What will Destiny 2 Season 17 focus on?

It’s May now, and we’re heading into Destiny 2 Season 17 at the end of the month here, and we essentially know nothing about where the story will go in the post-Rhulk/Witness era. We know a few things that will happen next season, like an Iron Banner overhaul and the arrival of a new dungeon, but beyond that? Things are murky and we only have clues from the current and past seasons to go on.

For me, there are two main “season” stories that I can see Bungie preparing for Year 5 here. I don’t want to say that these are the next season for sure, but one of them could be, so I just wanted to review the evidence here before Bungie starts announcing anything official.

Archangel Season

This is the idea that we’re finally getting back to the Rasputin story that made up most of Year 3, but Rasputin was almost completely wiped out when the Pyramids came, their defenses literally useless against the black fleet.

However, there are some indications that we will return to his story, including:

Last season a series of cosmetic items were released, a Ghost, a ship and a sparrow, all with the Rasputin aesthetic, but called “Archangel”. All the quotes in the flavor text were also about him, such as “Time will tell what role the Warmind plays in the coming war. I find it hard to believe that his story is over.”

The last we officially heard about Rasputin was that Ana Bray had evacuated him from Mars in an engram and was building a special exochassis to house him. The idea here is that Rasputin may go from being a giant glowing orb to an actual character that we interact with in the near future here.

Ana Bray was shown in a scene from the Witch Queen, reminding us that she is in the Tower. Mars Has Returned, which was the central location of Rasputin’s Warmind DLC and his main technological presence. And as Witch Queen progressed, the end of the Board of Inquiry’s questline spoke of a human settlement, Nefele Stronghold, which Rasputin had apparently wiped from the records.

Add to this the idea that Bungie has been accepting requests to see SIVA return to the game for years, and that could be part of the seasonal focus. Next season, we know that the Trespasser weapon from Rise of Iron will return, Shiro-4’s sidearm from that SIVA-based expansion.

What I don’t know is how Rasputin’s return furthers the Darkness story that we’ve been delving into with Witch Queen. It seems a bit apart and yet there is a lot of organizing here, something has to be. Although for season 17? Unclear.

Season of the Leviathan

We now move on to another situation that the game is clearly setting up, the return of Calus. Meeting Rhulk has given us a greater understanding of what Calus is probably trying to do right now. Rhulk became a Disciple of the Witness by eliminating all remaining members of his kind besides himself. Calus was desperately trying to communicate with the Dark, as evidenced by the events aboard the Glykon, and I can see one story where he comes back with the idea that if he exterminates all remaining Cabal, including his own daughter, Caiatl, he might ascend. become a Disciple as well.

For now, however, he seems to be gathering the loyalty of some of his former troops. We learned this season that Saladin, by joining Caiatl’s war council, had unsettled some Cabal and increased defections to Calus’s forces.

We don’t know where he is, or where the Leviathan is. In a dream world, the return of Calus would be accompanied by the return of at least part of Leviathan itself, perhaps the first thing in Destiny 2 to break out of the content vault in some way besides the Crucible maps.

To me, Calus is now motivated to become a Disciple and serve the Witness, it feels like a logical evolution from the end of the Witch Queen story. We still don’t know if the Witness has a bunch of Rhulk-like disciples hiding out in other pyramid ships, but it certainly seems possible. But what is very clear is that Bungie is planning a return for Calus in one form or another, and since we are already over a year in the making for this, it may be relatively soon.

Those are my two main ideas, although there is a third lingering one in there, the fact that Savathun will probably be resurrected at some point, but that’s a concept for another day.

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