Recently, Destiny 2 received its latest expansion titled Lightfall which turned out to be… let’s say controversial, both in terms of gameplay and when it comes to its plot component. But before diving into the new add-on, let’s take a look at what had been happening with the overall plot over the last few expansions to have an easier time with the lore drops and mechanics in the future.
Beware, spoilers ahead! If you’d rather experience this content on your own, leave now. Otherwise, this is our Destiny 2: Lightfall review, proceed with caution.
The overall story of the game revolves around the conflict of Light and Darkness represented through the Traveler and the Witness. The Traveler, having appeared in the Sol System, launched an incredible leap in technology which propelled humanity into the so-called Golden Age. After a certain period of time, the forces of darkness invade the Sol System and almost wipe out humanity – an event that was later dubbed the Collapse. However, the Traveler managed to fight back and exile the dark fleet somewhere into the depths of space. The Witness has been persistently chasing the Traveler for many millennia, and now he has turned his gaze to the Sol System once again…
For the first time, we got to feast our eyes on the Witness during the previous expansion Witch Queen (before that, the darkness was represented by a fleet of pyramids), and now he is literally standing on our doorstep and preparing a new apocalypse. Whether the players are up for these new challenges yet remains to be seen. Despite the previous enmity, humans have allied themselves with aliens (the Fallen and the Cabal Empire) as both have been affected by the destructive influence of the Witness. Even the obvious antagonist of the previous expansion, Savathun, the Queen of lies deception, turned out to be our ally, although in her own peculiar way.
At the moment, she is considered to be slain by players, but there is a possibility of her return. The future is unstable, and the Witness arrives in the company of his new acolyte, Emperor Calus, forcing players to fight for survival again. All that is known is that the Witness is seeking a certain Veil that is located on the suddenly opened Neptune, in the city of Neomuna that was lost during the Collapse and retained all the technologies of the Golden Age.
This is where the actual plot begins. Over the course of 8 rather lengthy missions you will confront the troops of Emperor Calus in city blocks. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t answer many of the existing questions about the game’s lore and instead adds a variety of new ones. There was never an explanation of what the Veil is and why the Witness seeks it, did we even lose it at the end of the campaign or not? What device did Calus attempt to use? Described as an artifact of Light, what was it doing in the disposal of the forces of darkness? How did Neomuna survive the Collapse and why did it never try to contact others until now? They were aware of the existence of the Guardians and that the Earth managed to survive as well. It was even mentioned that Neptune was prepared to fight off the Guardians if they got to the planet.
I hope that we will find answers to these questions during the upcoming Seasons. There will also be a new subclass of the Dark, the Strand, the mastery of which in fact is the center of its own plot with a scattering of bits and pieces of information around.
Let’s talk a bit about the characters as they present their own problem when it comes to the plot of the expansion.
Cloud Striders are the local Guardians fully equipped with technological implants that reduce their lifespans to measly 10 years. Players encounter only two of them, Nimbus and Rohan, one of whom acts as a rebellious teenager that constantly blurts out phrases that make you want to facepalm while his mentor sacrifices himself and leaves the protection of the city to Nimbus. There is a certain drawback to that sacrifice: up to that point, you will have seen Rohan for a grand total of three times throughout the campaign and there is simply not enough emotional investment into the character for this loss to be felt. As a result, his act of heroism provokes no emotional response besides “Oh no!.. Anyway”. Meanwhile, Nimbus continues to annoy you with his inappropriate phrases and behavior. Although, admittedly, in a later quest the game does address that it was hard for him to lose a mentor.
Osiris, the former warlock and an incredibly important character for the history of the world, accompanies us through the missions and causes nothing but further irritation. The constant indignation and attempts to hurry the Guardian up awaken the desire to give him some sedatives and get the grandpa to bed. Although I understand why he behaves in this manner, it doesn’t change the situation at hand. And, to me, it feels like he became too involved in the plot as over the last 5 years or so he somehow appears in almost all plot points, leaving no room for the development of other or new characters. Sometimes it feels like the game is dedicated not to confrontation between Light and Dark but rather to pulling a neurotic old man out of all sorts of troubles.
I’d also like to mention Calus. Or, rather, his finale. The odious Emperor, whom we have encountered a handful of times throughout Destiny 2 and one of my favorite characters, was unceremoniously killed off in about 3 minutes in the most boring boss fight in the game. That very moment when you feel damn sorry for an antagonist, because there was a certain connection with the plate character, and they did not deserve such an ending.
Not to mention, the boss fight itself was quite dull and only raises more questions. Emperor Calus, who had since become an emissary of darkness, does a whole lot of nothing in the final mission of the plot. His bodyguards are more of a headache than the Monster Emperor himself that just follows you around the arena. Is it really a worthy finale for the Emperor that drank wine that was acquired as a result of turning entire planets to liquid? Could there have been no more fitting end for a beloved enemy?
Let’s move onto the gameplay and technical components of the game. The quality of Destiny 2 is steadily declining each year and, while the number of bugs that were there during the release cannot compare to the launch state of Cyberpunk 2077, many of the problems that squeezed past the QR have been extremely unpleasant.
Out of the innovations, the expansion brought forth the build system with the option to save and edit them without using third-party apps; the Guardian ranks that are meant to reflect your gaming experience throughout the main game and the Season; player ratings in the post-game lobby; a new type of opponents; new subclass: Strand, that was mentioned above. However, the plethora of bugs that sneaked their way into the release version of the game have managed to spoil the otherwise good impression. I personally had trouble even with the build system, where upon choosing an existing build or trying to edit it the game would throw me back to the initial screen.
Another new addition is the player reputation system that doesn’t seem to be important for anything besides a couple of achievements during the Season play. After completing certain activities – raids and others – players can give you praises with various “titles” that affect the whole… nothing. At the moment, it simply exists, but maybe it is a build-up for some future system?
The new subclass plays and feels great. There are cool animations combined with new mechanics (players can now almost literally become Spider-Man!) that makes it feel fresh and interesting within the game. It also turned out to be surprisingly balanced, the last subclass had been terribly broken on release and it took over 6 months to fix it.
Strand allows you to be very dynamic on the battlefield and, at the same time, keep large swathes of enemies at bay via tight crowd control. And there are many, MANY enemies. The developers have heard players’ pleas about increasing the overall difficulty of the game but approached this problem very peculiarly. Throughout the new campaign and in the additional story quests, the number of opponents is overwhelming, you can literally suffocate in the crowds while being approached by squads of fresh enemies, including the inevitable approach of the Tormentors.
I liked the way the new enemies turned out, it is a fairly aggressive, interesting looking mini-boss that can shut down players’ abilities and capture the Guardians which at high level spells almost certain doom. This keeps you on your toes and forces you to look for ways to clear the waves of enemies and at the same time keep your distance from the Tormentor. However, the crowds of enemies everywhere is not quite the way I’d have liked to see Destiny made more difficult.
Having dealt with all the story challenges, players get access to the new raid that features Nezarec, the final god of pain, an entity that was previously briefly mentioned within the game itself. The raid takes place in the ship of the Witness that was destroyed by the Traveler, and the destructive combination of light and dark looks extremely psychedelic but beautiful in its outworldly way. I participated in the day one contest mode and it was quite interesting. The mechanics of the raid are quite simple which makes it more accessible to players, and I hope that more Guardians will be able to throw aside the scary stories of the hours of torment required to finish D2’s raids and be able to enjoy it.
For comparison, on the first day of the raid opening, it was cleared by 45.5 thousand teams (approximately 273k people) while the previous two raids were closed by 6k and 5k teams respectively. It might feel like a walk in the park for experienced players (there were videos that it was closed by 3 people instead of the intended 6 without dying, which was almost impossible to do in other raids), but it is an excellent starting point before moving to other high-level activities.
The story-part of the raid, once again, causes a lot of questions but I believe we will receive our answers at a later point. I do have some complaints about the mechanics, however, 5 stages are the same jump puzzle, charging 2 balls of different colors, etc. – it all becomes boring after the second clear. And although we closed the raid on the first day in contest mode, it didn’t bring much joy.
Separately, I want to make a mention of the new loot, more specifically the new weapons. And if there are no questions about the exotic weapons, there are some problems when it comes to the legendary ones. Since the first Season of the previous expansion, there are simply no new legendary weapons in the game. All the new guns are old models, slightly modified and tweaked to suit the theme of the Season and which we had already seen plenty of times before.
I was hoping that the new expansion will bring new weapon models since it is the NEW expansion after all, set in the new region, but no. We have gotten the same weapons we saw 3 expansions ago, again. That has also affected the raid weapons, which all follow that same old principle of tweaking the existing weaponry. This is disappointing, considering the cost of the expansion. Yes, there are a few craftable guns from Neomuna, but they are “make and forget” type of weapons.
Although the exotic weapons are quite pleasing in this regard. Even just the Quicksilver Storm submachine gun is simply beautiful even if you forget about it featuring an underbarrel grenade launcher with automatic homing mini-missiles. It simply shreds enemies in a beautiful way.
When it comes to the locations and audio, Destiny 2 remains on the same height – everything looks and sounds at a very high level, the style of the neon city where the fighting takes place as a huge statue of Calus looks on impassively from his ship fascinates and rouses the wish to look through every nook and cranny for something interesting and unusual. All of that is accompanied by a wonderful soundtrack that perfectly conveys the mood of whatever is happening. The new locations are quite beautiful, from the raid to the dungeons and the city of Neomuna. The new raid conveys the surrealism that surrounds the Light and Darkness, and is worth seeing.
It’s time to sum up. Despite all the negative points that I brought above, I liked the gameplay part of the expansion. Even if the plot leaves a lot of questions unanswered and some moments made me want to delete the game. I want to believe that Bungie will change their approach to the development of the game and stop pushing out lazy content or the unfinished messes when it comes to the technical side of things.
I also want to note that, while the launch of the expansion broke the record of the number of players online simultaneously, a few days later the overall online collapsed. It is a shame that the long-awaited Lightfall was more of a fall of Bungie’s reputation when it comes to creating quality content over a placeholder for a year, until the normal story arrives.
At the very end, as you peer into the initial cinematic, you can see the Witness cuts down a group of 3 Guardians… I wonder if those are the same ones that were present in previous Destiny 2 trailers, the good old FireTeam that consisted of a Titan, a Warlock and a Hunter and led players from the very beginning.
Check out the official site to find out more or to start playing.
Note: Destiny 2 Lightfall is a verified purchase by the author.
