Destiny 2's Season Of Dawn Finally Lets You Ride Sparrows On Mercury

Bungie's Destiny 2 Season of Dawn livestream showed off a few new things that are coming with the season, including its content calendar and new Sundial six-player event. It also confirmed an item that appeared in the Season of Dawn trailer that Destiny players have been wishing was in the game for a while: Sparrows on Mercury. It's one of multiple welcome changes coming as part of the new Season of Dawn update, which also makes adjustments to Eververse. [Update: Update 2.7.0 is now available. Bungie has released the Season of Dawn patch notes, and we've put together a guide to the A Matter of Time quest, which is what you'll need to do to unlock the new Sundial activity, which in turn will get you new the seasonal artifact. We also have a guide to The Dawning cookie recipes for 2019's event, which now underway.]

In Destiny 2, Sparrows are the speeder bike-like vehicles you can summon to help you get around in patrol zones, the open public areas situated on various planets. When it was added with the Curse of Osiris expansion back in the first year of Destiny 2, Mercury was a relatively small zone--so Sparrows were disabled, forcing you to walk wherever you wanted to go.

We're headed back to Mercury for Season of Dawn, in order to use some time travel Vex tech run by Osiris, Curse's main non-player character. Though the zone doesn't seem like it's changed too much outside the addition of the new Sundial activity, Bungie showed the ability to summon Sparrows on the planet during its stream. That's going to make hanging out there a whole lot less irritating.

The stream also gave a few other tidbits of information. We saw the new seasonal artifact, the Lantern of Osiris, which will dish out several season-specific mods for armor and weapons as you level it up. Those mods are mostly focused on armor with Solar affinity, as opposed to the mods that came in Destiny 2's last content season, the Season of the Undying, which were mostly aimed at Void and Arc abilities and armor. Undying's weapon mods were also mostly for close-range, rapid-fire weapons, where Dawn's play more with precision guns that function better at long ranges.

Bungie also showed some Sundial gameplay during the stream. The six-player activity includes a variety of bosses that will roll out slowly over the course of the season, and looks like it'll include multiple encounters, similar to the Menagerie activity from the Season of Opulence. Completing it is part of the season's story, which sends you to Mercury to stop the Cabal from trying to use time travel to rewrite the ending of the Red War, the conflict from Destiny 2 vanilla's story campaign.

While Bungie showed off the new content calendar, it seems like it's holding some things for the season closer to the vest than it did for Undying. We got a sense of the content that will roll out next season, but altogether, the calendar seems a little thin. That might be a result of Destiny 2's seasons being a lot smaller than its major expansions, like the recently released Shadowkeep--but it also seems likely that there are some secrets coming next season that Bungie has yet to divulge.

The Season of Dawn kicks off on December 10, so make sure to finish whatever you still have left to do in Undying by then.