Destiny 2's pre-expansion live event might have been nice if I could see it, idk

After a short goodbye event live in-game last night, Bungie have shut down Destiny 2's servers to roll out the new expansion, Beyond Light. The event was only small, just a little flourish as Darkness closed around the solar system and locked off several areas for the foreseeable future. I think. But it seemed nice. From what I've seen. I wouldn't know myself because I, like many, got sick of queueing for the servers then being disconnected when I got in, and just went to bed. Alright, let's catch up with a VOD.

Whoops, sorry, that's one of my own recordings. Let's see...

Ah no, I've done it again. Alright, last try, here's "Kamino" off YouTube with a video they've nicely edited together with dialogue, some of the sights, a little timelapse, then the big finish:

(Or this video has the raw finale.)

Okay! So folks got to visit a vibrant part of the Last City we're usually locked out of. That is nice. And over time, our busted friend orb pulled itself together a bit? With a smidge of chat from our NPC pals, and a wee cutscene showing the Darkness constricting around the system while the Light starts pushing back. Alright, sure, cool. It's not huge, but it wasn't meant to be. Apparently we weren't even supposed to know this was coming, as game director Luke Smith said last week:

That would've been a nice surprise, if I had naturally been playing from midnight until chuffing 3am. I tend not to do that. Awful timing.

The event ran up until Bungie took the servers down for maintenance to roll out the update, but I don't know why they didn't just take the servers down hours earlier and do it then. As is, especially with the predictable server collapse, it was well rubbo for Europe. Even for some American timezones, it ran a little late. Or they could have done it on the weekend. I'd have taken a slightly shorter season to see its actual end. Not like this season hasn't already been too long, considering Beyond Light's delay dragged it out another two months.

I don't mind that the event was small and slow, mind. I quite liked the destruction of The Almighty, watching missiles crawl across the sky as they rained in from around the solar system. Nice bit of big, slow sci-fi, that. The problem with The Almighty was Bungie not managing players' expectations by warning of a wait (for ages, it seemed the event was straight broken), and here it seems their own expectations were jacked.

But look, I am hopeful for Beyond Light and the new season. It all seems like it's finally leading somewhere. And I'm up for a new meta, and abilities, and new gear, and just newness. A big kick of new Destiny sounds lovely right now.

Destiny 2 will come back up and Beyond Light will launch at 5pm today. We have to redownload the whole game, and you can start that now on Steam in preparation. It's a 54GB download, so hop to. On the bright side, it'll be a far smaller installation now, partially due to Bungie flushing out bloated files and partially due to, y'know, loads of areas and stories being removed.