Bungie Reveals Destiny 2 Season Of The Wish, Forsaken's "15th Wish" Five Years After It Was First Teased

Destiny 2's next season is the Season of the Wish, and it'll concern one of the weirdest elements of the game's lore: the powerful wish-granting dragons called ahamkara.

Bungie officially announced the season's name on Twitter after players completed a new puzzle in the Imbaru Engine, one of the activities that are part of the current Season of the Witch. The new season kicks off on November 28.

Completing the final puzzle unlocks a cutscene that hints at where the story is going, and it's actually a return to a hanging plot thread Destiny 2 players have been wondering about for years. The cutscene hints at the 15th Wish, an element first introduced back in the Forsaken expansion in 2018.

If you're not familiar, here's the backstory on why the 15th Wish is such a big deal. Forsaken's raid, Last Wish, had players venturing into the Dreaming City to destroy Riven, the last known living ahamkara in Destiny 2's solar system. Ahamkara are incredibly powerful and dangerous creatures in the lore of Destiny 2. They're basically genies, capable of granting wishes to anyone who asks, but with a tendency to twist those wishes against the wisher, monkey's paw-style.

In Destiny 2's backstory, Guardians banded together to wipe out the ahamkara long before the time in which the game is set, since they were so incredibly dangerous--granting wishes that backfired on those who asked for them, eating folks, and generally being a spooky, semi-magical menace. Riven was the only ahamkara to survive that Great Hunt, and was secretly kept by the Awoken queen, Mara Sov, to give her a power no one else had. Mara used a device called the Wall of Wishes to make her wishes, which reduced Riven's ability to misinterpret them and use the wishes against her.

Back during the Forsaken expansion, players uncovered several wishes that could be entered into the wall ahead of playing the Last Wish raid, which came with different benefits. Some could warp you straight to a specific encounter, others gave you extra chances at the raid's Exotic weapon, and some were just fun, like the one that changed whose voice you heard over the radio during the raid. Using each wish unlocked a Triumph, which was how players knew there were 15 wishes in total--but for five years, only 14 had been discovered.

Completing the puzzle in the Imbaru Engine reveals the setup for the Season of the Wish. Players uncover one last ahamkara egg, with the implication that the only way to chase down the Witness to stop it during the upcoming expansion, The Final Shape, is with the help of an ahamkara's magic. And during a cutscene that becomes available after finishing the activity, the player character and Eris Morn put together clues that look to lead to the 15th Wish.

Those are some pretty big story implications for the next season of Destiny 2, and suggest the Season of the Wish will take players back to the Dreaming City. That location has ongoing issues of its own--it has been caught in a three-week time loop since the events of Forsaken, and none of the game's characters know how to break it. We might finally see some conclusions to these plot lines that players have been dealing with for most of Destiny 2's life.

The Season of the Wish announcement is the first major development in Destiny 2 since Bungie laid off a large chunk of its staff in October. Bloomberg reported that the layoffs come alongside Bungie delaying The Final Shape's release to June from February, although Bungie has not officially delayed the expansion.

The report stated that as much as 8% of Bungie's workforce, or 100 people, lost their jobs, and those layoffs included prominent members of Destiny 2's community team and two of its music composers. That's created a negative sentiment among Destiny 2 content creators and players, after what Bloomberg reported was a 45% drop in revenue following its previous expansion, Lightfall.