The dust has settled around Shadowkeep and Destiny 2 players are coming to grips with the new content in the Season of Dawn. This season feels thinner since it doesn't have an accompanying expansion to flesh it out, which has led many to ponder what the rest of Year 3 holds. In a recent interview with GamesRadar, producer Rachel Levine and community manager David 'Deej' Dague stressed that seasons will continue to evolve in Year 3, and that players shouldn't expect to see the same content beats - new horde mode, season pass swag, Eververse refresh, and a handful of Exotics - repeated every season.
"I don’t think there’ll ever be one true size for a season," Levine says. "I think all seasons will evolve and we’ll do our best to make sure that each season fits to the community and what they want to see from the game. We are ultimately trying to learn to take what we learn from the game, per season, to create a game that everybody will like and that will engage with the diverse crowd playing Destiny [no matter when they came to the game].
"If there are aspects of any season we take that we want to apply to individual people, we’ll examine our data – how they play, what they engage with – and feed that back into the game. No season, I think, will ever be the same. Our community shouldn’t expect that – we want to tell a story that continues across the entire year."
"And to add to that, narrative as a whole needs to consistently evolve," she adds. "The story beats we got to plant in Season of Dawn are really exciting and we get to continue moving forward with that. We’re really excited about how people engaged with the first [Saint-14] mission, and we want to continue to help people be excited about those missions."
With the release of the Season of Dawn, the Vex Offensive activity from the Season of the Undying permanently left the game. Dague discussed the challenges of building and removing this kind of content, and balancing that with the forward progress of Destiny 2 as a whole.
"When you defeat the Undying Mind and the Vex go into retreat, that portion of the player experience is over… but now the Cabal are on the march," he says. "So you’re constantly confronted with new challenges, or you’re constantly aware of the fact that the only reason that this is happening is because of what you accomplished last season. That is a far more engaging and meaningful experience than just piling more and more things into the game that people say ‘there are so many milestones and so many things to do over the course of the week that I don’t know how to spend my time’. Even some of the most hardcore players in our community have said that to us."
Like many, I'm curious as to whether we've really seen the last of Vex Offensive, and indeed if future seasonal activities like the Sundial will ever be brought back - perhaps for limited-time events. I put the question to Dague, who didn't dismiss the possibility.
"Anything can happen in the future," he says. "These are the surprises we keep in reserve. For a while, people were asking us ‘do you think we’ll ever get to see Eris Morn again?’ and that’s something we got to pay off this year. ‘Do you think we’ll get to learn more about Saint-14?’ All of these things are things we know players are curious about and we think about being able to pay off."
Separately, Dague affirmed that Bungie plans to "lean more into the MMORPG elements that make Destiny special."
