23 May 2023 , 11:25
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Destiny 2 Season of the Deep kicks off today, pushing the six-year old title into its 21st season and narrowing the gap to the Light and Darkness finale – The Final Shape – slated for Q1 2024.
As always, expect the Destiny 2 servers to go down for maintenance ahead of Season of the Deep rolling out. The point to note is that while downtime will last for around three hours, players can actually dive into Destiny 2 Season of the Deep before the scheduled maintenance ends. As long as you download and install the Season 21 update you can log in and start playing the new season before Destiny 2 maintenance ends.
Destiny 2 Season of the Deep release time is set for 6pm BST / 1pm EDT / 10am PDT because that's when you can log back in after downloading and installing the Season of the Deep update. Destiny 2 maintenance starts at 3pm BST / 10am EDT / 7am PDT and wraps up 7pm BST / 2pm EDT / 11am PDT. Players will be removed from the servers at 4.15pm BST / 11.15am EDT / 8.15am PDT.
Bungie advises that console players running into issues after downloading Destiny 2 update 7.1.0 should restart their console and try downloading the hotfix.
Destiny 2 Season of the Deep: season pass
Details on what exactly we can expect from Season of Deep are thin on the ground but one big thing we do know outside of gameplay is that post-update 7.1.0, the cost of the Destiny 2 season pass is getting a price hike. And as small as Bungie says this price increase is, it's enough that players will need to now buy two Silver bundles to purchase it.
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Prior to the increase, the Destiny 2 season pass price came in at 1,000 Silver which is covered by the 1,100 Silver bundle, priced at £8.49 / $10 / AU$14.95. The new Destiny 2 season pass price will be 1,200 Silver, tipping it over into needing to buy a second Silver bundle. The smallest available Silver bundle is 500, which costs £4.79 / $5 / AU$7.95 so you'll need to buy that on top. Not ideal.
Destiny 2 Season of the Deep: weapon changes
In terms of gameplay, over on the blog, Bungie has given us both a Season 21 weapon changes and Season 21 tuning abilities preview. The mid-season update 7.0.5 included changes that the developer was testing for Season 21 but brought forward, and were largely PvP tweaks. Destiny 2 Season 21 weapon changes will therefore be more PvE focused including a "substantial number of changes" to hip-fire reticles, Exotic weapons and more.
Reticles have been rebuilt for fusion rifles, hand cannons, sidearms, and trace rifles so that they "move more visibly at high FOV, while still conveying the current state of the weapon accurately." Other weapon reticles will get the same treatment in a future update. Shotgun reticles will also scale with FOV, so they match pellet spread regardless of your selected FOV.
Fusion Rifle charge and Sword guard energy's hip fire reticules will be updated to display the charge meter and current Sword guard energy, rather than players having to rely on audio / visual cues. Shayura's Wrath will have an aim-down-sights reticle post-update, and in terms of Exotics, reticle elements have been added to show perks or states that are pertinent to players.
On the accessibility front, Bungie is rolling out full auto melee settings for melee weapons including swords and glaves, "powered melee, unpowered melee attacks, and melee attacks while in a roaming Super". That means, as long as you have the melee or fire button held down (depending on the melee attack type) you'll continue to attack with your fist.
Destiny 2 Season of the Deep: abilities tuning
Bungie has laid out a handful of "high-level goals" for ability tuning in Season of the Deep:
- Increase viability of roaming Supers in high-difficulty PvE content.
- Incorporate subclass keywords into a selection of Light subclass Supers.
- Reduce the amount of unlimited uptime mobility available in the Crucible.
- Increase buildcrafting capabilities of a selection of Stasis and Light subclass Aspects.
Fragment slot allotment is getting bumped from a single slot to two, all Supers will; have increased PvE damage resistance by 20%, while some Hunter, Titan, and Warlock Supers are getting finetuned.
Destiny 2 Season of the Deep: everything else
As always, expect new cosmetics, weapons and armour in the Destiny 2 Season of the Deep update, as well as new dungeon. Hopefully there'll be a substantive narrative progression, and Bungie has confirmed that "most combatant shields" are having a visual update, what with them being unchanged since 2017.