Seasonal events are meant to be chilled, laid back affairs presented using a theme to just break up the monotony of the daily activities in a game. They're not meant to be particularly exciting, or rewarding just something 'different' that's forgivably 'low-effort' for a developer to deliver just to mix things up a little while they take a break or get on with better things. Which is why it's so shocking that Bungie managed to screw things up as badly as they did - seriously, this is one instance where getting it wrong actually looked harder than getting it right. It was a bugged, unstable, unrewarding slog that started two weeks too early, went on for three weeks and yet somehow outstayed its welcome by a month. They handed out a paid track for free, then snatched it back once all of their content creator buddies had taken advantage of it, reset everyone else's progress, then blocked progress and lastly made the material acquisition completely lopsided making their punishing RNG sting even more every time you wasted what few materials you had on yet another -blam!- roll. And to think that this is the shape of things to come...

This year's Dawning was bad. The bugs (please allow upgraded snowball kills to count), the event card, the quests, but what really irks me is just the lack of any innovation. Each year they take 2 things away and give 1 thing back. There used to be snowballs around the tower and we'd annoy people and have snowball fights. Riven used to have a cookie, and she wasn't even sunset. Starhorse has a sugar cube but no one even remembers. We have more vendors around like Ghost, Seasonal, and even BLOODY RAHOOL, but the new cookie we get is for Nimbus of all people?!? No updates to Dawning Essense drops, no avenues for cosmetics with cool new effects, no special modes, no new strand ingredient, no new dread ingredient, they took away any method to get Dawning weapons outside of challenges and focusing, gifts in return now do not drop weapons, Eva's pinnacle is now a world drop, none of the planets aside from Europa have gotten a snowball update, but at least we can farm some bright dust.

It was my first time doing Dawning. Got all the handcrafted emblems, got the rolls on the weapons I wanted and gilded the title so all in all it was a positive event for me.

Big failure. Just bummed, especially with all the bugs. It’s just an event, but I was really looking forward to just having some fun but didn’t have fun and kind of gave up :/ They really need to do a lot to keep players in this new year.

Star baker 3 gilding bugged and was not given. Still star baker 2. Just like champ 2 gilding, was never awarded after seal gilding.

I agree, Dawning used to be more fun. I think Bungie has stopped caring about the game and they fired the people that did care. They have stopped updating special events; they don’t even bother to make trailers for them (Houndish made a hilarious Dawning trailer, if you haven’t seen it). Would not be surprised to hear their current storylines are AI generated.

[quote]Sorry if this gets long and ranty. When I first started playing Destiny 2 with the launch of beyond light the first event I experienced was the dawning. It was something truly magical. The tower decorations, the music, the weapons, even the eververse store was incredible. It seems like the past couple of dawnings have just been worse and worse. Why no more exotic ornaments for events like the dawning or festival of the lost? I want to spend money but the options are 1 armor set and then ghost shells, ships, and sparrows I will never use. However make those ships act like the starfarer 7m and give extra dawning stuff and I might. What happened to making weapons that fit the dawning theme? Glacioclasm and cold front look like they come from a special winter event. Even the old dawning ship (starfarer 7m) was special since it gave extra dawning stuff. The tower music this year was buggy and weird. It would play for ~1 minute then stop for 3 or so minutes then start the next song. The emblem quests... Maybe I am wrong but it seems like the only way to get the special emblems was opening the gifts raw and not focusing for weapons? This was awful but I did like the special emblems. The paid event card upgrade... After the mess up of making it free it probably should have stayed free. It would have felt like a gift to the players who are still playing.[/quote] Yeah. It was just horrible. Dawning was as bad as the tonic system they never bothered to test or fix. https://youtu.be/tmCaXewv6YY?si=SFLuSwyXKhLhVTxl

They allow some players to get the event card for free and spat at the rest who has to pay for it, the dawning was riddled with bugs and they could not care less about fixing them. They got lazy and no longer make event skins for exotic weapons because they may actually want to kill their own game. Bungie does not care about destiny 2, and they may be delusional enough to think we will care for that garbage ultra-woke game they have been working on instead... It has been a disapointing dawning for a disapointing game... And we still don't have our third dawning guilded tittle because they cannot be bothered to fix the game at all.

Why talk only about an event as failure? Bungle as a whole is one gigantic failure! Gaslighting us out of so much content it's plain daylight robbery! And because of the vaulting the new player experience is DEAD! And that in turn is VERY good for player retention.... or so Bungle believes, why else would they butcher the game like this? I lost all faith in Bungle as a company and in Pete being a human being.

Today is the first time I’m asking myself ….why am I playing d2? I’m only playing control and it’s awful today . As expected though but how much longer can players put up with the game 🤷🏼‍♂️

Dawning wasn't all bad. Took me a total of 80 gifts in return to get all three dawning emblems but to get the essence was annoying since it didn't wasn't frequent like last year thus I had to resort to farming dungeon and raid final checkpoints. Lost sector in my opinion took too long for me when soloing.

I found the dawning to be ok. I haven’t been playing regularly for a while and dropped back in the last few days. Played Trials (badly) to get the two guns I hadn’t unlocked. Played Gambit for essence and gifts in return. Got the ‘dragon’ armour cosmetics with bright dust, got the three emblems, unlocked the guns. Got the Xurfboard and another few exotic class items from Xur with all the strange coins. Don’t know if any of the drops are decent, but I wasn’t looking for anything specific so 🤷‍♀️. All in, I found it rewarding enough. I might have felt differently if I played for hours every day or was chasing specific rolls of a gun.

it would be interesting to see what percentage of the player base has really bothered with the event. For me a total waste of time (running round to deliver stuff really). But everyone to their own so hope some people enjoyed it