Bungie community manager confirms Destiny's Crimson Days event is coming

With the Destiny 2 holiday event The Dawning now wrapped up, it's time to look ahead to what's coming next. According to this Reddit thread, which now comes with an all-but-official confirmation from a Bungie community manager, players still soldiering on through the waist-high salt drifts can expect the return of Crimson Days.

This event first appeared during Destiny 1's lifespan, and is a Valentine's-like celebration of lovers and killers. Assuming it follows roughly the same structure, it will bring a new PvP mode and new ghosts, sparrows, and weapon ornaments to collect by either grinding the game or shelling out for time-limited special engrams. Of course there's a good chance the Destiny 2 iteration of Crimson Days may work differently, but assuming it doesn't here's what the Destiny 1 Crimson Days page says:

"Crimson Days celebrates two Guardians, united against the competition, watching one another's backs and becoming legend together ... A Crucible Fireteam, forging bonds of teamwork and friendship that even death only strengthens."

That's a rather florid, Shaxx-flavored description of Crimson Days' 2v2 Elimination Mode called Crimson Doubles. The original version was more than just a half-sized PvP mode, however: When a player was downed, their partner received a "Broken Heart" buff that boosted armor, agility, recovery, and weapon handling that lasts until the fallen partner was revived, the surviving partner was killed, or the round ended.

The Reddit post also includes a number of datamined references to the event and the Crimson Doubles mode, and images including weapon ornaments, ghost shells, Sparrows, and gift boxes. And in case that's not enough to seal the deal for you, Bungie community manager Cozmo23 hopped into the thread to say that, yes, Crimson Days is coming back.

"The rumors are True. Crimson Days is coming back," he wrote. "It won't be the same as last year time(2016). We will talk about how it is changing in the blog update on Thursday."

Those changes will hopefully include some tweaking of the Crimson Doubles mode, which in Destiny 1 very quickly went from a fun novelty to being dominated by hardcore PvPers who took it all very seriously—not exactly the spirit in which the mode was intended. One possible fix would be the addition of randomized pairings, something that Destiny 1 didn't offer: It required that players be formed up in two-player fireteams prior to joining.

The next "This Week at Bungie" blog update, which will presumably make all of this official, is scheduled to appear on January 11. That update, the first of 2018 from the studio, should also give a clearer sense of what other tweaks and changes the game's febrile playerbase can expect over the coming weeks and months. Yesterday, game director Christopher Barret, who runs the live team, tweeted this:

For anyone curious - I read Bungie forums, I read Reddit, I read Twitter, I watch Twitch. I also play Destiny. I share your love of the game. I’ll talk about where we are headed Thursday.January 9, 2018

That post usually goes live sometime in the afternoon on PST, and we'll have thoughts on the contents shortly thereafter.

TOPICS

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.