Destiny 2: Joker's Wild release date announced as Trials of the Nine is put "on hiatus indefinitely"

Destiny 2: Black Armory is on its way out, with little more than the Valentine Crimson Days event and another Iron Banner left in the tank. That means the Season of the Drifter and its Joker's Wild DLC are spooling up, and as Bungie announced in a recent blog post, it's all scheduled to arrive on Tuesday, March 5. 

According to the annual pass roadmap released last year, the first month of Joker's Wild will up the Power limit to 700, add private matches and new maps to Gambit along with a mysterious "new Gambit experience," and introduce a new pool of Joker's Wild gear. Just as excitingly, it will also add Xur bounties which will hopefully help alleviate some of Destiny 2's most painful grinds. 

It's not all excitement this week, though. Bungie's blog post held somber news for Crucible fans: the hiatus on Trials of the Nine, the pinnacle PvP mode which was pulled from the game in season four to give Bungie time to improve it, has been extended indefinitely. And from the sound of things, it won't be back for at least six months.

"With the introduction of Trials of the Nine in Destiny 2, we made a few changes to the formula which never really hit the same mark," the Destiny 2 PvP team wrote. "We were unhappy with its role in the ecosystem. The new activity wasn’t achieving the goal of bringing the community together every weekend. Both Destiny and the online PvP scene have evolved since 2015, so we don’t believe that bringing back the 2015 version of Trials of the Nine would accomplish what our goals are today. Until we have a solid prototype for a pinnacle PvP endgame activity, Trials is staying on hiatus indefinitely and will not return over the course of the next few seasons. When we have those new plans ready, we’ll be sure to share them with you." 

We know that the next two seasons will be three months apiece, so at the absolute earliest, Trials will return in September. But even that's a longshot, as Bungie still hasn't settled on a concrete vision of what the mode should look like. Some players have suggested reviving the original 3v3 elimination mode that started Trials, but evidently Bungie isn't interested in that either. Suffice it to say, Trials won't return until late 2019, if ever. 

Here's everything coming in Destiny 2 Season of the Drifter and the Joker's Wild DLC. 

Austin Wood

Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.