Destiny 2 now has a short quest honoring a developer who died last year
In the most recent This Week at Bungie blog, the developer announced that it would be 'Honoring a Friend' in the form of a new quest designed to pay tribute to a fallen colleague. Matt Helsom was a senior artist and videogame animator with Vicarious Visions, which was one of the Activision studios that worked alongside Bungie for Destiny 2. Helsom died last year at the age of 45.
"We wanted to memorialize his contributions in the Destiny universe," said Bungie. "We wish all of his family, friends, and everyone he impacted during his life the very best. Thank you to everyone in the community who joins us in remembering this warm soul."
That quest went live with today's reset, and to complete it you'll need to visit the Braytech Futurescape region on Mars. Head towards Ana Bray, then take a left as if you're going to Mindlab: Rasputin. Along the way, around the area with the two tunnels you have to crawl through, you will find a small room with a set of terminals. One of these has a datapad on it, which should give you an 'Investigate' prompt. Here are a couple of pics to help you find it.
Once you've done that, head back to Ana and she'll bring up a message that writes Helsom into Destiny lore forever. According to Ana, Helsom was a Xenoarchaeologist in the Golden Age who believed that humanity had encountered extrasolar species long before it met the Traveler. She goes on to say he was a "cigar smoking, whiskey-drinking explorer who hated flying … Every log entry I've ever heard made it sound like he was the happiest guy in the room." You can read the whole thing below. I think I've got some Martian dust in my eye.
Prior to the event going live, Bungie's community managers had warned not to expect anything major in terms of in-game items with the quest, so I was surprised to see that it does reward an Exotic Cipher. These can be exchanged with Master Rahool, the Cryptarch in the Tower, for a quest-based Exotic weapon you're missing from a prior season. (The options are the Leviathan's Breath bow, Eriana's Vow hand cannon, Bastion fusion rifle, Symmetry scout rifle, or Devil's Ruin side arm.)
If you already own all of those, and are holding on to the Exotic Cipher from this season's pass, note that you can only keep one Cipher at a time. You can however spend them with Xur at the weekend to receive an entirely random Exotic. All in all, it feels like a sweet way to honour someone who sounds like he was one of the good guys.
For those of you've who've resisted Destiny 2's dark gravitational pull so far, you may be interested to know that Forsaken and Shadowkeep—which are the last two of the game's meaty annual DLC expansions—is now included as part of Xbox GamePass. The next installment, Beyond Light, will arrive on 10 November, later than expected due to coronavirus complications. A new trailer for that dropped earlier today.