The latest season of Destiny 2 has been formally announced and it’s called the Season of the Splicer. For those keeping up, and I barely am, the Splicers have been pretty quiet since the Rise of Iron expansion for the original Destiny, which was that game’s last major expansion back in 2016.
In the Season of the Splicer, the Vex, the alien robots who can seemingly weave alternate realities and travel through time, have plunged the City into an endless night through a simulation. The only way to beat them, according to the Warlock Vanguard Ikorra Rey (lots of proper nouns in this game, I’m sorry), is to enlist the help of a Fallen Splicer named Mithrax.
The last time the Splicers played a heavy role in the story was back in Rise of Iron, when a Fallen house of Splicers came across the SIVA virus, a self-replicating nanotechnology from Destiny’s Golden Age before the Collapse (I’m really so sorry about all the proper nouns, this game is nerdy as hell), which seemed to make them nearly invincible and could even reanimate the dead. While there doesn’t seem to be any SIVA in sight, the Splicers’ unique ability to “commune with machines” looks to be the key to figuring out how to fight off the Vex this time around.
What this will look like consists of at least two recurring activities: Override and Expunge. Override is the new seasonal six-player activity that will task players with hacking into the Vex network. It’s not a new raid but it seems to sport some cool visuals like a raid would. Hacking into the Vex network apparently takes you onto these floating platforms whose color scheme and whole look seem ripped straight out of Tron. Expunge is the new weekly Pinnacle mission, and I won’t lie to you, I don’t know what that means. Last I heard, there were Pinnacle weapons that had these long quests to get them, so this is maybe that.
This season also brings the already very controversial and incredibly convoluted transmog system to Destiny 2, and it seems to be going in exactly as is. No surprise there, it was definitely way too late to just pull it, but I guess we’ll see it in action pretty soon now.
The most exciting news to me is that the Vault of Glass, Destiny’s first ever raid, is coming to Destiny 2. Bungie has previously teased that while the experience is by and large the same, there will be some modifications made to bring the whole level up to snuff. It has been nearly seven years since it came out, so it makes sense. Running home after school the week that raid came out and hacking away at it for days with my friends remains one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had with a game, and while there’s no way to replicate that, I will be mostly happy just to have Vault of Glass back.
There will undoubtedly be more weapons, armor and quests, both hidden and not, to uncover throughout the Season of the Splicer, which starts next week on May 11 and runs all the way through Aug. 24.