Before I jump into this rant, and it’s going to be a rant, so sorry, I want to make it clear: I bought the Witch Queen expansion. I’ll be playing the Witch Queen. I’ll even be writing about the Witch Queen. I committed to the grim project of “covering Destiny 2” a full year before I started No Escape. None of what follows is me signaling why I won’t be playing anymore. The fact is, for all the reasons I’m about to get into, I both hate this video game and can’t get rid of it. This piece is meant as a warning to folks looking to get into the game when the Witch Queen comes out: turn back now.
So, the Witch Queen expansion comes out in seven days. It’s about 12 hours or so before the weekly reset, and we still don’t have a resolution on Beyond Light‘s last season, Season of the Lost. No final mission (yet), no last audio log, no lore book. Just radio silence and a lot of “look over there, doesn’t the Witch Queen look sooooo spooky?” from Bungie.
It’s a shitty way to make a video game, in my inexpert opinion. Beyond Light came out in November 2020, and Season of the Lost alone has been going for six months with no content updates since October 2021. Keep in mind, the Witch Queen hasn’t been delayed, it is absolutely still coming out next week, but we’re still sitting here with no conclusion to the story from the last expansion. Admittedly, with nothing to do, I haven’t been playing much Destiny 2. My time has been spent elsewhere, on games I like more, some of which I’ve talked about in these “pages.” A single game should not demand – or take up – all of your time.
Last year, we got to see what the pinnacle of Bungie’s seasonal storytelling could look like. Season of the Splicer ran from May to August and was absolutely riveting. It situated Eliksni in a context that made them much less “Other” than they had been portrayed previously. It showed the extent to which xenophobia and bigotry can destroy a society. It featured a fucking TRON world complete with a synthwave soundtrack where you defeated Vex in their “throne realm,” to misuse the game’s language. It was genuinely cool. Season of the Lost, by comparison, falls extremely flat. Mara Sov is back, Savathûn was Osiris the whole time and is now in a crystalline cocoon, we have to travel to the Shattered Throne to rescue Mara’s Techeuns, and the Crow learns who he was in his past life. That is all we’ve really gotten in six months, y’all. Genuinely. Even in the season prior to Season of the Splicer, someone tried to assassinate Zavala using a high-tech crystal ball; this, comparatively, is boring as fuck.
For a while I struggled with whether I wanted to put something this vitriolic out there, especially after reading Rebekah Valentine’s deep dive into the toxic culture at Bungie that seemed to particularly plague the narrative team (and how the equally toxic community enabled the company’s worst abusers). I have nothing but respect for the folks who write the game from a narrative perspective, and I can only imagine the havoc they’ve been plagued by over the last 12 months as they struggled and rushed to get not only seasonal content out the door, but the Witch Queen expansion as well. When I say that Beyond Light was extremely hit or miss, I do so only with love and understanding. But man, it sucks to see. And the narrative troubles aren’t even the least of Destiny 2‘s worries.
Let’s talk about the content removal. Since 2017 Destiny 2 has released two small expansions and three larger ones in addition to its “Red War” campaign: Curse of Osiris, Warmind, Forsaken, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light. Along with each of these new expansions up to Shadowkeep, not only did we get “new” locations like the Moon, but we also got raids, strikes, and of course, new story content. Since Shadowkeep, Bungie has been struggling to bring new players up to speed on its labyrinthine story, so starting with Shadowkeep new Guardians would be onboarded not by having to play the Red War campaign, then Curse of Osiris, then Warmind, then Forsaken, but instead by resurrecting in the Old Russian Cosmodrome like Guardians used to in Destiny. This was followed by a parade of missions and “adventures” (subquests) you had to do before you could just venture out on your own. Still, the Red War, Curse and Warmind were all available to play.
With Beyond Light, the “Destiny 2 Content Vault” (DCV) was announced, and in November 2020, the original game, Curse and Warmind all got eliminated, along with Mercury, Titan and Mars. Now that the Witch Queen expansion is due, we’re staring down the barrel of Forsaken‘s entire expansion content getting vaulted, along with the Tangled Shore and any attendant raids or strikes that went with it. New players will start in the Old Russian Cosmodrome, do a series of missions with a guy whose name refuses to stick in my brain for any period of time even though I literally just did these missions like six hours ago, and then you can either do Shadowkeep or Beyond Light “legacy” missions. Just keeping score here: I’ve spent well over $200 on this video game since 2017 and about 60 percent of the content I bought is just not there. It’s like what happens when a record label decides it doesn’t want to license its music out to iTunes users anymore, except this seems even less reasonable.
Oh, but also: the Witch Queen will only make sense if you’ve been playing Destiny 2 since the beginning, as it will likely refer to not just events like our defeat of Hive god Nokris and the worm Xol, Will of the Thousands, but also the Red War campaign itself (specifically in the Light-suppressing tech Empress Caiatl recovered from Dominus Ghaul). You’ll need to know about all the Dreaming City shit that happened in Forsaken. To even understand who Osiris is, you benefit from having played Curse of Osiris. None of this content that I just mentioned will be available to new players on day one of the Witch Queen! That’s wild!!
During the Season of the Lost downtime, I had time to play other games, chief among them Final Fantasy XIV. It’s by no means a similar game to Destiny 2 outside of belonging to the MMO category more broadly, but it’s also not dissimilar, if that makes sense. Both stories are complex and lore-dense. Both have very troubled beginnings, development-wise. Hell, you can even compare the nuclear annihilation of FFXIV 1.0 to the vaulting of Destiny 2 content if you wanted to be uncharitably specific. But even here, the dissimilarities are more striking than the points these two games converge. By all accounts, the team at Square-Enix that developed FFXIV 2.0 did so to replace a fundamentally broken and alienating game with something functional and fun. It was a total reboot, a continuation of the story only in the sense that everything in 1.0 had happened, and many of the characters from 1.0 did survive. But the journey your Warrior of Light goes on in A Realm Reborn takes fundamentally different paths from the one a WoL would have taken in 1.0. It doesn’t start fully in medias res.
Destiny 2, on the other hand, absolutely does. New players coming into Destiny 2 are walking into the second act of a movie they’ve never heard of. Old players are watching the first act get shredded by the projectionist.
“But Kaile,” I hear my immortal enemy, the twitter troll, cry out: “can’t new players just watch YouTube recaps of Destiny 2?” Yeah dude and I could just watch recaps of FFXIV and its three expansions leading up to Endwalker but that’s not as fun as playing it, as experiencing the good and bad aspects of these expansions, for myself. It was cool to take new players through the slog of the base game. IDK what else to tell you.
“Bungie is just trying to save space on Gamers’ hard drives!” you scream, making it clear you won’t leave me alone. Like, okay – Destiny is 90GB with all the expansions. Destiny 2 is hovering at 70GB and 60 percent of its content is gone forever. Tell me more about storage efficiency.
I wish I could get excited about the Witch Queen. It’s the culmination of a lot of different plot threads I’ve been following as a fan for years. But Bungie’s decision making keeps getting in the way of that. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. It’s only a few hours until the weekly reset.