Destiny 2: Shadowkeep – Vex Offensive: Final Assault

Season of the Undying is coming to an end in a few days and The Vex Offensive: Final Assault has been dropped into Destiny 2 Shadowkeep.

Over the past few weeks, Ikora has been busy building a portal in the Tower. Each week, when we logged in, more of the portal would be built and the theories grew in the Destiny community as to what would happen.

The Vex Offensive: Final Assault had been specifically called out on the Season of Undying roadmap leading to expectations that ‘something’ may happen. Would we go through the portal and enter a new strike or mission? Would we get some event-specific loot to celebrate the end of the season? In the end, the only change was the boss fight in the Vex Offensive. Rather than fight the Vex Minotaur, we fight against the Undying Mind.

From a story perspective, it’s quite cool. The Undying Mind is a Vex Hydra boss in the strike The Undying Mind from Destiny 1. The Undying Mind re-established itself in the Vex network and created copies of itself over thousands of timelines. The Mind was unreachable until Ikora constructed a Vex portal from Vex chassis components, allowing the Guardians to venture into the timelines where the Mind had established itself and destroy it once again.

From a gameplay perspective, it’s a little disappointing as it would have been nice to get a new strike or weapon or maybe a more complex encounter for the end of the final assault.

I would have liked something more to end the season. Back in September 2019, we had a community event where we had to kill a certain number of enemies on Mars including 300 million Hive, 150,000 Nokris kills and 100,000 Xol kills. This was good because the community worked together and met a goal, rather than being directed to kill thousands of Undying Minds over thousands of timelines. Perhaps this isn’t the end of the season and we still have some content coming before the end of the season to link up into next season, we’ll see in the next few weeks.

Back in the summer, Luke Smith did say in his Directors Cut articles “The Annual Pass was harder on the team than we anticipated. The scope of what we delivered, the pace that we delivered it, and the overall throughput for Annual Pass takes a toll on the Bungie team. I–and many others–had conversations throughout the year with team members–who had jumped from release to release– about the grind of working on Destiny. Working on the game was starting to wear people down. We needed to develop a more systemic, standardized set of mechanics for progression to keep our teams healthier.”

Do we expect too much from Bungie in terms of what they can realistically release in a small window of time? Were our expectations raised by a specific call-out on the roadmap? Is this the first chapter in Bungie’s single evolving world and do you think it will continue next season? Let me know in the comments what you wanted from The Vex Offensive: Final Assault and what you think this may lead to next season.

Bungie has since responded to the community asking for their feedback with Cozmo taking to Reddit to say “Sorry you found it disappointing. We’ll pass along everyone’s feedback to the team. Let us know what you liked, didn’t like, and think could be improved upon in future seasons.”

One good thing about the 3 months seasons is Bungie can learn from content updates quickly. It’s up to Bungie what they learn from this end of season event, however, it appears expectations were raised somehow and hopefully they learn from this in future content releases.

Let me know down in the comments what you think and also what this means for Season of the Dawn coming in three weeks time.

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