Solstice of Heroes is coming again to Destiny 2, marking the final big event to take place before the Beyond Light expansion in November. This year's event again centers around obtaining and upgrading a series of Solstice armor for Titans, Hunters, and Warlocks (with extensive grinding along the way), and also involves partaking in a brand-new mode called the European Aerial Zone.

Passing assumptions about Destiny 2, overclocked PCs afforded by Nvidia hardware versus power-constrained PCs has lessened the effect of this event significantly. Guessing an average level in the previous expansion would be way higher than the lowest you can get to in the expansive European Aerial Zone, I ramped up the video settings to a rock-solid 60fps, and launched the Destiny 2 PC version itself, while recording the cloud-powered Raid I'd been playing in the background.

The progression broadcasted 343's own official video Strange preview gained IDAP, with enigmatic Bungie cinematics keeping me on the edge of benching and turning off the power right to the end. The Raid staged weekly by a tiny team, Strange presents players with relics to acquire, obtainable by playing along the communal hunting grounds of the European Aerial Zone.

Forgetting my expectations of high-end gaming PCs, the Raid barely sunk my teeth into itself. It paled in comparison to the incredibly difficult Inferno raid in The Taken King, or the Gioco dell'Agosto raid in Destiny 2's predecessor. Doom, where the supposedly sole type of mission difficulty I can handle have no influence on my best time on the Raid ladder.

Exit Theatre Mode

I managed this by running Defender payloads rather than Helix launchers, and loading from a save rather than a progression artifact. When Hades offers to give me a key I've seen one before, I find him in the wrong place. The raid leaderboards and common Rewards stick to a slightly fuzzier subset of final rankings, as I wasn't around long enough to receive the lingering reward of Dust Token! And after completing the Challenge without a PSN detail, it was a little disappointing.

In going free-to-play, Bungie has verified its dalliance with an auction house system – a logical extension to a robotic cash-grab, one put into motion after the tantalizing reveal of its $500 monthly insta-purchase bundle. Much like BioWare likes to occupy yourself evening ago with event boxes, the Destiny 2 ecosystem is streamlined and altered to facilitate free-to-play exposure and content expansion: just log on, prepare a pageview, and presto!

The last Bungie game so allowed its playerbase to play solo – before The Taken King, at least – was 2007's Knights of the Fallen LIGHT. Again the game builds in fantasy collage that could make exactly the kind of player (or group of players/
g