Destiny 2’s Derealize mission brings back the best part of Exotic quests

Only one week into the Episode Heresy, Destiny 2 has already dropped the new Exotic mission to get the fun-looking Strand submachine gun. Surprisingly, the best part of the latest Exotic quest isn’t the mission itself but everything outside of it.

With the Destiny 2 weekly reset on Feb. 11, alongside the usual seasonal story continuation, players also started finding new secrets in The Nether. Eventually, these secrets led to the start of the new Exotic quest and kicked off the pursuit of the new Exotic submachine gun, Barrow-Dyad. Bungie never mentioned the Exotic mission coming this early in the season. Most players expected it to drop in Act Three, following the format of Echoes and Revenant.

If you haven’t played this week, you may encounter a new blight in one of the areas aboard the Dreadnaught when heading into The Nether activity. Getting close to the blight will teleport you to an area with a puzzle and the first Osseous Taken Fragment. This kicks off the Exotic quest line, involving a little bit of prep. You must find and solve puzzles, empower Taken curses, and collect more Taken Osseous Fragments.

It takes about an hour to do the prep, depending on whether you decide to Google the answers or figure everything out yourself—and this is just to get to the mission. After that, you can launch and complete the Derealize mission using the node in The Last City. The mission itself is also great, with new Dreadnaught areas to explore, puzzles to solve, and lore to learn.

The surprise and secrecy of this mission brought back the excitement of discovering and exploring the Exotic questline I hadn’t felt in a long while. Most of the latest Exotic quests and missions are just handed out during the main story. Missions like Encore and Kell’s Fall are decent in their own right, but they were just another step in the seasonal quest. The process of discovering and unlocking the Derealize mission made this quest truly Exotic.

The last time I remember that the Exotic mission made me this excited was with the Corridors of Time during Season of the Dawn and the original Whisper of the Worm mission, where you had to wait for a public event on Io and kill specific Taken to open the portal. Granted, Presage and the mission for Wicked Implement also had a level of secrecy and prep, but those didn’t feel nearly as memorable despite being good.

With the Exotic mission out, many players wonder what Bungie has in store for Act Three. “I wonder if we’ll get another mission in Act 3 or something different altogether,” a player wrote in a Reddit thread, and the answer remains unknown. Either way, Bungie must be preparing something, or the end of Heresy will be the driest we’ve ever seen, especially considering the length of the season.