After Lightfall Launches, Destiny 2 Is Shaking Up Its Seasonal Model

A new expansion for Destiny 2 also means multiple seasons of activity, but 2023 and beyond will see the seasonal model overhauled. The Witch Queen era of Destiny 2 delivered four seasons of content, with each one of these three-month events having a consistent sense of design. Post-Lightfall, Bungie plans to experiment with "substantial iterations" to its seasonal model, beginning with Season 20, Season of Defiance.

According to game director Joe Blackburn, numerous seasonal quality-of-life changes will be introduced, with an eye on reducing complexity through the game's progression systems. Umbral engrams and Umbral energies are being retired, and all you'll need to focus an engram into a particular seasonal weapon or armor will be a seasonal engram and some Glimmer. Seasonal engrams will also be stored and tracked on seasonal vendors, freeing up inventory space for Guardians.

The other big change here is that you'll no longer need a seasonal currency to unlock a chest at the end of an activity. Instead, singular keys throughout your playtime will be dropped and can be used to gain extra rewards from a chest at the end of a seasonal activity. Keys won't drop every time an activity is completed, but the base rewards for each seasonal activity completion will be better and will thus create more meaningful bonuses.

After Season of Defiance, Season of the Deep will see even bigger changes implemented. Season of the Deep and the to-be-titled Season 22 will not feature a vendor upgrade paradigm, and while this doesn't mean that the feature is being done away with completely, Bungie is instead focusing on more experimental ideas in 2023 with Destiny 2.

"We want to create more varied experimental frameworks and slowly create a wide array of different systems for players to show their investment into seasonal content," Blackburn added. "This variety will also extend into the types of content players experience in the moment-to-moment gameplay of our later seasons. In both Season of the Deep and Season 22, the team is pushing the envelope to create more fresh activity experiences, like when we first unveiled the Shattered Realm in Season of the Lost or debuted Battlegrounds in Season of the Chosen."

Seasonal changes are just the tip of the iceberg for Destiny 2 once the Lightfall expansion goes live on February 28. Beyond a number of technical tweaks under the hood, weapon crafting is getting overhauled, buildcrafting is evolving, and certain subclasses are being rebalanced.