Intrepid Guardians across the globe have succeeded in depositing over nine billion Fractaline in Destiny 2, thus completing the Empyrean Foundation community challenge that has dominated the mind-space of most players for the last several weeks. In celebration, Bungie announced via YouTube that a long-gone PvP mode from the original Destiny, Trials of Osiris, will return in its first Destiny 2 iteration on March 13, which just so happens to be when the game’s next content season, Season of the Worthy, officially kicks off.
Trials of Osiris is a weekly Crucible mode only available between Friday and the weekly reset each Tuesday morning. Back in the first Destiny, players had to purchase an item called a “Trials Passage” from Mercury’s resident Osiris super-fan, Brother Vance, in order to participate in that week’s Trials of Osiris. Matches used the “Elimination” rules with a couple of key differences, namely that squad matchmaking was turned off, but Light levels were turned on. This meant that players had to roll in with their own Fireteams, and that Guardians with a higher Light level were actually stronger, unlike in normal Crucible modes where everyone is leveled out.
The real kicker was that in order to win the best gear, you had to emerge victorious from nine Trials of Osiris matches without losing. And if you did take an L, your Trials Passage was revoked after the third loss, meaning that you had to go purchase another if you wanted to keep trying.
In the above trailer, Bungie leaves many specifics about how Destiny 2‘s Trials of Osiris up in the air: does it still require a Trials Passage; if so, how much does the Trials Passage cost; what currency is used to buy it; is the Friday-to-Tuesday time frame set to return; how many wins are needed to get the best rewards; how does matchmaking work; and so on. Bungie does say, however, that this new version of Trials “matches what we remember from back in Destiny 1,” so you can make your own assumptions.
We also know that three maps from Destiny are returning for Trials of Osiris, specifically Cauldron, Exodus Blue, and Anomaly. Additionally, the original Destiny Trials of Osiris gear set is coming back for each class, along with cool new lighting effects that only activate for players who “go flawless” and finish the Trials without a loss.
This new version of Trials will be Power-enabled, just as the original was Light-enabled. As you might have guessed, the Destiny 2 subReddit is already upset about this. “Artifact needs to be 100% disable for Trials,” reads the title of one thread with more than a thousand upvotes in just over three hours. (In Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, each Guardian has an Artifact that continues to gain Power (read: levels), even after the character has otherwise maxed out their Power through conventional means.)
“If they allow it people who can sit there and play 8 to 10 hours a day will be able to reach way higher power than the average player and have an unfair advantage,” according to the thread’s author, u/Larry52795.
“It already made me never want to play Iron Banner,” said u/i_forget_what_i_do in a comment. “Before it was fine because if you were a really good player you got rewarded. Now all it takes is just having no life at all so you can mindlessly grind Eris bounties, getting 25 SMG kills, getting 30 Void kills, etc. Just doing that over and over again can’t have a benefit in Trials. If it does people will riot.”
Elsewhere in the thread, u/c14rk0 had a more visceral reaction to the news. “The second Luke Smith was talking at the start of the video I immediately just got angry to begin with,” they said. The rest of their comment goes pretty far off the rails, to such a degree that I don’t feel comfortable quoting it here, but you can read it for yourself if you’d like a refresher on the kind of unbridled anger that developers face from the people who supposedly enjoy their games.
One could argue that, even with Artifacts or Power differences disabled, players who spend eight or ten hours a day on Destiny 2 will still “be able to reach way higher power than the average player,” just in a more abstract sense, and it’s me, I’m arguing that. Trials of Osiris is designed to be the absolute height of competition for the upper-most echelons of Destiny PvP players, and it’s better for all of us if those players are sequestered into their own little queue, leaving the rest of us normies to enjoy regular Crucible in peace for once.
