Destiny 2 News Roundup – Lightfall trailer, Iron Banner, DMG leaving and Secrets are coming back

Bungie were back this week with their This Week At Bungie update, with a bumper edition. Today I’m going to recap the Game Awards Lightfall Trailer, Iron Banner, sad news that DMG is leaving Bungie, plus we have some news from the team related to info and clearing up some comms.

Without futher delay, let’s dive into it.

This week at Bungie, we celebrate lots of stuff! The Dawning! New partnerships! A year that is about to end and a new one that’s about to begin! Also, activities that are coming very soon! And I’m going to celebrate that this is my first time writing a TWAB. ¡Hola, mundo! (Hello, World!).

This is also the last TWAB until next year. That sounds like a long time, but worry not, we’ll be back with tons of new topics to tackle starting on January 12. We will use this time off to rest, so we recommend you try and do that, too!

A VERY RE-AWARDING TRAILER

Last Thursday, we launched a new Destiny 2: Lightfall gameplay trailer during The Game Awards. We hope you enjoyed it, and that it serves as a little tease of what’s coming on February 28. So, how about we watch it one more time?

YUMMY, YUMMY, I GOT COOKIES IN MY TUMMY

Do you have your Exotic oven mitts at hand? Because the Dawning is here, and we need to cook, Guardian. We recommend you invest a bit in Resilience to handle the oven heat, maybe some Strength to carry the ingredients, and even some Intellect to remember the preferred recipes of everyone around the Tower and beyond.

If you want more information about this heartwarming, cookie-eating, and not-asking-questions-about-the-ingredients Seasonal event, we have a wonderful article with all the information you might need.

There’s a new quest to complete, a new recipe for a certain cheeky Ghost, snowballs to throw, and, of course, some wonderful rewards. Old favorites are coming back with new perks and an Origin Trait, and we also have a new Stasis Omolon Lightweight Pulse Rifle called Stay Frosty PR7.

Go talk to Abuelita (Granny) Eva in the Tower to start. The Dawning will run until January 3, 2023.

And now, check out some of the fancy new things you’ll find during the event this year. There are also exclusive unlockable items linked to the upgraded Event Card available for Silver.

THIS WAS A TRIUMPH

We’re making a note here: Go complete your personal Moments of Triumph, Guardians! There’s a new Ghost and a Sparrow waiting for you. We are sure you already have some unlocked since these Triumphs are based on some of your greatest successes during the year. Once you have unlocked 28 of the 30, you can equip the MMXXII emblem and Title and, if you feel like it, acquire the real-life Seal, the patch, and/or the T-Shirt available at the Bungie Store!

NOT ONE, NOR TWO, BUT FORTRESS

Valus Forge also has a gift for you! And by that, we mean a new Iron Banner week with new loot and a new game mode to get the hang of. The Titan previously known as Lord Saladin might be an old wolf, but he can still learn a few new tricks.

Iron Banner returns on January 3 with a new game mode called Fortress where you capture and hold zones while defeating opponents, but there’s a twist. A Cabal twist! The objectives will change once Caiatl and her troops get involved, but we are not revealing the exact details of how Fortress works because we want you to run up that hill yourselves.

During Season of the Seraph, players will have a chance to earn two returning Iron Banner weapons, the Dark Decider Auto Rifle and the Gunnora’s Axe Slug Shotgun, both with new perks and the Iron Banner Origin Trait. For the complete list of weapons in the loot pool, check the TWAB from December 1.

And, of course, there’s an Iron Banner armor refresh. Wolf cloak? Mohawk helmet? The best robes on this side of the Nessus Radiolaria lake? You got it.

IT’S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY

There were some rumors swirling around that Bungie was done making secrets forever. While the record was corrected, we wanted to talk a bit about this subject and the feedback we have been seeing from players hungry for surprise content. Here is Assistant Game Director Robbie Stevens to share some of our thoughts.

Robbie Stevens: We wanted to take a moment to address the community’s feedback around secrets in Destiny 2. But before we get started, if you take one thing away from this communication, let it be that the people working on Destiny 2 believe that secrets are an important part of this franchise, and we’re dedicated to delivering secret experiences, both small and large, throughout the coming year.

First and foremost, let’s address the Reddit AMA about the difficulty of encrypting content that brought this conversation to a head. Datamining and leaks are not unique problems to Destiny 2. Every live game deals with this issue because it’s one of the most challenging engineering problems in games today. That said, our communication was misinterpreted to mean that we were no longer building secret experiences, which is false. We’ve delivered hidden and secret story beats and content this year and will continue to do so next year.

For some in the community, ‘secrets’ have come to mean either a secret mission or a puzzle. It’s understandable that the community is hungry for more of this content and is interpreting any hidden thing we do as a signpost of something bigger to come. Just understand that we’ll never openly reveal a secret mission or puzzle before it goes live and that, although we’re intentionally hiding things for you to discover in every release, not every secret can be something as big as a mission or puzzle.

Looking back on the past year, The Witch Queen was a release containing a fair share of secrets, and the experiences on the Throne World were directly influenced by content like secret missions and dungeons. Additionally, as many of you have noticed, we’ve been layering teases and secrets about future content throughout our stories, lore entries, and world-building leading up to Lightfall. However, we know that you want more. We know that we haven’t released a secret mission that scratches the same itch as Presage, Zero Hour, or The Whisper this year. Those missions were some of the most challenging content for our teams to build, which is why we’ve only released at most one secret mission within a twelve-month period. But as we’ve developed our plans leading to Lightfall and beyond, I want to reassure you that the community’s feedback is heard loud and clear, and “putting more secrets into Destiny 2” is an initiative our teams have been working on for months before this conversation recently came to a head. Some secrets will be small, some will be large, some will come next year, and some are right around the corner, but I promise you that we’ve got a talented group of people who love this type of content and who know what it means for the community to discover and experience it.

AND THE WINNING ORNAMENT IS…

Remember when we told you back in August that you would have the chance to vote for a weapon to get a new ornament designed by a community artist? Time flies! Long story short, Arbalest won, the community artist StellarStateLogic drafted three options for you to vote for, and today is the day we tell you which one was the fan favorite. We counted the votes, we checked the numbers against each other, and the winner with 55.5% of the votes is…

Design #3: Synthwave

We are always excited to see what the community votes for. Now, please be a bit patient while the team implements the design on our beloved Linear Fusion Rifle. And thanks one more time to StellarStateLogic for their awesome work.

A VERY SPECIAL FAREWELL

As some of you might already know, Dylan (dmg04) is leaving Bungie’s Community Team at the end of the month. It’s hard to put together how we feel about him, but let’s try.

First as part of the Destiny Player Support team, and later as a Community Manager, Dylan’s contribution to make Bungie and Destiny better is unmeasurable. He is honest and respectful, shows a genuine love for his work, and always takes everyone’s feedback seriously, no matter if you are a new player, if you have been there since the Alpha, or if you are a new member of his team. We could make a 10,000 word TWAB about him, and that wouldn’t even begin to do his yellow beanie justice.

So, we’ll just keep it short and sweet. When you are great, you never truly leave, so this is not a goodbye, but a thank you. And that’s how it is. Thanks, dmg04.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the latest update from Bungie.