Destiny 2 Review: With each new addition, Destiny 2 has been dogged by the curse of constantly reinventing itself in the hopes of creating a better, more sustainable future for the game. Over time, Bungie reworked every facet of the game numerous times, from weapons to armor to abilities to activities, each time fixing some difficulties but creating new ones that inevitably lead to the cycle repeating. It didn’t matter how many adjustments were made; Destiny 2 was never completely perfect.
If there’s one thing The Witch Queen gets right, and there are many, it’s the sense of continuity and stability it provides to the game. It has new features, but they’re mainly improvements and advancements on systems and ideas that were introduced in Beyond Light. The Witch Queen, on the other hand, stands out in a more important way: as the best addition for Destiny 2. Now, at long last, that future has arrived.
The campaign is the main attraction, and it stands on its own as a compelling reason to suggest this addition for fans of Destiny 2. When it was first released in September 2014, Destiny 2’s campaigns were nothing more than an introduction to the game’s endgame: a few short objectives, linked by rigorously templated recurring activities and open-world busywork. It is, nonetheless, the focus of attention here.
This game has a lot of character, and the eight lengthy missions are full of memorable interactions and surprises. In order to board the Witch Queen’s ship, you must first attack a Cabal base on Mars that was recently returned after being borrowed by the Darkness. From there, you’ll find a way onto her Throne World, a creepy parallel universe in which you can see a physical representation of your own personality.
Imagine the Hive God of Cunning’s Throne World. A magnificent ivory castle is surrounded by a vast swamp. Hive architecture has been done before, but Savathûn’s flamboyant flair keeps us from feeling like we’re treading familiar terrain. Story and aesthetics are intertwined. It’s not long after landing that you discover that Savathûn now has the same space magic that powers most of your abilities. The campaign’s primary aim is to figure out how this happened in the first place.
I like that it doesn’t shy away from being a little out there. While playing Destiny, you may not be aware of the game’s crappy lore. Bungie, on the other hand, appears to be embracing its more fantastical sci-fi notions as they build towards the final clash between Light and Dark.
Bee’s brain
Because of this, I believe it will be difficult for novice players to understand. Bungie’s choice to exclude prior campaigns from Destiny 2’s new player experience has resulted in a poor experience for new players. The quest system works when you’ve established experience with the game, but it does a horrible job of pointing you at what you should be doing and why. The Witch Queen does little to solve this situation. While the campaign does a good job of introducing crucial elements, there is no clear path into the story or the overall pace of the endgame… In my opinion? Read the Books of Sorrow, get in, and accept that at a certain point you’re just along for the trip.
As a lifelong Destiny player, I’ve become accustomed to being disappointed by the game’s story. Shadowkeep was a few nice moments bookending a mishmash of rituals and MacGuffins. Beyond Light introduced and killed its main opponent with little fanfare, and hurried through crucial moments with little chance to stop and analyze what they meant. It’s been a year-and-a-half of seasonal storylines dedicated to making Savathûn a threat, and the twists along the road feel enormous and tragic because of it. When it comes to the game’s primary character, Bungie is taking advantage of Lance Reddick, who is voiced by Reddick.
Of course, the gunplay is fantastic. This has always been a strong suit of Destiny 2, and the encounter design for the campaign makes good use of it. The Witch Queen’s campaign is rumored to be difficult even easy. Legendary is a brand new difficulty setting that raises the power level cap below the mission’s minimum while also introducing new challenges and modifiers. It’s well-suited to those who have a somewhat well-stocked Vault and some familiarity with armor changes. I was forced to use Destiny 2’s build crafting in a way that isn’t common outside of the most difficult endgame tasks. Complexity is allowed to flourish through the multiple abilities, weapon perks, and mods throughout the game.
The new enemy type, the Lucent Hive, adds some additional tactical complexity. Because they are armed with your own abilities, the minibosses wielding Light are extremely dangerous. But unless you perform a melee finisher on their Ghosts, they’ll resurrect once you kill them. You’ll have to deal with a variety of range issues, and you’ll have to leave the large, lethal target until you know you can safely take it down.
Bungie’s current philosophy on difficulty is reflected in the Legendary campaign, which is more than just a fun challenge. Before, players had to choose between mindless shooting, which was entertaining enough on its own, or cooperative endgame activities that required everyone on a team to optimize their loadouts. Non-matching elemental weapons can’t damage shields in the Legendary campaign because of the Match Game factor. In addition, it doesn’t use Champions, which require seasonal changes in order to be stunners. Even if you’re facing the missions on your alone, you have a great deal of leeway in the design of your loadout.
After completing the Legendary campaign, I felt compelled to spend a significant amount of money on the new Void 3.0 subclasses. Void’s ability trees have been reworked to match Stasis’ ability trees, allowing for highly customizable builds on a handful of Void-specific keywords, rather than an entirely new system. My go-to keyword as a Warlock is Devour, which replenishes health when you die. It has always been a big help, but now it has a wider impact. Through passive Fragment benefits, modifications, Exotic armor, and weapon choice, I may decide how heavily to spend on each keyword.
There is nothing but nothingness in this place.
This system has three significant drawbacks at the moment, all of which are a testament to how amazing it really is. In the first place, the current imbalance in the Light subclasses is a major drawback. For the time being, Void is superior to Arc or Solar, but that will change as each gets a 3.0 makeover in the upcoming seasons. Void 3.0’s approach is perhaps better communicated and more customizable than Stasis’s, hinting that last year’s addition may need it’s own revamp to keep up with the times. The lack of an in-game option for preserving loadouts in Destiny 2 is made all the more ludicrous by the third effect. The usage of third-party services like DIM, which uses the Destiny 2 API to allow you to construct and equip builds, has become a need as build crafting continues to grow more sophisticated and configurable.
Repetitive activities and occasional Exotic quests fill the rest of Destiny 2’s gameplay after the campaign is done, making it easy to get back into the groove. I enjoyed exploring the Throne World as a starting point, but I was let down by the fact that Savthûn’s role as the god of cunning was reduced to hitting F on a large sphere to expose some hidden platforms. When accomplishing tasks in the open world or through new instanced activities like Wellspring, the new location vendor Fynch gains reputation. There are a lot of reasons to return, but I still don’t think Bungie gets the most out of its destinations in general Friends and I made one final excursion to the Tangled Shore before it was demolished by The Witch Queen. Another interesting area that I haven’t had the opportunity to explore in years due to bounties and busywork.
I’m not a fan of Bungie’s decision to hide Pinnacle activities, which are required to reach the highest level cap, beneath Fynch’s reputation system. Pinnacle Engrams can only be obtained through Throne World ranks, which are required to participate in the weekly campaign challenge and to play the Master difficulty edition of Wellspring. Because of the looming deadlines for the Iron Banner, Trials, and the debut of Grandmaster Nightfalls next month, players will have little choice but to grind in order to reach the Pinnacle cap in time.
A good thing that Destiny’s beat has become so familiar is that it’s a good thing. Since its inception, this has seemed to be a game that was constantly recreating itself. However, Bungie finally found a seasonal approach that worked with Season of the Chosen last year. As a result, the same design will be used again this year. There will be a weekly plot related to a new activity in this year’s seasons, with enhancements you unlock each week to boost prizes.
With the structure in place, the quality of each season is mostly determined by two things: the additional activities it brings and the rewards you can obtain. On the basis of the criteria outlined above, Season of the Risen is a better option than The Witch Queen. Maybe a little boring, but still fun to play. Acceptable. It’s wonderful that Savathûn’s preferred aesthetic is incorporated into familiar settings, but the pace and goals are overly familiar. That’s fine because the guns are excellent. My favorite season is one in which I can use my trusty wave-frame grenade launcher.
In fact, I already have a long wishlist of weapons that I hope to acquire throughout the game. There are a lot of new weapons in The Witch Queen, which shows that Bungie was listening to the complaints about Beyond Light’s lack of weapons. The new Origin Traits provide them an additional benefit based on their source, making them more attractive. I don’t feel like I’m losing out on anything if I use one of my older guns because of these benefits. Because they all come with Land Tank, which increases damage resistance when killed, I’m more likely to go after the new seasonal weaponry.
Lifting one’s spirits
Most of the systems designed to make getting a certain piece of loot easier have failed. As part of Bungie’s ongoing makeover of vendors, you can now spend your prizes on a specific weapon. Drifter is the recipient of an update this season. An unpleasant imbalance is created when one Gambit weapon is easier to obtain than another from the Vanguard playlist. But that’s what happens when you don’t completely reimagine the game every year. On the contrary, we’re now in the age of Destiny 2’s continuous, rolling improvement. The time will come for Zavala in the future.
The new crafting bench offers a more predictable path to the exact role players desire, but one that relies on RNG to some degree. To learn how to make a gun, you must first obtain a Deepsight version of the weapon in order to learn its pattern. Earn progress toward unlocking the pattern by killing or completing tasks while the weapon is equipped and extracting its ingredients. When it comes to raiding weaponry, you need five Deepsight variants of a gun, which means you have to get five of those guns from a random drop.
And that’s just to unlock the ability to make the simplest version. The only way to raise the level of your made item is by killing and completing tasks. The more you progress, the more perks you gain access to. It takes a significant amount of time and resources to get the best perks for your chosen built gun, not to mention the time it takes to equip and change those perks.
Discussions regarding how to fine-tune this system have already taken place—the drop rates for Deepsight weapons, and the cost of enhancing perks. It’s a system that’s going to need a lot of tweaking before it’s finished. Bungie has already adjusted the drop rate of firearms from the Wellspring activity to take into consideration how scarce their Deepsight variants were, based on the reaction.
Here’s the key: whatever flaws the crafting system has, it’s light years ahead of what we had previously. It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to make god-roll variants of every weapon supported by the system. But I don’t think that was the purpose of the article. There’s no reason for me to ever make a sidearm because it makes me sad to use one. Under Your Skin—the new seasonal bow—makes me happy, and the crafting mechanism now gives me a certain path to the role that I desire.
I could, of course, just happen to get a roll of the dice, at which time I’d probably focus my energies on something else. To make matters even worse, masterwork weapons cannot be manufactured, so the entire system is rendered pointless. (I’m kidding, of course.) Mostly.)
The strangest aspect of the crafting system is that it’s presently unfinished. It doesn’t contain the core activity playlist weapons from Gambit, Crucible, and Strikes, nor does it include the new guns that may be obtained in the world loot pool. Considering that these are already the most difficult to regularly farm, this seems like a blunder. In the future, Bungie has promised to add more weapons to the crafting system, so hopefully, they’ll show up soon.
The current situation
Destiny 2 is still a work in progress, despite how much I love the new additions. Isn’t there always room for improvement? Even if I said it at Beyond Light’s inception: we need to pay more attention to our foundation-building playlists. Two new Strikes, as well as Battlegrounds from Season of the Chosen last year, are added to the Witch Queen’s Vanguard playlist. To be sure, I won’t be thrown into a Year One Strike as soon as I hit play, but it’s better than nothing. Bungie, it’s been four years. Please quit pestering me with requests to play Exodus Crash on your console.
This year, Gambit’s rules were tweaked and enemy locations were updated for the season. It makes sense on paper, but there’s room for improvement and, more broadly, the game would benefit from a new set of maps. It’s also not ideal that Gjallarhorn can fix all of the issues it raises. In the same vein as last year’s Trials Lab experimentation, certain experimental rule sets are planned for the coming year. There is a good chance Bungie will come up with a solution that can’t be solved by a single overpowered rocket launcher.
My only complaint about the Crucible is the lack of any Europa maps, but that’s no different than my gripes with the Throne World maps. As a general rule, I like Bungie’s stated goal of making the Crucible more about gunplay and less about abilities, and every major sandbox update shifts the Crucible meta. Destiny 2’s existing maps still greatly favor short-range weapons, despite the current weapon meta being in fine shape. If we don’t get new arenas specifically created for the present version of the game, then shotguns and SMGs will continue to be powerful.
My main worry with the current state of Destiny 2 is that Bungie continues to remove portions of it. Destiny Content Vault is Bungie’s phrase for the removal of older, less-used elements of the game from the game’s catalog. Less spectacular as the ones made in Beyond Light, but no less significant. This year’s seasonal content has been wiped out in addition to the previous year’s Forsaken expansion campaign and Tangled Shore location.
The Witch Queen’s campaign is clearly superior to that of Forsaken, and its termination is a tragedy. Is it doomed to oblivion, too? Hope not. Bungie is constantly making changes to Destiny 2 as the game enters this new phase of constant improvement. As an example, consider last year’s standout Exotic mission, Presage. Despite the fact that it was important to this season’s Exotic quest, Vox Obscura, it has vanished.
My final assault on Savathûn’s stronghold was accompanied by a triumphant, driving music rich in intertwined melodies that harkened back to the series’ beginnings in the final task of The Witch Queen’s campaign. That’s the irony of the Content Vault: Destiny 2 is a huge fan of reminiscing. Finally, in the last seconds, it has earned the right to do so after a remarkable campaign that has channeled some of the best shooters in recent years. It’s not simply a treat; it’s a celebration. That, too, would be a tragedy if it were to be lost.
