Junot had the unenviable job of replacing Gina Torres as the voice of Ikora back in 2021, and did an admirable job—nailing the character's personality and mannerisms. As a Warlock main, Ikora was always my favourite of the Vanguard. Here they deliver a pitch perfect farewell, which is making me feel a lot of things.

OK, so what's actually in the Monument of Triumph update?

Here's a rundown of some of what to expect from the patch, based on what Bungie has been teasing across the past few weeks:

• A restored director, which will once again be the main way to launch the game's activities and has been refreshed to add Kepler and the Lawless Frontier
• A heavily simplified version of the Portal, which will hopefully make it easier to jump in with friends and actually earn good rewards
• Distortions, a new modifier that will rotate between the game's destinations—offering extra challenge, empowered enemies, and unique rewards on completion
• The return of Sparrow Racing League, a race mode that was available in Destiny 1, arriving in the sequel for the first time
• The return of the Pantheon raid gauntlet, this time featuring bosses from raids that were "Vaulted" (ie, removed) from the game
• New loot for all of the Portal categories
• Refreshed loot pools for all raids, dungeons and destinations, including new armour set bonuses
• The ability to upgrade weapons to higher tiers
• More attunement options to help chase specific weapon drops
• Catalysts added to all exotic weapons that didn't previously have them
• 300 more vault space slots
• 8 more loadout slots
• The ability to choose between seven artifacts
• A rework of anti-champion mods, now making them intrinsic to weapon frames
• A new aspect for each class
• A new Stasis and Strand grenade
• An across the board buff to all primary weapons
• A massive balance pass across abilities, weapons and exotic armour
• Gambit is back

There's more too, including updates to bright dust—Destiny 2's in-game currency—and reworks to a bunch of PvP activities. You can browse through a full thread of planned updates, with links out to relevant articles, over on Destiny 2's Bluesky account.

The Guardian's last message

Here's Peter Jessop, voice of the male Guardian player character, saying goodbye.

"So long my friends," he writes in the video's description. "Some of you knew, but most of you didn't when I was playing along beside you. I forgive you for Ganking me in the Crucible."

Man! These are hitting me harder than I expected. I thought I'd made piece with the end of a series I've been playing for over a decade, but I guess not.

The final patch notes are here

We're still a few hours away from the release of 9.7.0. While you wait, how about over 17,000 words worth of patch notes?

New additions, reworks and fixes abound. It's an exhaustive list, and plenty of it is genuinely exciting. This would be a bumper patch worth showing up for even if Destiny 2 was continuing. Hopefully it does enough to place the game in a good place for those of us who still plan to play across the coming months and years. (Or at least until I've finished soloing all of the dungeons.)

A musical interlude

Peter Jessop's video below not only set the tone of the moment, but it did so backed by arguably the most iconic song from Destiny 2's original soundtrack.

It's one of many stand-out tracks from the game's history, a catalogue of work from series composers Skye Lewin, Michael Salvatori and others that adds massively to the rich texture of the game's history. So many of the game's moments that stick in my mind are, in part, because of the music that backed them. The orchestral howl of the dogs in the Leviathan's pleasure garden encounter, or the electronically ethereal chimes of The Whisper exotic mission.

Here's two that have stuck with me the most over the years:

Deep Stone Lullaby is a triumph of a thing—a sad, quiet, sparse little tune that's deployed perfectly in the Deep Stone Crypt raid. It's arguably the best raid moment in the series, and it happens during a jumping puzzle of all things.

On the other end of the adrenaline scale, Shell of What Was is a recurring motif throughout the Forsaken expansion, but one that comes to the fore at the end of the Last Wish raid. It's a big triumphant finish to one of the best raids to come out of the series—a final moment of hype that punctuates the time you kill a big wish dragon.

Sometimes Destiny 2 was a very very good videogame.

What builds are you taking into Monument of Triumph?

With new aspects, ability reworks, exotic armour buffs, and seven whole artifacts full of mods to pick from, this update is looking like a buildcrafter's dream. So what builds should you actually play?

Destiny 2's build scientists have been hard at work theorycrafting based on what Bungie has revealed of the new stuff. I'm particularly enjoying Llama's series, which offers three builds for each class that make use of the new toys on offer. It should offer a nice break from Getaway Artist Prismatic Warlock.

Titan

Warlock

Hunter

Is it weird that the end of Destiny 2 has me more excited to play than ever?

It's incredibly bittersweet that my most anticipated features this patch are tainted by Bungie's past decisions

As usual when we post about Destiny 2, one of the first comments to this live blog was about the time when Bungie removed a whole bunch of stuff from the game.

I've written about it before, but the 'Destiny Content Vault' proved to be a major misstep, alienating players who were rightly upset about stuff they'd paid for being taking away, and making it impossible for new players to experience the game in its entirety.

It's telling, then, that the two Monument of Triumph features I'm most excited for are also ones that are tainted by the shadow of the DCV.

Pantheon 2.0

The returning raid gauntlet mode will, this time, feature a selection of bosses and encounters that were previously vaulted. The concept art features Calus from Leviathan, Argos from Eater of Worlds and Gahlran from Crown of Sorrows. While there's no word yet on any Scourge of the Past encounters, I'll be disappointed if I don't get to have another argument about CAP vs ACP.

I'm looking forward to the nostalgia of tackling these bosses for the first time since they were removed with Beyond Light. But that excitement is lessened by the fact that I shouldn't have to see this as a big deal. That Bungie would remove a chunk of its endgame in the first place is absurd.

And a single encounter is a poor replacement for the pacing and vibes of a full raid—the way mechanics are teased and expanded across the encounters, or the connective tissue and atmosphere of interstitial combat and jumping puzzles. It's just not the same.

Calus is a fun fight, but it's a shadow of Leviathan as a whole; it's Royal Baths and braying dogs and the wacky gameshow obstacle course that lead into the boss fight. Without Scourge's city opener and Sparrow escape, Insurrection Prime is just a Servitor stuffed into a mech suit.

Part of me had always hoped they'd come back in their entirety one day. When the studio started adding old Destiny 1 raids, I'd assumed eventually it would be the turns of the ones that D2 lost. Now we know it'll never happen. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

Distortions

I've always liked Destiny 2's destination spaces. In some respects they're a missed opportunity—all a bit too simple and small to really sell the concept of a shared world shooter. Nevertheless they're a chill space to enjoy Destiny 2 as a satisfying FPS. A perfect canvas to grind bounties and catalyst progress while listening to a podcast.

So I really like that Monument of Triumph is giving them a bit more purpose. Distortions will rotate between a number of the game's patrol zones, making them harder and adding, we're told, surprising encounters and other interesting quirks. Colour me intrigued!

I like the idea of giving these spaces a bit more structure and purpose—an actual gameplay loop that offers players a reason to revisit these otherwise neglected spots.

But again, it's another part of the game left incomplete. We're missing numerous destinations still, from Io to Mars to the Tangled Shore—big chunks of the base game and it's first expansion. I'd love a Distortion on the Tangled Shore, just because I'd love to return to the Tangled Shore.

The end of Destiny 2 is sad not just because of what could have happened in its future, with the intriguing story Bungie was cooking up as part of the Fate saga. It's also sad because we now know that the tapestry of Destiny 2's history will forever remain incomplete.

Preloading for the patch is live

I can confirm patch 9.7.0 is now rolling out on Steam, ahead of the servers going back live in just over an hour. You may need to restart Steam if you don't see the download option.

At least the community is still making tools for Destiny 2

No discussion of the game would be complete without a nod to its many third-party community tools. If there's one thing Bungie absolutely nailed for Destiny 2, it was its extensive API that allowed for some powerful options to help manage your loot.

Destiny Item Manager, D2ArmorPicker and Light.gg have all been pinned to my bookmarks bar for years now. And even now, people are still offering up new ways to sort through the game's guts.

Destiny Report lets you search through the games guns. You can filter by element, type, perks, frame, source. You can also play about with each gun's perks, checking what each does to a weapon's stat distribution.

It's not the first tool that has let you search through the database for the exact perk combo you want, but it seems significantly faster than many of the alternatives.

We're live!

This patch already has more players on Steam than for the launch of the last Destiny 2 expansion

Even with the patch going live slightly earlier than expected, the Monument of Triumph update has breached 100,000 concurrents on Steam.

In comparison, Destiny 2's Renegades expansion pulled just 71,278 concurrents on its first day on Steam.

Marathon, meanwhile, has 7,870 players right now.

...And the servers are down

This is how you know this is a proper Destiny 2 launch. I tried to load into the Tower, got a Weasel error and now I'm stuck on a loading screen.

We're so back.

Chart watchers in shambles

Did enough people just try to check Destiny 2's concurrent numbers on SteamDB that they had to throttle traffic?

It's running fine now, but my chart watching was briefly interrupted by a queue due to increased demand.

For sure plenty in the community are invested in this patch's success, to prove to Sony and Bungie that Destiny as a series is worth investing in. See also the many, many calls for a Destiny 3 announcement during the major announcement conferences over the last week.

The Traveler returns

Back where it belongs.

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