Last night, I spent the better part of an hour shooting the final boss of Lightfall, the latest expansion for Destiny, hiding underneath a flight of stairs, whittling away at their health until victory. “This exceeds my wildest imaginations,” screamed Calus, a towering monster capable of starting interstellar wars but not peeking underneath a staircase. I’d given the boss a few, genuine tries before throwing up my hands and seeking help on the dark web.
I really do feel bad for folks getting into Destiny with Lightfall, because Bungie made the most baffling decision to make all content harder with this expansion. Not just the campaign, which has some truly awful difficulty spikes, but retroactively as well to strikes, battlegrounds, raids, and dungeons. Suddenly, my game to chill and shoot stuff with friends became a sweaty unpleasant mess as I die for the millionth time on a nightfall strike to make my power level go up by 1. Don’t get me wrong, Destiny always had hard content, specifically the raids, dungeons, and grandmaster nightfalls, but it was so much more pleasant to gear up for that stuff with leisurely popping Cabal heads while listening to a podcast. The true Destiny sickos are probably loving this ratcheting up in difficulty, but to me it just makes a chore-filled grind even more arduous.
I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to go back to Destiny 2. Here’s my petty beef with Bungie:
At some point they put Beyond Light on Gamepass, which brought me back in after last playing it during Forsaken. I was enjoying Beyond Light enough to pick up the last season: but then they removed BL from Gamepass shortly before that last season ended and suddenly the new subclasses and a bunch of things I was still playing through disappeared. Which, I guess I understand business wise, but it felt really wrong as a player.
Destiny has cool lore and delivers consistent 30 second loops of fun, but that felt pretty bad.
This is the expansion where I finally broke up with Destiny 2.
Destiny 2’s shooting is still, for my money, the best in the industry. It feels perfect. And the abilities are generally pretty fun (though I feel like Titans get the short end of the ability stick).
But all these expansions have a formula: new location, new variation on an existing enemy type, they throw you on the loot treadmill and draw it out so you don’t blow through the whole campaign in three hours, and essentially assume that if you’re playing you’re already up to date with the lore. And you wind up chasing loot all the way to the high-end activities, so if you don’t have anybody to do the Nightfalls or the Raid with, there’s no point in getting on the treadmill.
The Witch Queen free weekend just before this came out gave me ample opportunity to blow through the WQ campaign solo and finally genuinely sold me on Destiny 2 (despite all the problems you can imagine arose from delving headlong into that). I could write a trademark Way Too Long Post about my overcoming the obtuseness and solo-unfriendliness and finding a great shooter without having to be embroiled in years of meta or anything, really persisting and committing to finding some kind of perspective to make me finally click with a game I’ve bounced off of over and over for years.
Then Lightfall came out, I played the intro teaser before anyone had gotten through the campaign, it seemed cool and I was ready to buy in, but def wanted to take a break n consider whether to buy WQ and wait for LF sales, buy LF outright, or what.
All of the reception to Lightfall since then has completely undone all the good will, just as swiftly as that weekend had given it to me. They almost made me go from a skeptic to a fan proverbially overnight, and they completely unravelled that accomplishment with what looked like a slam-dunk expansion by doubling down on all their bad habits that even its most committed players have grilled them for ages on. Even WQ is less attractive than it was to me before.
A truly incredible feat. Never have video game players found such solidarity in a sentence as “Bungie is fuckin ridiculous”.
this headline is amazing to me though because I actually beat Savathun by doing a similar cheese in her final phase for what felt like an hour lol, but in that case it felt like a choice and less like I was pushed to by simply spiteful design
I would love to talk to someone who’s way into Destiny 2 and get their take on it. I know Bungie’s broad MO for the last few expansions has been “we have an Audience and we are going to make D2 for them” (in contrast to Activision being a little more insistent on Bungie making D2 a lot more approachable). I just know D2 is Not For Me
Certainly, as someone who doesn’t play Destiny (or Destiny 2) but knows people who do, I always got the impression its main draw was precisely that it’s a “game to chill and shoot stuff with friends”, so it also baffles me if the new expansion makes this a thing that you can’t do easily.
(Sure, I’m sure there’s people who do play Destiny 2 for the challenge… but like every other MMORPG, isn’t the point for most people that’s it’s something you do whilst you interact with people socially?)
I think it says a lot that the subreddit for this game is saying the game is now too hard to be fun and clearing activities does not result in adequate reward.
One person even said that Bungie appears to have tuned the game for the 1-5% of players who wanted this difficulty. But the thing is those players already had GM nightfalls, raids, etc. So what does that leave the rest of us?
