With Destiny 2's Season of the Drifter and Joker's Wild DLC scheduled to release next Tuesday, March 5, today Bungie released a new dev-guided trailer overviewing everything coming in the next season.
The headlining act is Gambit Prime, which Bungie described as the final exam to Gambit's practice test. Gambit Prime features new rules and Primeval mechanics said to require raid-esque coordination. Gambit Prime matches are only one round apiece, for instance, and the mode allows players to siphon Motes of Light from the enemy team on top of robbing them of their motes via invasions. It will also feature two new maps, with a Mars map coming in week one and a Titan map coming in week two. Incidentally, the Exotic hand cannon Thorn is also scheduled to arrive in week two.
That said, the most exciting change has got to be Gambit Prime's firmly defined player roles. By equipping new color-coded armor sets, Gambit Prime players can tailor their loadouts and play as one of the following:
- Reaper, whose goal is to kill as many enemies as possible
- Collector, whose goal is to collect and bank Motes of Light
- Sentry, whose goal is to kill Invaders and Taken, and defend the Mote bank
- Invader, whose goal is to invade the other team and steal Motes of Light
On top of role-specific armor sets, Gambit Prime will also feature new weapons. We saw the Spare Rations hand cannon, Sole Survivor sniper rifle, and Doomsday grenade launcher, as well as an unnamed shotgun, submachine gun, and scout rifle.
Gambit Prime is also the key to a new four-player endgame PvE activity called The Reckoning, which is set in the realm of the mysterious Nine inside the Drifter's equally mysterious cargo. We didn't learn or see much about The Reckoning, but do we know it's filled with enemies and rewards loot which ties into Gambit Prime, including that slick color-coded armor. It's also split into tiers which start at one and escalate to three, with each tier apparently featuring a countdown timer. Production lead Blake Battle likened The Reckoning to the Crota raid from Destiny, pointing to hordes of enemies attacking from all sides.
Today's trailer also showed off a new way to increase your Power: the aptly named Power Surge bounties. Judging from the example we saw in the trailer (pictured above), these limited bounties award specific pieces of gear which drop at set Power levels - in this case, 640 Power. For reference, the new Power cap in the Season of the Drifter is 700. Power Surge bounties should provide a tidy way for new players, or players who can't play super heavily, to catch up and experience the Season of the Drifter and Joker's Wild - provided they own the annual pass. These bounties were likely created as a response to early Black Armory woes which saw many players treading water for weeks because they weren't of-level for the new content (in response, Bungie also lowered the Power requirements on some activities).
This is all pretty exciting stuff. I'd love to see Gambit Prime revitalize the PvPvE mode, and I'm especially interested in The Reckoning, which could occupy a similar part-Strike, part-raid space as the Shattered Throne dungeon. There are still some things we haven't seen too, like the seemingly Dawning-esque spring event and Xur's new bounties (now renamed Invitations of the Nine). We'll find out more on March 5.
You can find more information and some details you may have missed in our roundup of everything coming in Destiny 2 Season of the Drifter.
