destiny 2 how to tell what curse week it is

Destiny 2's Groundhog Day curse is a great bear upon that's easy to miss

Stop trying to hide practiced story

For about half a twelvemonth, parts of Destiny 2'due south world have been trapped in a fourth dimension loop, our actions and adventures having no real bear on as the same events unfold every time the 3-week cycle starts over. While rotating quests is standard for many MMOs, and indeed Destiny 2, the curse cycle of the Dreaming City is really a story quietly unfolding. Y'all may have missed this if you don't play regularly and listen to all the quest dialogue, but everyone there knows nosotros're trapped in a Groundhog Threeweeks loop and it's getting grim. Change may exist coming.

A cursory epitomize for not-Destineers. In Destiny, elf-ish spacehumans named the Awoken alive in the Dreaming City, a paradise of gardens, crystals, and waterfalls built upon an asteroid. We visit in Destiny 2's Forsaken expansion and, after players first beat its raid by smashing a wish dragon possessed by a dark god (video games, eh?), a expletive trapped the city in a loop. At present the expletive ebbs and flows across a iii-calendar week bike, the air growing heavy with flecks and orbs of elder awfulness, and all sorts of nasties from afar stars and deep planes swarm the Dreaming City.

Each week, the curse shifts and a few different quests and activities rotate in, all repeating on a three-calendar week cycle. And everyone in the Dreaming City knows time is repeating, remembering everything that's happened since September but unable to change their actions if they stay in the metropolis. Every three weeks, the aforementioned space elf gets injured dedicated artefacts. The same monastery is attack past the same baddies. And then on and round and round we go, some signs of promise coming across cycles, some people escaping information technology by leaving, and everyone else settling in for the long booty considering the consequences if we don't will be worse. That's been fun.

While we repeat the same quests and wider events slowly progress, we're as well getting to know characters meliorate, with new dialogue when we see questgivers again. My favourite is Amrita, a infinite elf wounded every 3 weeks while defending precious artefacts. Over time she'southward got chattier, revealing more almost the items we're recovering as well every bit herself, so settling into a sort of grim humour.

"It's embarrassing, actually," she began during the latest bicycle. "'Assistance, assist, the Hive are stealing our hard drives.' 'Uhh, they shot me uhh oh no.' I'one thousand a skillful shot actually. A good fighter. I didn't call back this is how history would recollect me."

This week, another warrior is saying she has "lucked out" because her place in the cycle is on scouting duty safely atop a cliff. "I become to come here every three weeks and simply... hang out."

(Reddit user "dobby_rams" has been collating the 21 weeks of curse dialogue so far, if you're curious. Much will be odd if you don't know the game just y'know you lot go the picture.)

Our wee Ghost robopal getting increasingly riled past the apparent indifference of Mara Sov, the Dreaming Metropolis queen who's seemingly sitting this out far abroad, has been good too.

This week seems like information technology may be exist the start of large events with the bike. Mara Sov has left, saying she'south off on of import business organization and may be some time. Because Bungie tin can't do annihilation important in the open, this is in a one-off scene which only appears to people who consummate a specific quest this ane week. Mara even dropped a reference to a ambiguous unnamed character from the first Destiny (and never seen since) who spoke the clunking line "I don't even have time to explain why I don't accept time to explain." Mara echoing that enigma sure is some classic Destiny. I'll not even get into the big twist around her brother, Forsaken antagonist Uldren Sov, in an earlier i-off cinematic. Simply whether Mara leaving changes anything or not, I'm unreasonably pleased with this whole curse setup.

While rotating quests is a fairly standard manner to continue an online game fresh, it's rarely intended to be an actual story. This is unexpected fifty-fifty within Destiny two, where elsewhere we tin can idly walk through the battlefields of wars which still rage despite the fact we won years ago, where many characters briefly recognise g plot lines we ended then continue to human action like nothing happened, and where the aforementioned people die the same deaths because we replay the same missions.

God, this game has such foreign storytelling. Destiny 2's original story entrada is piffling more than an aside within the wider plot, a series of events that weren't that interesting or exciting with forgettable characters and largely ending in a return to the status quo. I do like games which tell stories within worlds rather than focusing on erecting intricate millennia-long plots where everything ties into everything else, but that's not what Bungie are up to.

Across small-scale mentions in side-missions, NPC churr, and squillions of text lorelogs, they are conspicuously building a long arc of dire events. Merely they hide all the portents and explanations, instead often using the foreground to tell bland stories. Destiny is incomprehensible if you lot don't hunt out and follow these tranquillity parts. And some of their ideas are really interesting! What is this. Why. Why do they do it this way.

They're nonetheless doing it this fashion. This calendar week'south new quest to nab a honking bully revolver, The Last Word, is the lead-in to the next season of Destiny 2: Forsaken'due south paid annual pass. It's a turning point in a story with an enigmatic grapheme tinkering with dark forces to an unknown end, though unless you've delved deep you lot'd not know this and run across the Out-of-stater merely as the announcer of a multiplayer mode. A lot of that story is likewise in lorelogs, and this new quest builds on another started by a rare loot drop many players still oasis't even found. And who's reading all the descriptions when trying to grind through the many grindy stages of a grinding quest? And so the quest climaxes in a story mission which, though it has a cute trick, tells no story.

I hateful, I am happy enough just shooting faces in the hope of finding better guns to shoot faces amend, but it's maddening that the game foregrounds and then many uninteresting stories while hiding good stuff in quiet quests and lorelogs.

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Source: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/destiny-2-the-dreaming-city-curse-cycle