Close followers of the Destiny franchise have come to know and expect the expansion reveal streams hosted by the Bungie community managers. These streams take place on their Twitch channel and tease new content, destinations, loot, and features that players can expect to find in soon-to-release updates.

Bungie’s recent stream kicked off with the prologue cutscene for the new Warmind expansion.

New Campaign Missions and Destination

In this cutscene we are introduced to Ana Bray, who will narrative cornerstone and vendor in the Warmind expansion. We also get to see the Hellas Basin sector of Mars which in the birthplace of Rasputin and will be the new patrol area.

The story is expected to revolve around the awakening of Rasputin and the melting ice caps on Mars. The receding ice caps expose Clovis Bray, the corporation that created Rasputin, as well as a frozen Hive nest. Yup, you read that right – FROZEN HIVE. (Turns out we incorrectly predicted the enemy type for this expansion in our last post about it.)

New Activities

Now, most players don’t play Destiny for the story missions (see: Destiny 1 campaign), they engage for the buttery-smooth mechanics, loot, and replay-ability of the activities in the game. With this expansion comes new adventures, a new raid lair (of which we don’t have many details yet, but expect it to take place on the Leviathan), and a new activity to play in patrol on Mars – Escalation Protocol. The game mode is reminiscent of Court of Oryx or Archon’s Forge if you remember those from the first game in the series.

In Escalation Protocol, players in patrol are able to join and cooperatively fight off up to seven waves of Hive with the other players in the shared space. It has loot unique to the activity and a collection of five bosses that will rotate from week to week. During the rounds, there are two different limited-use relic weapons that can spawn to aid in your battles. The first is the very same Hive Sword that was introduced in the first Destiny. The second is a new weapon called the Valkyrie which is a spear-like weapon that you can use close-range or throw for some big booms.

PvP Updates

This update is bringing two new maps and a huge overhaul to the player-versus-player system in Destiny 2. First of all, private matches are returning. This was a feature that was available in Destiny 1, but wasn’t ready for release at the start of Destiny 2. Secondly, Destiny Crucible is finally getting a ranking system.

There are going to be two different ranks in the new Crucible system, and both are going to be tied to unique rewards.

• Your Valor Rank is mostly tied to your time commitment. Playing better will level you up faster, but there is no penalty for losing.
• Your Glory Rank is tied to your performance. It goes up when you win and goes down when you lose. There will also be a unique weapon awarded to players who are able to achieve a high rank in the system. The reward and ranking will reset each season.

QoL & Sandbox Updates

In the stream, we also saw some quality-of-life updates that will be coming our way with this update. There was a demonstration of the new emote wheel, which will let players map four different emotes to use during combat or in social spaces. We also got to hear from Bungie’s weapon designers about changes coming to exotic weapons. They heard the feedback that exotic do not feel “exotic” enough so they made updates to the perks and/or performance of almost all of the exotic weapons in Destiny 2, and let me say, some of the upgraded weapons look really cool and really fun to play with.

More to Come

Bungie has promised that this just the start of the conversation about what is to come in the new expansion. I would expect that we get some more details about the vault space increase and exotic weapon update, at least in the form of patch notes, as well as some more teasers about the story in the new expansion. Active and returning players of Destiny 2, what are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments below.

P.S. Did you know we have a Destiny Hype Channel in the Gamelust Discord Server? Click this link to join in on the conversation.