It's a shame that in almost 10 years Destiny 2 never had strike refreshes. There were individual strikes that got reworked but it also removed the previous versions, and it was a handful over the years whereas Destiny 1 had both the Taken War and Siva Crisis refreshing the old strikes and adding more variety to the playlists.
To be fair, a few of those revamps were sorely needed. I don't think anyone liked the original Exodus Crash, and strikes like the Inverted Spire were really showing their age. Adding a bit more content to stop people from just skipping half the strike was also probably for the best, although I do think they went overboard with Lake of Shadows forcing you to do two convoy sections. If D1 had gone on longer, we might have seen reworks replacing the originals after some time too. The variety situation is rectified somewhat with all the battlegrounds getting added to the rotation after their seasons were up, though I know some people are less fond of their structure.
I do miss some of the vaulted strikes though, even if I don't necessarily think they were the best or if I still have bad memories of them (looking at you, Savathun's Song). Pour one out for the Festering Core, the poor thing. Only got to be in the game for a year before it got sent to the vault.
Had a realization the other day: is there any other character that had less done with them than Hawthorne? She showed up in the Red War campaign and some of the other base game strikes and missions, and then never had any real story presence since then. Maybe an occasional bit of text written for an interaction, but as far as I can remember, she had no new dialogue recorded in the near decade since she was introduced. I guess maybe Shiro-4 and Efrideet could be considered to have less, but at least they have the excuse of only being introduced at the end of D1. And as I mentioned earlier, they even got a mention in lore tabs in a couple items in this last update, so Bungie didn't totally forget about them.
Speaking of, I started looking through the various new items for lore tidbits again, and found some interesting things I hadn't seen before:
- Fafnir: A conversation between Director Moffat and someone called Lee in the basement of the DEO, presumably another researcher that got caught up in their experiments and became changed by the Nine. In the decades since their disappearance, he never stopped trying to search for Louis Yero and Nella Davis. All he's gotten out of these conversations is items of theirs plucked through time, but for the first time Lee allows him to send them a message: a slice of his retirement cake.
- Monument Shell: A DEO memo for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Yero-Davis Memorial Wing.
- Brigantine Brut: After her satellite finally lands on Neomuna, Astraea, the AI from Vesper Station, makes contact with Soteria, the AI of the CloudArk.
- Vexlost Shell: IV appears to you in a dream, warning of the fears of the Nine with regards to the Vex. While alluded to strongly before, it confirms that the Vex are the pawns of the flower game that the Gardener and Winnower set in motion, and that if the Vex succeed in returning the universe to the original state prior to the Gardener's interference, not even the Nine will be safe.
- Unbound Astronaut Shell: The H.E.L.M. is completely wrecked and scavenged, but Failsafe got a new jumpship to pilot.
- Divalian Shell: As Petra and Mara discuss the curse of the Dreaming City in front of Riven's clutch, the first egg hatches. It seems Mara wanted for that to happen.
- Seer Shell: IX talks to you about how things are not proceeding according to how the Nine foresaw it (the Traveler was supposed to die, the Outer Nine weren't supposed to retreat). Like what was said in the Winnower dialogue, the Nine intended for you to kill the Winnower somehow, the idea being that defeating the Winnower would prevent the end of existence, but they also know that that's what the Winnower wants because it still proves the idea correct either way. When you raise an objection and ask about what you want instead, IX realizes that the reason the future is clouded is because you still have free will. Guardians make their own fate, after all.
- Department-Issued Shell: A conversation between Ben Yero and Gideon Davis (Nella's husband? father?), where Gideon informs him of the connection between their disappearances and his intent to sue the feds over it.
- Unanswered Ante Shell: A letter from Clovis Bray I to Ana Bray, where he forgives her and Elsie for their actions against him, admitting (with a smidge of his usual arrogance) that they were only doing what they thought was right. He mentions how Fenchurch Everis is the only one that actually visits him anymore, and from him he has learned of the Prophecy. He requests her assistance to put his mind into a new Exo frame so he can join up with the Vanguard and help in the effort to bind the Nine.
Shame we may never see any of these stories come to fruition, but it still paints a picture of what was likely to come next. Really wish we could have gone exploring Old Chicago now.
