It’s been almost 15 months since the release of Lightfall, the seventh major expansion for Destiny 2 since its launch in 2017. The year was marked, for some, by failure and tragedy: Lightfall itself wasn’t especially well-received, Zavala voice actor Lance Reddick died during Season of Defiance, and Bungie fired 10 percent of its staff and delayed the release of The Final Shape amidst reported missed revenue targets of about 45 percent. The severity of each of these points of interest differ: gamers not really enjoying Lightfall‘s narrative or character writing does not hold a candle to either the layoffs or Reddick’s passing – but they did all influence the discourse for almost the whole year.
It’s been a long almost-15 months. Was it worth sticking with Destiny 2 through all the turmoil, or have I been wasting my time on a dead game whose funeral is still incoming?
Lightfall
After the tour-de-force of The Witch Queen, which I can now begrudgingly admit was good despite not enjoying it in my initial review, I think a lot of players came into Lightfall expecting an incredible follow-up. After all, we were getting a totally new location with massive lore implications and it seemed to be setting us up for a monumental final battle. But while Neomuna is an interesting location, and the lore absolutely slaps, Lightfall itself was rather thin: a macguffin hunt punctuated by Osiris’s increasingly hysterical complaints, a sorely generic “one last job” story for grizzled old space cop/Cloud Strider Rohan, and a deeply awkward extended introduction to Rohan’s apprentice, Nimbus.
The expansion landed with a thud and ended with a dud: after successfully holding back Disciple Calus’s Shadow Legion at the entrance to the Veil/CloudArk complex, we fling ourselves down a hole into a boss-battle-ass boss battle room to defeat the former Cabal Emperor… only for our own Ghosts to be used to create the link between the Veil and the Traveler that the Witness needed to get in. It was a very frustrating moment in an expansion mostly built on other moments of frustration: of not being able to master Strand when it counted, of being told we need to protect the Veil quickly despite never stopping for a moment to learn what it is, of constantly rushing into dangerous situations only to get our asses beat. From the moment we hitched a ride to Neptune on a Cabal jumpship, we’d been following Osiris into scenarios where we were just ontologically kept on the back foot, never able to take advantage of anything we were typically used to doing.
I didn’t enjoy it in the moment, but having spent a year mulling it over, I think it was ultimately a good decision for the story. We needed to lose here, to be reminded that even in a game whose only verb is gun, gun is not always sufficient for victory.
2023 and 2024 have been the years I finally got into buildcrafting. I’m still not very good at it – holding all of the different aspects and fragments and subclass verbs in my mind is like holding sand in a sieve, and I’m genuinely still mostly lost on armor optimization – but I’ve discovered how much more fun the game can be when playing a well-crafted and tuned build. Spending a good chunk of the year simply playing around with a Strand build that wasn’t well-optimized but felt good to me was also necessary, as I felt like I got to know the raison d’être of Strand a little bit better.
Narratively speaking, Strand is not “controllable” like Stasis’s freezing powers are. The Guardian has to learn to flow with it, not swim against its current, as doing so usually ends in exhaustion at best and total disintegration at worst. Playing with the actual class, you have to be able to see the flow of your combat rotation and move with it. For most Threadrunner Hunters, that flow includes throwing a Threaded Spike into a group of far-away enemies, catching the knife when it returns to get up to 100 percent of your melee energy back (and using Gambler’s Dodge near enemies to refill it when you miss your catch), then shooting any Tangles that spike created.
If you’ve equipped the Whirling Maelstrom aspect, those Tangles will explode into little tornado-like buzzsaws that slice through nearby enemies. One Maelstrom is good at clearing ads; a room full of Maelstroms can do genuine damage to big bosses. Depending on your equipped fragments, your grenade slot being taken up by Grapple is no big loss, as you can do a punishing Grapple melee for big group damage and even auto-reload your equipped weapon in mid-air. Having Widow’s Silk equipped means you can have two Grapples, and other fragments (as well as armor mods) can assist in regenerating both your melee and grenade energy extremely fast. When you really get into the swing of things, it is genuinely so fucking fun to zip around the battlefield, bopping the shit out of lower-tier enemies and creating more chaos in the process. As I said in my Lightfall review for Eurogamer, if nothing else, the expansion gave us one of the most fun ways to play the game in recent memory, and for that I can’t totally hate it.
Season 20: Season of Defiance
After the failed attempt to keep the Witness from entering the Traveler through its fucked up psychedelic portal, the Forces of the City (I know) are met with another troubling revelation: Shadow Legion forces are on Earth taking human prisoners out on the frontier. We have to team up with EDZ scout Devrim Kay, Awoken Queen Mara Sov, Eliksni Kell Misraaks, and our boy Crow to try to rescue the kidnapped prisoners from seemingly-impenetrable Black Fleet prisons. In the process we free Amanda Holliday, and immediately get that sinking feeling in our stomachs as we realize we’re all of a sudden learning way too much about the crack pilot-slash-engineer to be a good thing.
And yeah: she dies halfway through the season, eliciting a genuinely tearjerking performance from Lance Reddick that would have slapped even if that exact story beat hadn’t taken place at the exact moment of Reddick’s own passing. But suddenly a sad moment in the story took on a much deeper gravitas than it was probably ever intended to, a moment that was almost a self-eulogy. Playing through Season of Defiance was hard to do once as a result; I tried playing through it again on my Titan and, while I ultimately did make it through, it was even harder to get through these particular moments of pain.
The key moments outside of this are: Mara Sov knights a bunch of non-Awoken Queensguard, declaring the end of the weird almost xenophobic barrier between her people and the rest of the system by saying “we are all cousins” to some degree. Misraaks and Crow both grapple with grief over Amanda’s death, with the Eliksni Kell upset because of survivor’s guilt and Crow sad because he loved her (very much a one-sided feeling of affection, in part because of who Crow was before becoming a Guardian, but something that might’ve changed over time had Holliday survived the bombing).
Defiant Battlegrounds are the mostly-EDZ-based ritual activity you had to do in order to progress the seasonal story, and they were fairly challenging early on. What’s been very interesting to watch is, despite our power levels not increasing once over the course of the entire year (currently capped out at 1810 without any help from the seasonal artifact), how easy the Defiant Battlegrounds have become as people dial in their builds and get more powerful weaponry. Going into a Legendary Defiant Battleground recently with BRAVE Arsenal weapons and an optimized Void Hunter build made the whole thing feel like a cakewalk, whereas I found myself struggling in matchmade Battlegrounds earlier in the year.
Season 21: Season of the Deep
Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, has suddenly reappeared—and with it, Deputy Commander Sloane. She’s been partially Taken as a result of her travails on the moon after the Witness put it in whatever weird pocket it has for planetoids, but that Taken essence has given her a new ability: she can, with effort, commune with Ahsa, a proto-Worm God who has positioned herself as an enemy of the Witness. The entire loop of Season of the Deep is to work with the Drifter and Saint-14 to bolster Sloane’s psychic connection to Ahsa with a Darkness mold called Egregore.
There were two modes in Season of the Deep: Salvage and Deep Dive. Salvage is a mode that takes place above the methane surface of Titan, and involves the Guardian working with the Vanguard and the Drifter to both keep Xivu Arath’s Hive forces from swarming and overtaking the moon and pick up a few Golden Age tech trinkets along the way. Deep Dive is a mostly underwater activity which involves you journeying to extreme depths to recover Egregore to strengthen Sloane’s connection to Ahsa. In both activities, you encounter a variety of enemies using tactics to try and take you out, but they’re mostly both pretty trivially easy. The big challenge is playing Deep Dive in such a way that you can access the Wicked Implement Exotic Quest, Whetstone.
Season of the Deep was narratively memorable because we got to meet a nice Worm God (Ahsa watched her species warp and deform into the Hive Worm Gods over a long period of time on Fundament), and also because she gave us the best look at who and what the Witness is: namely, an amalgamation of thousands of members of the Witness’ precursor species who all sacrificed themselves to the goal of enacting the still-nebulous “Final Shape.” We learn that the driving force of the Witness is essentially pure hate for anything that lives, and its conception of the Final Shape likely doesn’t leave room for anyone other than itself—even other Disciples or client species, like the Hive. And finally: we learn that in order to breach the Witness’s portal, we’ll need Savathûn’s help.
I felt myself starting to flag here. It was around this time that I started putting more effort into Iron Banner than anything else from the actual season, like the fishing minigame or any of the ritual activities. I found interacting with the story beats to be increasingly kind of odd: complete an objective, return to the H.E.L.M., go through the portal to the little sliver of the otherwise-unreachable Titan destination, and watch another scene in a play or pantomime run its course in front of me. Then it was back to the grind. While I hesitate to say “this is Destiny/Bungie at its worst!” it was definitely the game at its most rote, a transitional treadmill to get us to the marginally-more-exciting treadmills to come.
TITLE EARNED: Iron Lord[1]Play a fuckton of Iron Banner, get really fucking sweaty about it, reset your rank with Lord Saladin Forge, rinse and repeat for gilded titles.
Season 22: Season of the Witch
Since well before The Witch Queen we’ve had to deal with the Hive God of War, Xivu Arath in one capacity or another. Beyond Light’s Season of the Hunt is where Xivu Arath made her first appearance in the Sol System, taking out Osiris’s ghost, Sagira and allowing her sister, Savathûn, to slip in undetected and possess the body of the former Warlock Vanguard Commander. Xivu Arath would return in Beyond Light’s Season of the Lost and again in The Witch Queen‘s Season of the Seraph—though never as the main foe. She and her army of cannon fodder’s presence was always the catalyst for the principal characters to act quickly or rashly, but the typical play was to fend her off long enough for more consequential story shit to happen to the much more involved cast of characters whose faces we’ve actually seen.
With Season of the Witch that dynamic finally ran its course. Savathûn’s Ghost, Immaru, reports to the Vanguard that we can no longer ignore Xivu Arath’s presence; we either confront her now or watch her forces overtake the Coalition and the Forces of the City well before we ever have a chance to confront the Witness. And in response, Eris Morn says she has an idea and spookily disappears to a new Hive-shaped corner of the H.E.L.M. Her plan? Become a Hive God herself, the Hive God of Vengeance; Ahsa will act as her Worm, and we (hello, us, the Guardians!) will be her tithing subjects. We then spend the next three or so months climbing up Savathûn’s Spire, tithing big kills to Eris at the Altars of Summoning, and searching for secrets in the puzzle-box-like Imbaru Engine.
There were some really interesting mechanics in Season of the Witch, like the addition of a deck of tarot cards with major and minor arcana; the former would help empower us in each run of the Spire, and the latter would provide us with rewards and the chance to discover future secrets for collecting them. The story was also really fascinating—Eris turning into a Hive God of Vengeance was not a popular decision! Prominent characters like Ikora Rey and Elsie Bray commented extensively on their apprehensions of her decision – Ikora because she didn’t want to hurt her friend, and Bray because she had seen a version of Eris the Vengeance God in her Dark Future timeline. Even Eris’s on-again off-again lover, The Drifter, visited her in her throne room to offer his support, but tentatively.
Still, it didn’t look like it would be enough to fend Xivu Arath off until the very end of the season, when Ikora forced Immaru to revive Savathûn, only for Eris to immediately smoke her ass. Eris’s defeat of Savathûn instantly made her the most powerful living Hive God, and with her power she cut Xivu Arath off from her throne world at the same time that the Guardian defeated Xivu Arath’s most powerful champion. While this doesn’t take care of the problem entirely, it makes Xivu Arath much less powerful or capable, allowing us to take care of other business.
Unfortunately, Season of the Witch arrived at the utter nadir of player sentiment. The revenue projections report, the layoffs of 10% of the company, more reports of poor management at Bungie and Sony, and the announcement that The Final Shape along with Marathon would be pushed back significantly all coalesced to produce what content creator Datto has retroactively called “maybe the worst vibes in the history of the game.” The feeling was clear: Destiny 2 was cooked. Maybe Bungie would make it to The Final Shape; maybe it wouldn’t. It didn’t seem likely that there would be a future for Destiny 2 after the expansion dropped, one way or the other. And as Season of the Witch came to a close, we were looking at five or six weeks of new story content and missions at best followed by… nothing for almost five more months beyond that.
I think if you were to ask me the question I’m using as a frame for this article back in November, my answer would almost certainly have been “nah.” To elaborate on that, it isn’t that I wouldn’t have seen the positive value in the experiences I’d had up to that point; I would just have been unable to move past just how cooked not only Bungie but seemingly the entire games industry looked during Winter 2023. As of May 2024 it’s much worse on an industry-wide basis, but Bungie specifically? They’ve been trying their hardest. The effort is clear. If they must go down after The Final Shape by some shitty publisher mandate, they’re not doing so without a tremendous fight.
Season 23: Season of the Wish
Savathûn had one more secret up her sleeve: a coded wish for the Dreaming City’s Wish Wall. The true “Fifteenth Wish” that had been rumored to exist in-game for years at this point; a way to tunnel into the Witness’s portal and access the Pale Heart of the Traveler. Suddenly we were back traipsing around the Dreaming City and its network of underground caves, sneaking into the Black Garden to find the bones of Riven’s lover, Taranis, and even doing a good ol’ fashioned dungeon crawl in a literal castle via the Warlord’s Ruin dungeon activity. Riven wanted us to save her final clutch of eggs from being Taken; if even one egg was lost, we wouldn’t be able to get into the Witness’s Portal.
We had two activities again in this season: Riven’s Lair and the Coil. The latter activity can best be described as a pinnacle hunt, allowing players to run through a very light roguelite set of play areas with a limited amount of revives. If you get a good enough score and defeat all four increasingly difficult paths without losing all your lives, you get a shitload of rewards.
Storywise, the fatigue is real. The knowledge that this was all we’d have to do from November to June weighed heavily on the player base, at least at first. Learning about Riven and the Ahamkara was neat, but it felt like a side-tangent. Most folks wanted to get it all over with so we could get to the “final” bit of story so that we could all start the long and arduous process of waiting.
And then we got
Riven’s Wishes
A set of weekly activities that awarded us Last Wish Raid gear, exotics we hadn’t earned yet, and other powerful stuff; this lasted for six weeks between January 30 and March 5. This was immediately followed by
The Guardian Games 2024
An inter-player competition based on class that would reward pretty good weapons, armor and a new Sparrow class called Skimmers. Hunters beat everybody handily, and the activities to do so were a lot of fun, if not exactly memorable. Guardian Games led into
Into the Light
which I’ve already written about here.
In fact, I think it’s a way of engaging with Destiny 2‘s fraught and fractured history with the least amount of attendant baggage. It helps set The Final Shape – and beyond – up as a sort of fresh start, a blank slate. Whether or not Bungie will have the chance to actualize the new, fresh vision of their game this all implies remains to be seen, but for my part, I’m satisfied to start anew with my BRAVE Arsenal and Parade gear in hand.
Now there’s no more stuff to do aside from personal goals and tasks. We’ve seen the finale of Season of the Wish; Crow made it across the portal into the Traveler’s Pale Heart, and was almost immediately fired upon by Cayde-6, once again voiced by Nathan Fillion. We’ve seen all the behind-the-scenes videos and read all the TWIDs. All that’s left is for The Final Shape to come out on June 4, a date that is hopefully, barring all sorts of disasters natural and manmade, set in stone.
It is hard for me to maintain my critical distance from Destiny 2. I won’t pretend it’s not a mess, it absolutely is, but it’s also a game whose story I’ve become inextricably invested in over the past seven or so years. Despite everything, I love this game. And in spite of myself I feel drawn to rooting for the game to succeed, especially now in what may well be its final hurrah.
However, there are many questions to be drawn from the patchwork existence of Destiny 2, questions that even I with my fandom-addled brain can’t ignore. In the next post: Destiny has now existed for a decade, alongside games like Final Fantasy XIV. But unlike more traditional MMORPGs, Destiny is full of narrative holes, is awkwardly parceled out over two massive games, and has been chasing the FOMO-heavy ephemerality of a live service like Fortnite for most of its ten-year lifespan. How can we reckon with a game like that, where we can’t even examine the full story anymore because of how much we’ve lost?
References
| ↑1 | Play a fuckton of Iron Banner, get really fucking sweaty about it, reset your rank with Lord Saladin Forge, rinse and repeat for gilded titles. |
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