Author: Trafficblast

The Season of the Splicer has officially arrived in Destiny 2 (although the game is down for emergency maintenance), bringing with it a new slate of Seasonal Challenges. First introduced in the game’s last season, these challenges replace weekly bounties for Bright Dust and other rewards, giving you objectives to meet throughout the season. What’s nice about Seasonal Challenges, however, is that they persist all the way through the Season of the Splicer. While new challenges are released each week, you’ll have until the end of the season to complete them all–and earn big rewards of Bright Dust and experience points for your trouble.

Here’s a rundown of how the Seasonal Challenge system works and what challenges you’ll face each week throughout the season’s run. The Season of the Splicer is set to end on August 24.

How Seasonal Challenges Work

For most of its run, Destiny 2’s various activities vendors–Zavala, Shaxx, and the Drifter–carried weekly bounties that incentivized playing all three activities each week. Those bounties handed out Bright Dust if you participated in them, but if you didn’t, you missed out on earning Destiny 2’s premium in-game currency. Seasonal Challenges fix that; they’re challenges that are dolled out weekly, but which you can complete any time during the season.

You’ll find Seasonal Challenges on the Quests tab in the Director. Each week, a new slate of challenges is released, so you can pop in and see what their requirements are as you go. Completing challenges is a great way to earn experience points and power up your Seasonal Artifact, allowing you to raise your character’s level over the gear Power cap for the season. Many of the challenges also reward you with consumables and Bright Dust, which you can then spend in the Eververse Store on various cosmetic items.

Week 1

• Hello, World
  • Speak to the Splicer Servitor and complete Path of the Splicer I, then kill powerful Cabal enemies anywhere in the solar system. You get bonus progress if you defeat Cabal in the seasonal Override activity.
• Maximum Override
  • Complete 5 Override missions and deposit Data Spikes as a team. Bonus progress is awarded for wearing Season of the Splicer armor during the activity.
• Ethereal Splicer
  • Gather Ether from playing various activities, including Public Events, Strikes, Gambit, and the Crucible.
• Sidearm Splicer
  • Defeat opponents in Override with a sidearm, with bonus progress for precision blows.
• Icebound
  • Complete 10 bounties, and finish patrols, Public Events, and Lost Sectors on Europa.
• Challenger’s Aspirations
  • Complete three weekly Playlist challenges for Crucible, Gambit, or Strikes.
• Close Calibration
  • Calibrate close-range weapons on Europa (SMGs, swords, shotguns, and sidearms). You’ll get bonus progress for rapidly defeating enemies.
• Drifter’s Chosen
  • Earn 250 points in Gambit matches by banking motes, defeating blockers, and defeating enemy Guardians.
• Sacred Scorcher
  • Defeat enemy Guardians in the Team Scorched mode in the Crucible. Bonus progress is rewarded for fully charged detonations, which you can get by holding down the fire button for your Scorch cannon until it charges all the way before releasing it to fire.
• Vex Deletion Protocol
  • Defeat 5 Vex bosses in Strikes.

Seasonal

• Master Of All
  • Complete 75 seasonal challenges.

Amazon’s New World is set to have paid items that are “exclusively cosmetic in nature” at launch, and quality of life items and a battle pass-style program may come later.

Studio director Rich Lawrence took to Twitter to respond to questions from the community regarding New World’s Alpha patch notes that discuss the in-game storefront. He reassured fans that this store is to “create an outlet for players who find enough value in store items that they are happy to purchase them.”

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He promises the plan isn’t, and never will be, to “create a feeling that store items are necessary to enjoy the game.” All players, according to Lawrence, will be able to enjoy the full game experience without ever having to purchase anything.

When New World launches in August 2021, all store items will be “exclusively cosmetic in nature.” The current storefront in Alpha is simply a test, and none of the selections or their indicated costs are final. Alpha testers are encouraged to provide feedback on the items in the store to help determine whether or not they are added to the live game.

In the future, the team is planning on testing “quality of life items for mechanics like rested XP and fast travel, both obtainable in-game and purchasable in the store.” The release of these items will be determined by “how players progress in the months after launch.”

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The goal with all these items is “that they not offer an advantage that imbalances the game.”

Lawrence also revealed that the team is contemplating, but has not finalized, a “battle pass” style program that would “combine store items on a periodic basis.” This feature would be tested ahead of time to “ensure it provides strong value without disrupting gameplay for those not participating.”

Even further beyond that would be the “possibility of optional expansions, which would have a separate cost.”

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We recently got hands-on with the Amrine Excavation, one of New World’s six dungeon expeditions, and in 2020 we got to check out its massive 50v50 PvP war battles.

For more on Amazon Game Studios and New World, check out the report that details struggles, “bro culture,” mismanagement, and cancelled projects at the studio.

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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

NASA’s Perseverance has some company on Mars as China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft has successfully landed on the Red Planet.

As reported by The New York Times, China had revealed little of its plans prior to the landing and, while China’s state television did not report on the landing live, it dedicated hours of coverage following its touchdown.

“This is another milestone advance in our country’s aerospace endeavors,” China’s president Xi Jinping said in a statement. “You have had the courage for challenge, have strove for excellence and have brought our country to the global forefront of interplanetary exploration.”

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The Tianwen-1 mission launched from Earth in July 2020 to take advantage of a window every two years when Mars and Earth are closest to each other. It made it to Martian orbit on February 10 and stayed in orbit until it was ready for landing.

Tianwen-1’s landing craft held the rover – which is named Zhurong, after the god of fire in Chinese folk tales – and it is about one-fourth the weight of NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance.

Zhurong is powered by solar panels and it includes “cameras, a ground-penetrating radar, a magnetic field detector, and a weather station.”

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Tianwen-1 landed in Utopia Planitia, also known as “Nowhere Land Plain,” and is the same region where NASA’s Viking 2 lander landed in 1976. This area of Mars is a huge basin that is a couple thousand miles wide and could have been under an ocean in the distant past.

One of China’s main goals for this mission is to “better understand the distribution of ice in the region, which future human colonists on Mars could use to sustain themselves.”

NASA’s Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, and has a goal of seeking signs of habitable life and “past microbial life.” Since then, NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history by successfully completing the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

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