Last week, Bungie launched Destiny 2’s Season 6 “Season of the Drifter.” This is the first bit of DLC that’s been launched since Bungie and Activision ended their 10-year contract agreement on January 10th of this year. Everyone was curious to see what an Activision-less Destiny would be like without their influence. So, how is it? Well, it’s not for everyone … right now.
On day one, Bungie let’s you power up to 640 just by doing a few simple in-game tasks. The reason behind Bungie doing this is to allow the players who have fallen behind (or those who haven’t played “The Reckoning”) to catch up to other players because you can get destroyed by invaders that have done Gambit Prime, where different power levels matter.
So far though, Season of the Drifter is (as plenty of gamers and journalists have guessed) focused on Gambit Prime Bounties where The Drifter asks you to take on one of the many bounties and complete it. Once you complete the bounty and return to The Drifter, you will collect a Synthesizer which is used for The Reckoning. Each Synth is for one of four roles: Reaper, Collector, Sentry, and Invader. From what I was seeing, they have two uses. You can just use them to gain three points in your set bonus which will last about 30 minutes, or you can use them in your Synthesizer to create a Weak Mote of the Synth you placed into the Synthesizer. If you do this, you then place that mote into the “bank” in The Reckoning. When you complete The Reckoning, you will then be free to loot your mote, which will have turned into an armor piece of the set you originally chose when you made a Weak Mote.
That’s the main gameplay loop for Season of the Drifter. Once you complete The Drifter’s quest line, you will unlock the weekly Gambit Prime bonus and some additional bounties … but be careful. You can only choose one Prime Bounty at a time (it’s weekly) so be sure to choose wisely.
What’s a little weird to me about this is that Bungie designed this whole thing to create two tiers of armor that are going to be fundamentally pointless after tier three launches? I understand that maybe it was an introduction to a couple of perks with the rest to follow later on, but I don’t understand why you would bother wasting Synth currency on these bottom-to-mid tier sets. You’re clearly going to need a lot of it when it takes three synths and a tier three to get one piece of final-stage Prime armor. Hopefully Bungie will address this on their own YouTube channel with a ViDoc video, elaborate over on Reddit, or even possibly discuss it during a live stream. Now don’t get me wrong, I am loving what Bungie is doing now! I just hope they stay on this path and continue to deliver on content because I am loving what I am seeing.
