Should You Unwrap Destiny’s Holiday Event, The Dawning?

Even devoted Destiny players have been struggling to find reasons to log in and play in the past several weeks. The lackluster Festival of the Lost event this year was painfully focused on microtransactions and alienated many players, myself included. And while I personally enjoyed Rise of Iron’s core content, I exhausted its activities in a few weeks and was left with little to do. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s fine to have an ongoing game you enjoy playing for stretches before stepping away for a while to enjoy other games. At the same time, for those of us who really enjoy inhabiting Bungie’s futuristic universe, we’re always eager for something new to sink our teeth into.

Enter The Dawning, Destiny’s winter event, and the chance for Bungie to draw players back in for the holidays after many have already stepped away. The new content is available without an additional upfront cost for players who own Rise of Iron, and the event runs through January 3. So is it worth setting aside some of this season’s other great games to dive back in to the life of a Guardian?

Along with Rise of Iron, the Dawning represents Bungie’s most fervent effort to date communicating a sense of passing time within the fiction. Rise of Iron showed off an existing area (the Cosmodrome) with a fresh coating of snow and some new areas to explore, and in so doing, made it feel like the Destiny universe addresses the passing of seasons. That idea is reinforced with The Dawning, as winter and the coming of a new year arrives in the game’s main social space, the Tower. Snow drifts down amid the familiar kiosks, and wrapped gifts await opening on a raised balcony. Within the social space, music is distinctly “Destiny” in its instrumentation, but carries the harmonies and melodies of a forgotten carol. In short, the Tower looks, sounds, and feels great. 

The Tower looks amazing decked out in snow and holiday gifts

Expanding upon last year’s December event, we see the return of the Sparrow Racing League. The two older race courses are joined by two new ones, and both new additions are excellently designed. In particular, I think Bungie really found its groove in the Mercury map, Shining Sands. Filled with wild and tilted quarter-pipes and soaring jumps between platforms, the race course is exciting and alien. While the addition of a couple of new maps makes Sparrow Racing a lot more varied as an activity, I was disappointed to not see any other innovations in the system for this year. New race types, shifting gate locations, or a refined approach to vehicle control, tricks, drafting, or other control elements would all go a long way toward helping SRL feel more nuanced and engaging. As it is, I like the chance to get back on the course, but it feels like the potential for a real and deep racing mode is still a little out of reach. With that said, I’m very pleased to learn that the four racing maps are sticking around after the event ends; I love that friends can still meet up after the new year to play private races.

For me, the biggest draw of The Dawning is actually the three revamped strikes. The Shadow Thief, the Nexus, and Will of Crota strikes have all seen significant overhauls, and without exception, they’re all top-notch changes. All three were already good strikes in their original incarnations, but the new enemy layouts feel more tense and challenging. In particular, I appreciate the ways that each of those strikes’ three boss fights have evolved. Instead of battles where I stand in one place and snipe at a big baddie from a distance, the new gate closures and enemy spawns demand movement, team coordination, and smart shooting discipline. If they do nothing else out of this content drop, returning players should take the time to try out these new variations on old favorite strikes. 

Along with the three revamped strikes, all of the major strike playlists have received a new twist – scoring – and a new set of bounties to go along with the effort. It’s ultimately a pretty minor change to the way most players will approach strikes, but I can’t deny the fun of nailing a great Super and seeing thousands of points go up on the board. Strike scoring also has bounties and medals that encourage changing your weapons on a regular basis to nail different “sprees.” I like the way this mechanic encourages players to master all the abilities and weapons that they have equipped, rather than falling back on just one way to take down foes. 

The Dawning includes a couple of fun secrets, like this hidden Sparrow

A few exotic weapons also enter the game with The Dawning. I’m stoked to hear about Ice Breaker’s return; that sniper rifle was a staple weapon throughout Year One for many Guardians. I can’t speak to how this old standby feels; among the dozen-plus hardcore players I play with on a regular basis in the game, I haven’t talked to anyone yet who attained the weapon in these first days, even among those who did what I did, and completed the Nightfall bounty three times that has the chance to provide the weapon. If my experience is any indication, expect to be grinding that Nightfall bounty repeatedly in the coming weeks. 

The other two Year Three exotic weapons being introduced have new names, but they’re actually just solar and void variations on the machine gun called Thunderlord. Players have been eager to see these two weapons enter the game. And while their monikers are awesome, (Nova Mortis and Abaddon? Come on!), they aren’t likely to change your world given their identical perk structures to an existing weapon. While I think exotic quests are the ideal way to introduce new weapons, these two very similar questlines are too simplistic to really be memorable.

I’ve been vocal about my growing dislike for Destiny’s microtransactions, and I’m afraid The Dawning continues to frustrate on that level. While the game has pulled back from the brink of the way this year’s Festival of the Lost put a singular focus on real money purchases, I really don’t think that The Dawning is dramatically better. Some of the only meaningful new armor sets to be found in The Dawning can only be attained from “Treasures of the Dawning.” And while a few of these boxes can be earned in-game during the course of the event, I think it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would be able to get a full set without paying real cash. And that’s too bad, because the Bungie artists have outdone themselves with some of the most intricate armor designs yet introduced, for all three classes. I did some experimentation, and thanks to the random nature of drops from these Treasures, to obtain a matching full set of “Dawning” armor on one character took $40 of microtransaction payments. Results will of course vary, but it’s telling that it took me that long and that much money. What a shame, when those same items could have instead acted as meaningful rewards for an in-game activity, and I would have felt like the gorgeous designs actually matched up with something fun I had done in the game.  

Some of Destiny's coolest armor is now mostly hidden behind a microtransaction wall

In the midst of new race course and high scores on strikes, it would be easy to miss some of the important quality-of-life features that have just been introduced with this patch. But for me, those seemingly minor changes are a big deal. I love that green items now dismantle automatically for level 40 players. I applaud the return of Exotic Shards to Xur’s inventory; when he comes back this weekend, I’m hopeful it will resolve one of the major chokepoints in the exotic upgrade system. The notoriously stingy drops of skeleton keys are now easier to obtain, and also help make Nightfalls more rewarding, since you get one key for your first completion each week. Subclass quest items can be rebought from the Speaker, helping to clear inventory space. All these minor changes (and others) add up to a game that is simply a little more fun to move through, and I appreciate the adjustments.

I mentioned vault space above, and it’s the last point I want to talk about here before closing out. With The Dawning's introduction of a few new exotics, infuse-able racing gear, and a couple of new armor sets, the vault management issue has now become my number one biggest roadblock to having more fun with Destiny. Despite the significant vault space expansion that occurred several months back, the constant loot management required by longtime dedicated players has become a constant chore. My characters have 10 items in every slot (the max) and my vault is perpetually full, despite repeated culls of prized rewards from my years of play. The problem is exacerbated by an over-abundance of useless loot that drops in activities; most blues and even purple gear at this point has little value to serious daily players, so instead, we’re forced to spend extended periods of in-game time running back and forth between the postmaster and the cryptarch, decrypting items that we will, almost without exception, instantly destroy. It’s tedious, and dramatically curbs my enthusiasm for dropping into a random activity with friends. Needless to say, this is obviously not an issue that affects more casual players, but speaking with others who play regularly, the inventory management dilemma has blossomed into a big problem for the broader game, at least for anyone who enjoys holding on to the rewards they fought so hard to obtain.

The Dawning totally nails what it’s going for in its holiday themes, and it’s great to have a reason to hop in and join up with friends again. While there’s not a wealth of fundamentally new content to explore here, the activities on offer are all worthwhile, from the new racing maps to the challenge of strike scoring. Recognize Destiny’s December event for what it is – a fun seasonally appropriate gift to fans – and you should have a blast playing around and chasing a few new rewards. It’s likely that Bungie isn’t giving the first Destiny game its full attention at this point, as the studio is certainly hard at work on next year’s sequel. But The Dawning proves there is still good fun to be had in the this game we’ve been playing for a long time now, even when it feels like ithe fun mostly comes through through rewrapped presents that we already opened in a previous year.