Destiny 2 Season of the Splicer: First impressions from the opening week

Destiny 2’s 14th Season, Season of the Splicer, is well underway with the first week having just concluded yesterday. During this opening week, Guardians were taking the fight to the Vex in the new Override activity, hunting for god rolls of the new weapons, and upgrading their Splicer Gauntlet.

This Season has had a fairly strong opener but it hasn't been without its stumbles. Here’s a breakdown of what was both good and bad about the first week of Season of the Splicer:

Story

In Season of the Splicer, the Vex have used some kind of simulation technology to plunge the Last City into an endless night. The Guardians of the city must turn to Mithrax, one of the last Sacred Splicers of the Fallen, for help against the Vex and possibly create new allies in the process.

This is the upfront story of Season of the Splicer but it almost feels like a backdrop to the true story of the Season, how the Fallen House of Light are attempting to integrate with and make peace with the humans of the Last City. It is this underlying story that deals with complex, real world issues like segregation and racism that serve to elevate the emotions attached. The citizens of the Last City are rightfully hesitant to trust the Fallen and many instances of lynchings and murders have occured due to the mutual distrust present. If you haven't yet, be sure to read a few of the lore entries for the new weapons this Season. Some of them like Shattered Cipher and Survivor’s Epitaph are great entries that give real personal insights into the problems that this new alliance has created.

This Season so far has had some of the best writing Destiny has had and if this continues throughout the Season, Splicer will join Chosen as the pinnacle of storytelling in the franchise.

Loot

The loot of Season of the Splicer, like the story, is an area that Bungie has struck gold with. Almost every single new weapon in this Season is a worthy addition to your arsenal. Fan favourites like ‘Hung Jury’ and ‘PLUG ONE.1’ have returned and Guardians have been grinding Nightfalls in order to get the god rolls. ‘Chroma Rush’ and ‘Ignition Code’ are fantastic weapons that fill certain holes that were left in the sandbox when previous Seasons were sunset.

New perks such as Heating Up, Tunnel Vision and Adrenaline Junkie add a lot to these new weapons and can make them absolute shredders in both PvP and PvE.

The only downside to the loot in this Season is that the Seasonal Exotic ‘Cryothesia 77K’ is fairly subpar and feels fairly useless in a lot of situations. It does count as Stasis final blows for grinding out those new Stasis Aspects so that surely counts for something.

Activities

The new Seasonal activity ‘Override’ is honestly quite fun if a little thin. The aesthetic, which is very TRON-like, is a great change of pace to the usual Vex geometry and the objectives themselves have a great rhythm to them. The boss battles offer a good amount of chaos, even if they feel a little too easy. This low difficulty feels like it's because Override was designed as a 3-man activity and due to community feedback, was pivoted into a 6-man activity mid development. The fairly low number of enemies, coupled with the cramped nature of the activity just screams that it was developed for a lower player count.

This isn't the worst thing though as it means the activity to be completed fairly quickly, which makes grinding the powerful Splicer weapons a much easier time.

All in all Override feels like an evolution of the Contact activity from Season of Arrivals, which is certainly a compliment.

Armor Synthesis

We have already talked a fair bit about Armor Synthesis in Destiny 2 and how a large portion of the community is vehemently against the implementation of the currant system. What players soon realised when completing the opening questline in Season of the Splicer to unlock Armor Synthesis is that the grind for Universal Ornaments is far greater than everyone thought.

It was quickly discovered that there was a time-gate on how much Synthstrand a player could earn. When killing enemies, a player will only receive a piece of Synthstrand every 2 minutes. This is a problem as this means in optimal conditions, it would take almost 25 hours of in-game grinding to unlock a complete set of universal ornaments.

For a lot of players this has killed the hype that was surrounding Armor Synthesis when it was first announced and is something that Bungie definitely needs to address.

It is this implementation of Armor Synthesis, along with nerfs to Deep Stone Crypt loot, buffs to Stasis, and nerfs to Stasis counters, that has led to a bit of a stumble with the new Season launch.

The good in Season of the Splicer far outweighs the bad though and we still have Vault of Glass, the weekly Expunge missions, more Iron Banner and Solstice of Heroes to look forward to.