Destiny 2 has a ton in store for its core playlists throughout Lightfall. Bungie will touch on the Vanguard Ops, Nightfall, and Crucible playlists as part of its effort to overhaul the core activities in the game, the developer confirmed in a blog post today. Starting in season 22, players will also get a new featured mission node that revives missions from past seasons, including Presage and Operation: Seraph’s Shield.
As part of the upcoming tuning to the Vanguard playlists throughout Year Six, Bungie will tweak the Power Level for these activities to make them more engaging and bring a Battlegrounds playlist for players. The Battlegrounds playlist will feel similar to the level encountered in Season of the Seraph, while regular Vanguard Operations will have a smaller bump.
Bungie is also adjusting old Strikes such as Lake of Shadows and The Arms Dealer, which are considered to be among the easiest and shortest missions in the playlist. Their objectives and encounters will be closer to more recent (and more challenging) entries, including Proving Grounds and The Lightblade, according to Bungie. Exodus Crash and The Inverted Spire are next in line. Until these two Strikes go under the knife, they won’t be available as Nightfalls and will appear less frequently in the playlists.
Players can also expect to see Battlegrounds as part of the Nightfall rotations, starting with Heist Battlegrounds: Mars launching as a Nightfall during Season of the Defiance (season 20). “Four out of the six Nightfalls will be new or refreshed content coming to the Grandmaster rotation for the first time,” the blog post reads, which would make for a different experience for players who have already gilded their Conqueror title.
Starting in season 22, featured raids and dungeons will also get a new companion. Bungie will add a new, weekly rotating Exotic mission from past seasons. Players can expect Presage (Season of the Chosen), Vox Obscura (Season of the Risen), and Operation: Seraph’s Shield (Season of the Seraph) to return to the game through their own specific node. This lets guardians (re)experience those missions and might provide a different drop source for those Exotics.
The Crucible will also see some changes starting with Season of the Defiance. Bungie is looking to bring Countdown back to PvP, alongside a respawn-friendly variant called Countdown Rush. Players may even see more versions of Crucible Labs, which serve as limited-scope tests for potential features and tuning. In season 21, players will see the Meltdown map return. Season 22 will bring a “new Vex Network map,” according to the blog post, while season 23 will bring back the Citadel map to the mix.
Bungie promised some pending tuning to the Crucible, including matchmaking and reward structures. “We still don’t feel we have nailed the trade-off between fair matches and good connections,” game director Joe Blackburn wrote in the blog post. The team will “continue to adjust algorithms to improve connection qualities” and improve lobby balancing to make for “a more consistent skill spread” between players.
Trials of Osiris is slated for some changes in the future as well. The team plans to touch on the “rewards and matchmaking structures of Trials of Osiris” to make the mode more appealing and “more consistently keep the population at healthier levels,” Blackburn wrote.
Players can see some of the new additions starting with Lightfall and Season of Defiance, which launch on Feb. 28.
