By now Destiny 2 players have a pretty good understanding of how expansion campaigns are supposed to work. We load in, solve a mystery by throwing our arsenal of weapons at the problem, defeat a big existential threat and then spend the next year cleaning up the left over mess through seasonal content. And in this regard, not much has changed with the launch of Destiny 2: The Witch Queen. The differences between this expansion, which came out on February 22, and expansions of the past lie mainly in the aesthetic and narrative choices made by the dev team, as well as several deep mechanical overhauls to gameplay, chief among them “Void 3.0.”
There’s also the matter of the Destiny Content Vault.
I need to talk about this up-front, because I’ve been sitting with The Witch Queen for nearly a month and the audacity of the Vault’s mere existence, much less Bungie’s choice of what to add to it this year, hasn’t diminished in all that time.
To be very clear, I’ve been playing Destiny 2 since it launched consistently. When new expansions have dropped, I’ve installed them day one and railed through them ravenously. When Bungie started doing seasonal content drops, I bought a season pass from the get-go, despite some reservations. I’ve leaped through flaming hoops to rationalize some of the stranger decisions they’ve made regarding new player onboarding, weapon sunsetting, bizarre transmog economies, and so on. I genuinely love the lore of this game, and any opportunity I get to interact with it is one I’m going to take. I say all of this to make it clear that, since 2017, I have absolutely “gotten my money’s worth” from the game, including every time I’ve spent more of it, and I’m still kinda perturbed by the Vault.
When Bungie introduced the vault in 2020 alongside Beyond Light, they removed four locations: Mars, Io, Mercury and Titan. This also meant that the original base campaign, as well as Curse of Osiris and Warmind, had to be vaulted with these areas. This was already kind of a sus move, because while nobody has ever argued that they are particularly good campaigns, The Red War, Curse of Osiris and Warmind all provide a lot of really important context to what happens in later campaigns, like Forsaken and Shadowkeep. (And personally, I actually think the early parts of The Red War include some of the best storytelling Bungie has ever done, even to this day.)
This year, with The Witch Queen, Bungie has opted to vault the Tangled Shore location. And as a result, the Forsaken expansion is no longer accessible by anyone. This is a crucial campaign for anyone wanting to understand where we are in Destiny 2’s story. It sets up major characters, enemy types, settings and even contexts for why we’re in the position we’re in at the beginning of The Witch Queen, and the best you can do now is see if someone still has a Let’s Play of it posted to YouTube. Not to mention: it cost $40 at launch, and even higher if you’re a buffoon like me who sees no issue with buying digital “Deluxe” versions of video games.
Why should people continue to buy these exceptionally expensive expansions if, in a couple years, they’re simply not going to exist? It doesn’t matter if the justification is “we needed to make room” or “the world is alive” or “the spooky ships ate the planets ooOOOOo!!!” If you tell us these near-standalone creative works, that you made hundreds of people bust their asses for thousands of hours to produce, don’t themselves matter, why should we pretend otherwise?
And as I was loading onto the newly-returned (but still largely inaccessible) surface of Mars for the opening mission of The Witch Queen, this is what I was thinking about.
Now I hope after all of that damning that this praise doesn’t sound too faint, because I mean it when I say that Destiny 2 has never looked better. We’re operating on peak Bungie aesthetic here in every sense, with massive, painterly skyboxes dominating our field of vision in almost every new locale we arrive in. The lavish gothic architecture of Savathûn’s throne world feels meaty in a way that isn’t really all that applicable to other examples of Hive design, and the swamplands surrounding her castle – while not as lush and dense as in the promotional material – are exceptionally evocative.
And you will find no shortage of things to do in the throne world. From unlockable investigation board mysteries to weekly attempts to raise your reputation with Fynch, a defector Hive Ghost, to revisiting Savathûn’s Altar of Reflection and defeating her Executioners, to jumping into the PsiOps Battleground and completing Operation Elbrus for the Season of the Risen storyline, The Witch Queen is full to bursting with stuff. And I haven’t even mentioned Glaives or weapons crafting yet. The point is, The Witch Queen is prepared for players who simply want something – anything – to do.
That being said, most of that stuff is only accessible after you have completed the expansion campaign, and to do that you have two options in front of you: the standard campaign, which doesn’t lock to a particular power level; and the Legendary campaign, which is a bit like the old Heroic versions of story missions from previous campaigns. You can choose which type of campaign you want to play on a mission-by-mission basis, and you get extra rewards for completing Legendary missions, including a set of top-tier gear. Legendary mode requires patience and intentionality in your Guardian’s build, and feels a bit like a rhythm game in terms of how it handles its enemy encounters. There is a specific pattern you have to kind of key yourself into when choosing which enemies to square off against first. This is not the mode I like playing Destiny 2 in, and I’ve spent hours slogging through some of the Legendary missions before going back to the regular campaign. Maybe if I feel inclined maybe I’ll come back to Legendary someday soon.
Mechanically, the game has also never felt as good to play. This might seem trite as its “gamefeel” has always been a major selling point for players, but the addition of Glaives has introduced a new, faster, more kinetic way to play that is reminiscent of DOOM (2016). Simply put, slashing through big groups of Hive or Scorn with ease is very, very fun. Additionally, a lot of the changes to the Void class also feel incredible, and as the year progresses it’ll be interesting to see how players mix and match different Void powers together, and what becomes the most lethal combinations. Less impressive is the new weapon-crafting system, which requires a lot of grinding to produce seasonal weapons with a moderately narrow range of mods.
So it looks great, it feels great, there’s lot’s to do – DCV aside, it sounds like The Witch Queen is a pretty good expansion. It gives players exactly the kind of experience many of them have been asking for since the full game launched in 2017. Review over, right?
Unfortunately, there’s one more thing: the story.
What I will give the narrative team all the credit for regarding The Witch Queen’s story is that they only took big swings. That being said, I wish they would have taken at least one smaller swing every once in a while. The Witch Queen is ambitious with the story it wants to tell, but it often gets mired in a mix of literary and game genre references that clash at times. They threw everything and the kitchen sink into this expansion, from Neo-noir and New Weird to psychological and survival horror, and even a full storyline that played out like an abridged version of Apocalypse Now!. We’re solving mysteries like hardboiled detectives, peeling back the inscrutable horrors of the cosmos, traversing levels whose design looks like it was ripped straight out of an HR Giger sketchbook (minus the penises). We’re watching as the Greatest Hits cover version of many influential narratives from recent games, film and literature soar by – True Detective, Annihilation, The Void, Resident Evil 7, and so on.
And while it isn’t by any means bad to wear your references on your sleeve in this way, it’s jarring how many of these devices are picked up and dropped with abandon, sometimes without much in the way of closure or a satisfying conclusion, especially when it’s time to course-correct hard back into classic Destiny 2 territory and reassert ourselves as the strongest and best Guardian in the universe, the fulcrum around which everything important turns.
All of that said, the story is still easy enough to summarize in a paragraph or two. Savathûn’s throne world appears over Mars. We catapult ourselves aboard and discover that she has somehow gotten her hands on the Traveler’s Light and has started creating Hive Guardians with a cohort of Ghosts cooperating. We spend the next several hours trying to find out how and why this happened, how and why this connects to a Relic of the Darkness Ikora Rey and Eris Morn found on Mars, and ultimately prevent whatever it is that Savathûn is planning.
We encounter a bunch of crystallized memories that we present to several highly-guarded Altars of Reflection, and ultimately discover that Savathûn, far from stealing the Light, actually came by it honestly: she died and was resurrected by a Ghost – Immaru, First Light – fair and square. Now she’s going to use her connection to the Light to rope the Traveler into her throne world and “keep it safe from” the big series bad guy: the Witness. We then travel to the top of her throne world and, much like we defeated Dominus Ghaul in the original campaign you can’t play anymore, we put a stop to Savathûn’s plans. The raid focuses on one of the Witness’s disciples, and we learn a lot of disconcerting shit from it. Now we have to focus on Season of the Risen and the ongoing storyline developing therein.
Is this reductive? Yes. Are there still occasional affective moments? Yes. I’m skipping over a dash of drama between Ikora and Zavala, for example, that may or may not really hit for you. If you have ever bought into Destiny’s story, there’s a chance something here will tickle your fancy, and indeed that seems to have been borne out in many other reviews of the expansion. It bears noting that the critical and popular reception to The Witch Queen is in many respects better than the series has ever gotten, and that’s including The Taken King. It is entirely possible that I’m simply being a curmudgeon, and we’ll all just have to live with that. But from my perspective, I simply wasn’t able to connect with much going on here.
“But Kaile!” Someone shouts in the distance. “What about the lore implications of everything going on in this expansion? Hive Guardians? Savathûn getting the Light seemingly legitimately? The appearance of the Witness? The deepening division in the Vanguard?”
Unfortunately, my only answer to this is, “what about them?” We already know that the next expansion is going to be called Lightfall, and the one after that is The Final Shape. This gives us a pretty decent understanding of what’s going to happen, barring any superficial twists. We also know that there will continue to be Destiny 2 well after these expansions, which unfortunately kind of sucks the tension out of the room. Coupled with the apparently new policy of vaulting entire expansions after just three or four years, I’m genuinely of the opinion that it simply doesn’t matter anymore, if it ever did. It’s just a premium content veneer they place over a live service package every year or so at this point. It’ll continue to make them money.
This is about as nihilistic as I’m ever going to get about a video game, I think. And it’s a pretty good indicator that my days as a Guardian – as someone who regularly throws money at this well-oiled machine – are numbered, if not already up. If you still have a reservoir of patience for the kind of aesthetically-pleasing nonsense this game throws out regularly, then The Witch Queen will likely be right up your alley. Please don’t allow me to ruin your fun.