Destiny 2: Lightfall Review

It has been quite a while since I’ve taken on the mantle of reviewing a Destiny 2 expansion. The last time I did was for Beyond Light, which was two expansions and just over as many years ago (I did not return to officially review Witch Queen in between). Regardless, despite my loathing of the year that was Beyond Light’s content cycle, Witch Queen came in and rekindled my love for the game. After the pretty solid year of content from that expansion, I went into Lightfall with quite a bit of anticipation, as this was the true beginning of the end of the Light versus Dark saga that Destiny has been around since the first game’s release in 2014. However, what was delivered with the release of Lightfall was not quite what I was expecting, and can be summarised in two words: gross oversimplification.

Lightfall kicks off almost directly after the events of the final season of Witch Queen, Season of the Seraph. The Warsats have all been destroyed and the Traveller has left the Last City, while The Witness’s approach is finally upon Earth, and the mascot forces of Light and Dark are now face-to-face. This is where my first disappointment in the campaign comes in. Rather than the first mission or two being on the battlefronts at the very beginning of this campaign, you more or less start it by boarding one of Calus’ Shadow Legion ships right before it makes the jump to Neptune (to the point where it makes the jump almost immediately after you land on it). There are no stakes to the battle on Earth, you just head straight to the new destination of Neptune, the city of Neomuna.

As with virtually any Destiny expansion, the first mission aims to be action-packed, bombastic, and fun. To this point, it delivers. The scale is excellent, and you aren’t fully aware of everything as all you know is that you are to go through this Shadow Legion ship, take out as many of Calus’ forces as you can, and catch up to Osiris so he doesn’t get killed.

SPAAAAAAAACE!!!!

The campaign takes a little bit of a shift once you land in Neomuna, as this is where the new subclass begins to take shape in the form of Strand. Strand is thematically all about pulling on threads and weaving energy into physical shape. It can be used to inhibit your enemies as well as to augment your abilities. Warlocks become the Broodweaver, channelling their energy into creating Threadlings which are small beings made of pure Strand energy. Titans channel their inner Hulk with the Berserker, throwing out waves of their Strand energy to suspend targets, leaving said targets immobilised and vulnerable. Finally, we have the Threadrunner, the result of Hunters harnessing the power of Strand, debilitating enemies by applying several effects on them. They’re also more proficient at using the subclass’s Grapple Ability compared to its Warlock and Titan counterparts.

Strand as a subclass has a great mix of crowd control-focused abilities as well as abilities that deal high amounts of damage. It’s this flexibility that makes Strand so great in a gameplay sense, but we’ll get to that later. Strand is not only used as a new avenue for gameplay but it is also used quite heavily as a plot device during the story of Lightfall, unfortunately to the campaign’s detriment. The pacing of the overall plot is either slowed down or outright interrupted to preferentially serve the subplot of mastering Strand, and while I will concede that there are narrative reasons for Strand’s importance in the events of Lightfall, the pervasive nature of it just ruins any chance of a proper story being told. The way the pacing is ruined cannot be any more obvious than with The Veil. The Veil is a plot point that has been talked about for quite a while, as we haven’t really known exactly what it is, only that it is present on Neptune and it is the key to the war between The Traveller and The Witness. After playing through the campaign multiple times I can tell you this, it is not explained at all what this is, but the characters speak to you as if you should already know. This is very frustrating because it’s an insult to both new and returning players. New players will be just entirely confused and will probably drop the game assuming all the stories told in the game suck, and returning players will be annoyed that we have been left with more questions during a time when we should finally be getting answers.

Part of the pacing issues with a plot as grand as what Lightfall attempts is the fact that Bungie insists on keeping things confined to eight missions. I’d argue the only time Destiny 2 has had decent storytelling was in Witch Queen, which spoiled us with an incredibly cohesive story. It was an outlier that felt like a coherent piece of the puzzle when the other pieces typically have big implications and small explanations. This isn’t to say that Lightfall’s story would have landed better had Witch Queen never happened, but more that we had finally tasted some fine wine only to be given piss water again a year later. If the game would allow the story to take place over twelve missions or more, it would be just enough extra time to allow plot pieces to fully develop, and for characters to truly shine. Speaking of characters, the key new character in Nimbus is…an attempt at a character. Destiny 2 has constantly tried to have a comedic character to cut through its serious tone and none of it has ever stuck. Cayde-6 was a shadow of his former self until he was ultimately killed off, Failsafe was quirky at first but got old fast, Asher Mir was obnoxious – the comedic characters have never been the game’s strong suit. There are arguments to be made that these characters are essential, which is fair, but when they all try to go for MCU-level bland humour and hackneyed banter, it becomes a drag. Nimbus is no different, and at some points feels like a character originally written to be a D2 Cayde-6 replacement in the sense that they both fit the name of Destiny 2’s Claptrap, and you don’t want to be a Claptrap. The character isn’t irredeemable, but as they stand right now they are one of the weaker characters.

Nimbus is surprisingly caked.

On to the gameplay of Strand. As I mentioned earlier, Strand is an incredibly flexible and versatile subclass. The previous subclass Stasis was enjoyable and incredibly useful (especially for Warlocks), but it wasn’t the most flexible class and struggled to gain a foothold in groups. Strand by contrast offers utility in managing crowds while also wreaking havoc against tougher enemies during high-end content. The Strand-focused exotics created for each class are also incredibly powerful and do a great job of cementing the theme of each Strand subclass.

To complement the new Strand subclass, buildcrafting has been radically simplified. While the game boasts horizontal progression (making builds rather than just increasing power level), I’ve always found that the systems in place weren’t the most engaging. Stuff like elemental affinity on mods and armour, artifice armour effectively being useless, the ludicrous RNG nature of getting decent stats on your armour, and just the player-hostile nature of acquiring the various mods were all things that I felt were problematic with buildcrafting in Destiny 2. Elemental affinity for mods and armour has been removed, artifice armour now can give a +3 to a single stat of your choosing, and every mod is freely available. A lot of the more complicated mods have been removed which makes learning these systems much easier, but at the same time, it removes all the nuance from buildcrafting. You basically end up having the same build for pretty much every subclass across all three core classes – put one or two siphon mods on your helmet with an ammo finder, put two grenade kickstart mods on your arms, put a couple of reserves mods on your chest, a couple of surge mods on your boots and maybe a scavenger as well, and finally a time dilation mod on your bond. I hope Bungie plans to add more mods to the game otherwise the buildcrafting will get very boring very quickly.

One big point of controversy leading up to the release of Lightfall is the fact that Bungie was raising the difficulty floor of the game. People were worried that the game would be too hard with these changes – it’s not. The only thing most of these changes have done is encourage the player to engage with the buildcrafting systems a bit more than in recent history. There were a few points where I’ve found the difficulty just not particularly enjoyable. The first of these is the currently available exotic mission, Node Avalon. When on Legendary difficulty, it is just absurd. It’s by no means impossible to complete, but its design on top of the ridiculous scaling just makes it not fun. I’ve done it once and I have no desire to do it again. Compare this to Operation Seraph Shield which I ran numerous times on Legend. The other questionable piece of difficult content is Legend Lost Sectors. Now, I’ve never really enjoyed Legend Lost Sectors as a source of exotic farming, as it makes you engage with arguably the worst content in the game Garden of Salvation Lost Sectors. Admittedly, the Neomuna Lost Sectors are, surprisingly, very good and feel like mini-strikes. I know that the rewards and exotic drop rates are increased, but they still don’t feel like they are worth it, especially considering that even if you do get an exotic to drop you are still rolling the dice in the hopes that the stat roll of the exotic armour is good, assuming you even get the exotic that you want. I like the direction the game is generally going in when it comes to difficulty, as Witch Queen was far too easy (you shouldn’t be able to do a Grandmaster Nightfall efficiently without ever firing a gun), but these points definitely don’t feel great.

If I can clear the raid on day one, so can you!

On the other end of the difficulty seesaw is the raid, which is uncharacteristically a cakewalk. I won’t go on too much about this because there isn’t too much to this raid. It follows the design philosophy of having a central mechanic, but the mechanic feels so half-baked. It feels as if the focus of this raid was more combat-oriented rather than purely mechanics, but the combat is simply too easy. I did the raid on day one while the contest modifier was active (capped 20 Power below all enemies) and it never really felt that difficult – the normal mode is a pushover. It’s at least quick and easy to run, so I don’t loathe it like some other raids (*looks towards the moon*), but it’s a bit silly that doing patrol missions on Neomuna is harder than doing the raid, the piece of content that is supposed to be challenging. This raid has missed the mark in difficulty and feels like it just serves as a platform to show off Bungie’s incredible art, which is admittedly excellent as always.

Final Thoughts

Lightfall doesn’t hit the mark that Bungie had hoped it would. It has a woefully stupid story that leaves more questions at a time when we should be getting answers. The simplification of its buildcrafting systems has gone a little too far and the difficulty of a few activities doesn’t feel quite right (on both ends of the difficulty spectrum). However, there is still a lot of good. The aforementioned buildcrafting is incredibly accessible, Strand is a great subclass, the difficulty (for the most part) makes the game not feel like a total pushover, and so the gameplay is as strong as ever since the advent of the subclass 3.0 reworks (even if those reworks cannibalised Warlocks, but that is a discussion for another day). If you want more Destiny 2 to play, by all means, play it, but don’t go in expecting an expansion as significant as Forsaken or Witch Queen.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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