Destiny 2: Season of the Splicer goes live with transmog, new rewards, and more

Destiny 2's Season of the Splicer is upon us, bringing with it a new six-player matchmade activity, rewards, and the long-awaited (and incredibly confusing) transmog system. As always, the full lowdown on everything you can expect can be had in the patch notes at bungie.net.

Transmog, which enables players to dress up however they like without sacrificing stats, is a big part of many MMOs, and players including our own Tim Clark were very much looking forward to it. Unfortunately, the system revealed by Bungie a few weeks ago seemed unnecessarily convoluted and grindy, and the initial reaction from the player base was not good. It will be very interesting to see how that shakes out as players dive into the new content.

Other highlights in the patch notes include a substantial number of changes to the weapon and ability sandbox, as well as fixes for the core playlists and the Deep Stone Crypt, Garden of Salvation, and The Last Wish raids. Shaders are now unlockables, meaning they'll no longer be consumed when used and will be found in your Collections rather than your inventory. It will however cost 500 Glimmer to apply shaders, and there's a higher Bright Dust cost for unlocking new ones. 

The new shader system is a positive change overall, but players have quickly noticed one big downside: There's no way to organize shaders or mark favorites. It's just a big dump of color swatches you'll have to root through whenever you want a new look, which is definitely not great if you have a shader collection of any size. (And unless you started playing yesterday, you probably do.) Hopefully Bungie will roll out some kind of sorting system soon.

Naturally, there's also a new season pass:

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One change that strikes me as oddly fun is that Sparrows, the magical space motorcycles that Guardians conjure out of thin air to ride around on, will no longer time out and disappear after you hop off them, but can now stay in the game world "semi-indefinitely." Remember where you parked! (Yes, I think running around yelling "Hey, have you seen my bike?" at random strangers would be fun. You enjoy games your way, I'll enjoy them mine.)

For more information on what's in store, hit up the Season of the Splicer page at bungie.net, or get a crash course in the seasonal roadmap below.