Destiny 2’s latest season has finally ended, and it is a rare example of a Destiny 2 season that truly lives up to its name. If I had to describe Season of the Deep in less than five words, they would be: deeply underwhelming and disappointing. Although the game had a few nice additions that improved the community’s experience, such as the dungeon, fishing, and exotic focusing, the bad aspects significantly outweighed the good ones this season.

Gameworld/World Building

Season of the Deep has introduced two new seasonal activities, Salvage and Deep Dive, for players to enjoy and explore.

Salvage

The season’s six-player activity, Salvage, takes players to either the familiar abandoned oil rig-like setting of Titan’s surface or the overgrown and infested insides of the Arcology. These locations have not changed much since Titan was a destination that players could visit in the past. The main feature of this season, however, is the ability to dive into the depths of the methane sea, which is the main mechanic for all of Season of the Deep’s activities.

No matter where you start or whether you complete the task given to you, you will eventually be taken underwater and have to “swim” to one of the two possible final bosses of the activity. To add some variety, these bosses change every week, and their mechanics are slightly modified from some existing encounters. The tasks before reaching the boss are basically glorified public events. Salvage quickly became just another activity to grind and forget once I had crafted all the season’s weapons, even before the second week started.

Deep Dives

Unlike its sister activity, Salvage, Deep Dives are a three-player activity that focuses more on the “swimming” mechanic added in this season. Players start in the room where they first meet Ahsa and reconnect with Sloane and have to “swim” or descend into the depths of Titan’s methane sea. The underwater routes to each encounter are fixed, but they are more immersive and breathtaking (pun intended) than the ones in Salvage. What I like about this activity is that there are parts of the underwater segment where you can find and collect marine fauna for your fish tank in the HELM.

The encounters themselves are just the generic scan, defend, kill, collect, and move on; however, they have a more prominent sense of urgency and challenge because the time limit is very short and the tasks can take a long time to complete. Players can also choose to make each encounter harder by activating pressure trials through Toland, who is hidden in each encounter. One similarity between Deep Dives and Salvage is that you will be teleported to the boss room regardless of whether you finish the encounter or not; however, if you fail to complete the goal of the encounter in a Deep Dive, you will miss out on helpful buffs and Ahsa’s Gift, which make the final boss easier and give more loot.

The Deep Dive activity also has an optional secret room and boss where you can obtain an exotic weapon. If you did the secret segment for the first time, you may have underestimated how difficult it is (God knows my fireteam did). It starts off as a basic ad clear and a taken boss who shoots at you with a 10-minute timer, which stops when the taken boss dies. Once you find the next boss to kill, the timer resumes from where it left off and you are pushed into a maze filled with walls and enemies that push you back, a tormentor that moves around and can kill you very quickly, endless ads and bullets on your screen, and a buff that lets you damage the boss but disappears when you die. As difficult as this part of the activity is, killing the tormentor and getting the exotic is the most satisfying and rewarding feeling since the Whisper mission.

Ghosts of The Deep

If you are still looking for more content after doing all that, there is also the new dungeon that comes with the season and ties in well with the story.

The new dungeon, The Ghosts of the Deep, is one of the most annoyingly difficult dungeons ever created, in a good way… sort of. Since the seasonal dungeons are the only activities that will be removed once a new DLC comes out, they usually revolve around the season’s theme. Prophecy used the gambit mote mechanic, but with some changes. Duality and Spire of the Watcher followed the theme and story of nightmares and the warmind, respectively. What The Ghosts of the Deep dungeon incorporates are the “swimming” mechanic and the past and potential future of Xivu Arath.

I will not go into too much detail (because I will do a separate review later), but if you are a lore enthusiast or never had thalassophobia before, this dungeon might create or reinforce a new fear or worry by the end of your run.

Underwater Segments

Since this season is all about deep sea diving, all the seasonal activities have new segments that follow and maintain the season’s theme. Even though we spend a short time in them, they are still beautifully designed and aesthetically amazing.

Characters and Story

Sloane’s Return

The season’s story begins with a reminder of who and what we lost when the darkness first returned in Season of Arrivals (which was almost three years ago); it brings us back to another destination that was vaulted, Titan. Along with the destination’s return, we also see a beloved vendor and a new character.

After finishing the first mission, we reunite with Sloane and find her in a very unfortunate state. If not for her light, she would have been completely taken instead of just her right arm and lower half. Our short reunion also serves as a formal introduction to Ahsa. For the Destiny 2 veterans or the lore enthusiasts who play the game, they might recognize Ahsa as the leviathan of Titan. The very creature that swam around Titan’s seas when the planet was still a destination.

We learn that Ahsa and Sloane share a psychic connection with each other. Using the Deputy Commander as a vessel for communication, we are tasked each week to collect and give taken corals to the leviathan to strengthen the connection and learn more about the witness.

As overjoyed as I was to see Sloane and Titan again (outside of Gambit) and hear the theories that the community once had about the leviathan get answered in the first hour of the season’s release, this “happy” feeling would be short-lived and quickly overtaken by the annoyance and burnout from the monotonous grind of doing the same missions over and over again. The only thing that kept my sanity intact was calculating who deserved the “best dressed” commendation at the end of the activity.

I have said it before and I will continue to say it as long as Bungie keeps using this as a trope in their seasonal storytelling; nostalgia should not be the base or the main driving factor for a story. Using nostalgia for hype is a cliché that many people use to generate hype, but one that is understandable. In Bungie’s case, they used it as a lure for old players to come back to the game and try it out again. While people do enjoy this feeling of nostalgia, in the end that’s all it is; a feeling. Feelings are fleeting, they are temporary and can easily change into something else like an obligation to continue playing because we paid for it and we need to get the most out of it. Nostalgia bait is an understandable approach to try and bring back previous generations of players, but using it as a base would be like building a 30-story tower on a single sheet of paper. Especially when there have been little to no changes in the missions since the initial release of the game. Even if the A and B plots of the story do eventually tie in together; if the B plot is more interesting than the main story, then something is clearly wrong.

Xivu Arath: A Voice Behind The Name

After Season of the Seraph, Xivu Arath finally started to feel like a threat to us guardians. We were forced into a stalemate by her and her worm that draws strength from war, and we struggled to find a way to defend the Traveler and the City without empowering Xivu Arath. We ended up losing an ally in the process. It was at this point where Xivu Arath actually became a threat to us in the game, through the feeling of helplessness and desperation to find a way to stop her and her forces. This, along with images of her invading Torobatl, made us realize how dangerous Xivu Arath really is. It was a really long and tedious build-up, but now it was her turn to terrorize us.
Season of the Deep put the Hive God of War in the spotlight by finally giving a voice to the name. We first heard her in the first mission of the season, taunting us and introducing herself formally. We also heard her in the new Ghosts of the Deep dungeon, where we found a memory of darkness that revealed how she felt after the death of her brother Oryx and what she did afterwards.

Throughout the season, we fought her forces to help Ahsa gain the power she needed to strengthen herself so that she could communicate better with us and tell us more about the witness.

The Veil and the Origin of the Witness

After completing all the weekly missions and gathering enough coral to give to Ahsa, we learned about the veil and the origins of the witness.

Before the witness became the bug-eyed, vape-headed, eerie megamind that we saw enter the Traveler, he was once part of a struggling civilization, no different from us, that discovered the Traveler and were blessed by it. They built their civilization around it and called it “The Gardener”. They enjoyed eons of prosperity, but the Traveler never spoke to them; and so they sought meaning. During this time of pondering, they realized the dangers of the Traveler. They saw that it could destroy as quickly as it could create. Later on, they found a counterpart to the Traveler and named it “the veil”. The Traveler, as we know, possesses the light and the veil, as its direct opposite, possesses the darkness. By studying the veil and the darkness, this civilization found the meaning and purpose they were looking for. With darkness, they could lead the universe to a perfected future, a “Final Shape”, and by bringing the two entities together they could achieve this goal. But the Traveler would not allow it and left. The ones who were left behind used the darkness to form a collective consciousness through a mass ritualistic sacrifice and became the one we now know as the Witness.

As lore-heavy as this cutscene was, I think the community can agree that all of this should have been in the Lightfall DLC and not a short segment in a part of a season. A DLC’s job is not only to expand the universe of the game but also to answer questions that were raised by whatever came before it by including explanations of important plot points. Seasons, on the other hand, are supposed to act as either filler between each DLC or as another way of expanding what the game has already developed. Lightfall was Bungie’s chance to finally tell the community what the veil is after 10 years of speculation, but all it brought was a poor introduction with no explanation of what it is and why we have to protect it. Yes, seasons can also have important points that further progress the game’s already established story, but anything as crucial as the origins of the villain we have been fighting for nearly 10 years or the explanation of what the veil actually is should have been answered in the DLC that was literally about them.

Weapons, Mechanics & Gameplay

Seasonal Weapons: Reissued and Reskinned

Every new season brings a new arsenal of weapons; but this season’s weapons were very disappointing, both seasonal and exotic (with some exceptions).

The seasonal weapons are just reissued ones that you could have obtained by completing the Reckoning, an activity that is now vaulted.

Meanwhile, their other seasonal variants are just reskinned versions of them with the Taken effect on them. I know Bungie is notorious for using old assets and just giving them new names or skins, but this is just lazy. I may not know much about game design or coding, but if it takes you 20 minutes to design a helmet from scratch and if most of the code is already implemented in the game, what is stopping you from making new weapon designs?

The dungeon weapons, on the other hand, have a very interesting design. They stick to the theme of Titan’s arcology and deep sea diving, with the primary color being blue and the secondary color being white, to give the impression that we guardians have become underwater warriors. While I am not a big fan of how the dungeon weapons look, personally, I think the Greasy Luck Glaive is the best-designed weapon from this dungeon.

Exotic Weapons

Of all the new exotics that came out this season, only two stand out and are actually fun to use.

Centrifuse is a 450 rpm Arc Assault Rifle that you can obtain from the season pass at level 1 or 35, depending on whether you paid for the battle pass. It’s a pretty good ad-clear gun with the right arc build. It can clear any room in seconds and slow down anyone who is still standing, unfortunately for them.

The Navigator is a stasis trace rifle that you can obtain from the Ghosts of the Deep dungeon. It can act as a support weapon, granting woven mail to anyone you shoot at, but its catalyst is what makes the weapon so much fun to use. Holding the reload button on this weapon gives you and your allies a tangle that you can place anywhere and swing to your heart’s content. If you are a titan with Armamentarium, enjoy knowing what it’s like to be a spider hunter and for hunters, enjoy zipping around more than everyone else. Warlocks… at least you can still swing.

The last exotic weapon is the Wicked Implement, a stasis scout rifle. You can obtain it only by fishing and going through the secret area in the Deep Dives that I mentioned before. While the weapon is not terrible, I can only see people using it in very specific situations, like in seasonal activities or low-level nightfalls. In seasonal activities, people do not really need you for ad clear or damage, since they can do that themselves. So you have the freedom to carry this weapon with you and practice your aim or try to convince yourself that the gun has a chance of being B tier. During Season of the Deep, Overload Scout was an artifact mod and the fact that the weapon could also slow and freeze enemies meant that it was good at stopping Barrier and Unstoppable Champions. For a while, this was useful, but once the next season comes, I do not expect this gun to be used much.

“Swimming”

Given the title and theme of this season, it is not surprising that Bungie added a new mechanic to the game that would help the player navigate the deep methane oceans of Titan. While I have been calling this mechanic “swimming” throughout the season, the reality is that we actually sink instead of swim. When underwater, the player’s movements are slowed, they cannot shoot or use abilities, and they perform a slow fall when they jump or walk off a ledge. Your time underwater, however, is very limited, with a short timer/bar on the lower left of your screen that counts down every time you dive in. You can reset the timer by walking through and popping bubbles. But if you miss one or struggle to reach one while your timer is almost depleted, you will face a breaking overshield and cracks and leaks on the sides of your screen, along with the terrifying sound of breaking glass. As simple as this mechanic is, having to deal with a timer paired with slow movement and a seemingly limited supply of air bubbles makes your time underwater stressful, terrifying, and frustrating, to say the least.

Fishing

When the first official trailer for the season dropped, the last thing and the most interesting thing it showed was a guardian casting a fishing line into the open waters of the EDZ. Even if this was not the main focus of the season, the addition of fishing to the game was and is the best decision Bungie has ever made in Destiny 2’s history, and I will gladly die on that hill.

In a game where we are constantly pushing back the forces of darkness, subjecting ourselves to countless hours of raids, dungeons, and seasonal activities, fishing provides a refuge from the never-ending grind for players to escape to after a long day in the real world or in the game. Sure, the fishing spot disappears when a public event starts, but this is Destiny 2 after all. There are five other guardians in the lobby who are equally fed up with everything around them and will do anything to get back the best form of free therapy they will ever get.

Conclusion

While this season had some good points, like the Ghosts of the Deep dungeon, the lore, the world design, and the fishing, there was still an overwhelming amount of negative aspects and dull moments (ironically) that overshadowed the rest of the great work that went into Season of the Deep.

As interesting and inspired as this season was, most of what it did was remind us of how monotonous the grind of Destiny 2 is, and unless you were a new light or never reached the maximum light level, there was no real reason for you to play the seasonal activities other than to get the weekly story and the new weapons so you could craft them. The season relied mostly on nostalgia bait for older players to come back to the game, but no new changes were made to improve the gameplay.

With the way Season of the Deep turned out, it was a waste of Bungie’s talent for storytelling and world building to go into a season where minimal effort was put in. As much as I want to hope that this will be the last time a season like this will happen, if we look back at Bungie’s history, there will always be that one season that we can all agree was not on the same level as the other seasons released that year. Even if the year is not over yet, I’m going to call it and say that Season of the Deep is that one below-average season that comes out during the year.

Destiny 2 Season of The Deep End of Season Review