Tess Everis
Bungie went on a bit of a Destiny 2 apology tour over the past month or two, specifically after a poorly received State of the Game which caused director Joe Blackburn to admit it wasn’t up to par, and to announce a series of what seemed like unplanned changes to try to mitigate player concerns.
Much of that was focused on PvP, but there was some attention paid to the fact that Bungie had broken a (somewhat minor) promise to release new ritual armor sets every year. Their explanation in the State of the Game was that this armor was not used much at all, including for transmog, which caused players to say “well, it was purposefully less cool than almost all other armor, so duh.”
This was part of the changes, however. Blackburn announced that in order to rectify this situation, Bungie would take the Eververse armor set that was supposed to be released in the store this season for $15 or so per class, and put it as a random drop reward from the Ritual playlist. The armor, as seen below, mostly fits with the Hive theme of the season and is quite good (especially the Titan set, I’d say).
Destiny 2
This seems like a minor thing, dropping new armor from the Ritual playlist, but it’s…actually really great. It’s such a basic thing, but the only places we really see this happen in any capacity are the more “prestige” activities. Farming dungeon or raid encounters for armor pieces. One a year or so for Trials and Iron Banner armor. But here, a reason to farm normal Strikes, Crucible and Gambit for neat armor drops is nice. It’s the best thing they’ve done since introducing dedicated Ritual weapons for those playlists (albeit those are hit or miss).
The problem, of course, is that if you do want to transmog this cool armor, this costs you half your “free” transmog slots for the season, as you only get 10 total, and you’d spend five year. That wouldn’t have happened if you bought it, or got it through Bright Dust. Bungie has sold transmog “currency” since launch, something I don’t think I’ve seen another game ever do, and it remains my most-disliked microtransaction the game has introduced.
Of course, Bungie still has armor to sell this season, even if erasing what is arguably one of its most popular Eververse purchases in a season is kind of a big deal. The season pass ornaments require you to buy the season, of course. And there will be a paid set of Festival of the Lost armor in a few weeks, a tradition for all holiday events in the game, where only one event allows you to earn a variant (Solstice).
It sucks that it took a widespread protest to get something as simple as a new armor set to farm in normal activities, one for free-to-play players no less. But little things can go a long way, particularly with a game that has been as dramatically over-monetized as Destiny 2. I hope we see more of it in the future, no protests required.
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