I’ll be picking both, with at least one character (my snitch Warlock) siding with Osiris to see what the other side of the coin is like.
It is unlikely this would be an all-out war between the two, as my guess is that whatever drama happens this season, this leads into a big “Avengers assemble” season 11 where all the big players get together and then take on a larger threat in season 12, which will be the fall expansion we assume is coming.
While I had some wild theories about Prison of Elders returning, I am happy to see this Rasputin turn instead, as it’s one of the many threads that Bungie has left hanging, this one since spring 2018, which is the last time we heard from the Warmind in any real way. The theory is that way back when, the Traveler was going to leave humanity and run away from the Darkness, abandoning mankind like it had done with the Fallen long ago, but Rasputin shot it and crippled it, forcing it to stay and protect humanity. So yes, I do think he’s on our side and Osiris is being overly confrontational, as ever.
But with the focus on Rasputin and Osiris, it does seem unlikely that even though they’re “up” for rotation, that the Fallen will be the enemy stars of this season. Osiris is all about the Vex. Rasputin’s Mars home is full of Cabal and Hive. The Fallen weren’t really anywhere near any of those two DLCs, so I would be surprised to see them fit into this coming storyline. But we’ll see. ( Update : I’ve been reminded of the Fallen being key in the SIVA storyline of Rise of Iron, which is tied directly to Rasputin, and Bungie has “collected feedback” about us wanting to revisit SIVA, so perhaps that’s the connection I was looking for).
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As for what we’ll actually be playing this coming season on the PvE side of things? While Bungie has said they won’t keep giving us horde mode activities forever, the first thing that jumps out at me is a potential rework of Escalation Protocol. New enemies, random rolls on old guns, new IKELOS-style guns to join those, and perhaps some way to make it an actual, full, six-player instance rather than forcing people to go into random patrol zones to start it.
In my mind, if this is a PvP heavy season with Trials returning, this could be a “light” PvE activity in which Bungie doesn’t actually have to build out a new space, just modify an existing zone and activity to make it relevant again. This would no doubt be met with some level of disdain from players who always want something new, but as a compromise, I could see it working. EP remains one of the most fun activities in the game, it’s just almost completely irrelevant to run now, since the weapons are fixed drops and the armor sets have garbage rolls. I would not mind seeing it refreshed as the PvE side of this coming season, and that way, it theoretically wouldn’t need to be removed at the end of the season either, unlike Vex Offensive and Sundial.
There is a lot more to say about all of this, but I’ll wait and see what Bungie has to say in this week’s TWAB before diving any deeper. Exciting times, all the same.