Bungie is handling Destiny 2’s new three-week reset cycle in cool ways

Destiny 2: Forsaken is days away from being a month old, which means its ambitious three-week content cycle has already started over. The cycle in the game’s Dreaming City location didn’t start until the week after launch, and new content has been available each week since. But today’s reset brought with it an odd justification for why the reset is happening, and Bungie is leaning into it hard.

All games like Destiny have a weekly reset. To keep the game replayable, there has to be a day every week where your objectives start over again. With the Dreaming City, each week offers something new to do. As the recent Dreaming City curse grows greater, the content gets more difficult. This eventually culminates in the Shattered Throne dungeon every three weeks.

But now that the reset has started over, and the curse has returned to its original state, the game’s characters are acting strangely. Petra, the NPC for the Dreaming City, is back to where she was in the first week. But she’s a bit more confused now, and even comments on how we — the Guardians — did everything right, and yet the Dreaming City has returned to the same way it was three weeks ago.

Going on the Broken Courier mission available this week nets an even stranger response from the mission NPC. The courier talks about knowing exactly what was going to happen as she was fighting, but being completely unable to change her actions. Something strange is happening in the Dreaming City, and it’s setting up a justification for the game’s normal weekly ritual.

The short version of what’s happening in the Dreaming City is this: Riven, the raid’s final boss, wished it to be this way before she died. Ahamkara, Destiny’s wish dragons, of which Riven was the last, are very powerful and linger beyond death. But Riven was Taken, put into a kind of zombified state of being, where your power grows but your will is that of another.

Turns out, Riven was Taken by Oryx years ago, before Guardians killed him in Destiny’s The Taken King expansion. But Oryx’s sister, Savathun, made a deal with Riven more recently. In exchange for Riven’s freedom — her death by the hands of us, the Guardians — Riven would grant Savathun a strange wish: The Dreaming City would reset every three weeks.

This may sound like a strange wish, and admittedly, it is. However, Savathun is a Hive god, and the Hive thrives on destruction through their religion, called the Sword Logic. Essentially, beings like Oryx and Savathun are empowered by death and destruction.

In wishing for the Dreaming City to be in a perpetual cycle, Savathun turned the work of the Guardians into a battery for her own growth. If we stop fighting for the city, it falls under Savathun’s control, and she wins. If we keep fighting for the city, all our work is undone and she grows steadily stronger each week.

While it’s not entirely clear when Savathun will show herself for real, it seems obvious that players will eventually have to confront her. As for if this cycle will ever be finished from a story perspective, we don’t know. However, Eris Morn seems to be involved somehow, and could very well show up in the coming weeks.

It’s silly that Bungie is leaning in so hard into justifying an average game system like weekly resets, but the way that it’s pulled it off is actually very cool from a story perspective. Now we just have to wonder how it’s going to fix this once we finally put Savathun down, and if our war for the Dreaming City will ever truly end.