Today via a video released on their blog, Bungie pulled back the curtain on the Season of the Drifter and the new content that Annual Pass owners can expect when they dive in next month.
The juiciest bit of the Season of the Drifter’s Annual Pass Content is arguably the new Gambit Prime mode, which appears to be the endgame or competitive/sweaty version of Gambit which will challenge players to work together more than they have ever before.
According to the ViDoc, Gambit Prime will be one shorter, more intense round of Gambit that will feature “raid” like mechanics during the boss phases, and the ability to drain motes from the other team. This is designed to be the final destination for Gambit fans looking for a greater challenge.
The video also mentioned the desire to have more clearly defined roles in Gambit, similar to other competitive games, and while they stopped short of literally having players picking roles, there are new armor sets designed to encourage a specific type of gameplay such as the “Invader”, “Collector”, “Sentry” and the “Reaper.” The last two, Sentry and Reaper, are less obvious, and are about focusing down the Taken and killing enemies respectively, the Invader invades, and the Collector picks up motes.
Other more predictable changes are coming as well such as new maps, and weapons tied to playing through Gambit Prime. Also, having learned their lesson after the negative feedback from Black Armory’s gated content, not only is everything unlocked from the get, but those that are low Power Level will be able to take advantage of new Power Surge bounties to get up to 640 quickly.
On top of that, there will also be a new PvE event called The Reckoning, which appears to be tied to the lore of The Nine and The Drifter (who are now known to be connected). It’s hard to tell right now exactly how that will play, but it appears to be tied to Gambit Prime armor collection, and will task you with killing hordes of enemies as quickly as possible.
The newly updated road map and timeline provided by Bungie offers up a detailed look of other activities that are coming by way of the Season of the Drifter. This includes the Thorn quest line, a new Allegiance quest line which will ask players to choose between the Vanguard or a Drifter perspective, and new Xur bounties called Invitations of the Nine, which will offer rewards over nine weeks.
Season of the Drifter launches next week on March 5.
