Posted by Destiny 2 is the sequel to developer Bungie’s critically mixed sci-fi multiplayer RPG FPS and it is a rather interesting game in the sense that it expanded on foundations laid by Destiny, while also regressing heavily. I was a big fan of Destiny. By the end of the three years the game had, I had beaten virtually everything. I was with the game from the beginning, day 2, and I supported it heavily. Heck, I even bought the Ghost Edition. I enjoyed Destiny and I played it almost constantly, but I find myself unable to say the same about the sequel.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE DESTINY 2 STORY FOLLOW.
The story for Destiny 2 is great. It’s a massive improvement over the shoddy, disconnected skeleton of a narrative present in the D1 base game. But with D1, the storytelling consistently improved as expansions were released. This is even more apparent in D2. The narrative of D2 follows your Guardian’s journey to defeat Dominus Ghaul and the Red Legion, who are a faction of the Cabal enemy race. After the Red Legion destroys the Tower, your home, and attacks the Last City, Ghaul attempts to harness the Traveler’s power to gain immortality. The Traveler is the large white ball that floats over the Last City and gives Guardians their powers. Once Ghaul tries to harness the Traveler by using a kind of energy harness, you lose your powers and Ghaul leaves you for dead.
After traveling a bit, you find a shard of the Traveler that gives you back your light, your powers, in the European Dead Zone. After regaining your light, you help your new friend Suraya Hawthorne set up the Farm so that other surviving Guardians will have refuge. During the story, the Farm becomes the new social space. Once you have the farm set up, you travel to Titan, a moon of Saturn, Nessus, an unstable centaur, and Io, a moon of Jupiter, to find and reunite the Vanguard. Commander Zavala, the Titan Vanguard, is organizing a resistance on Titan, Cayde-6, the Hunter Vanguard, has got himself into trouble on Nessus, and Ikora Rey, the Warlock Vanguard, is hiding and reflecting on Io. While on Titan, you learn of a Cabal super weapon known as the Almighty. The Almighty blows up stars and it’s currently feeding on the sun. After uniting the Vanguard, you launch an assault to destroy the Almighty while the Vanguard prepares to lead an assault on the Cabal now inhabiting the Last City. Once you disable the Almighty, you travel back to Earth and take part in the final battle, culminating with you facing off against Dominus Ghaul. The Ghaul boss fight is interesting, because he has four different forms. His normal form consists of him running around and shooting at you with a standard Cabal slug rifle. His other, elemental forms appear during different stages of the battle. In his solar form, Ghaul throws flaming swords, much like a Warlock Dawnblade super. In his void form, Ghaul gains a void shield that he then throws like a Nova Bomb. In his arc form, Ghaul throws little arc balls at you. Once you kill Ghaul, the Traveler awakens, as well as some ancient evil in the form of mysterious triangle ships.
END OF SPOILERS
I personally enjoyed the story. I though it had its ups and downs but was overall a solid and cinematic story. Unfortunately, after the story, the other content is quite lacking.
D2 puts a big emphasis on Public Events and exploring the new locations. At first it’s a ton of fun. The new locations are much bigger than the locations in D1 and it helps that you have an in-game map for fast traveling and navigating. Fast traveling is definitely something that D2 needed, as well as D1 for that matter. It’s fun exploring these new locations and their lost sectors, hidden areas full of enemies and a treasure chest at the end, and participating in the public events. However, due to their prevalence, Public Events quickly become stale and boring. The same Public Event almost always spawns in the same place with their being about two different public events on Titan and Io and about five on Nessus and the European Dead Zone. The Public Events consist of preventing a Fallen glimmer extraction, destroying a Taken blight, destroying a Fallen Servitor, destroying a Fallen Walker, preventing a Cabal mining operation, interrupting a Hive ritual, interrupting a Vex conflux integration thing, and driving off a Cabal injection rig. The variety isn’t terrible until you do the same one twenty times in a row. Public Events also have a heroic form, which are activated by performing some additional task, such as destroying a Cabal ship or destroying two hive crystals. But even though they can grow stale, the Public Events are still fun. What isn’t fun, however, is the boring dialogue that accompanies each and every Public Event. Each location has some new character from the story that you can give resources to rank up and collect different loot. They also react to the Public Events with about two varying lines of dialogue. That dialogue grows old fast. I’ve gotten to the point where I loathe Nessus because I hate the dialogue between Failsafe and your Ghost. Maybe it’s because Public Events were so rare in D1 or had so little dialogue, but I honestly hate this new Public Event dialogue in D2.
Another returning activity from D1 are strikes and boy are they lackluster in D2. I could grind strikes for hours in D1, but I find it too annoying in D2. There are five different strikes and each is really annoying in some aspect. The European Dead Zone has the Arms Dealer, which tasks you with hunting down the Cabal officer Bracus Zahn. This strike is probably the least annoying strike and Zahn actually offers an interesting challenge with different weapons and attacks. Titan has Savathun’s Song, which is easily the second worst strike in the game. The strike itself isn’t terrible and a Hive Shrieker boss is actually quite interesting, the only problem is that Savathun’s Song takes forever to complete, and despite being a stationary target, the boss can easily wipe a Fireteam due to its never-ending barrage of energy orbs. Nessus has both the Inverted Spire and Exodus Down. The Inverted Spire is the second least annoying strike, but it can still be very annoying. The final boss has three different stages, each taking place in a different arena. The only problem is that during the final stage, Bungie decided to make it difficult purely because of how many additional enemies, adds, spawn. Exodus Down is easily the worst strike in the game. It’s long and boring and has two of the worst encounters in the game. Halfway through the strike, you need to defend your Ghost while he hacks something. During this part, you need to kill wave after wave of enemies. This wouldn’t be bad in itself if it didn’t take so long and didn’t include Fallen Shanks that both explode and slow you down. The boss is much worse because it’s an invisible Fallen Vandal that runs around a lot, and the explosive slowing Shanks return. That strike is just miserable. Io has the Pyramidion, and this strike is right in the middle. While long, the Pyramidion isn’t terrible, though it does have irritating moments involving lasers.
Another complaint I have with strikes is that they are only accessible in a randomized playlist. You can no longer choose which strike you want to do by selecting it on its respective planet. It also doesn’t help that Exodus Down and Savathun’s Song seem to come up twice as often as every other strike.
Then there’s the weekly Nightfall Strike. By the end of D1, the Nightfall had a timer that gave you bonus points based on how quickly you could finish it. D2 Nightfall’s do not have that timer. Instead, their timer straight up ends the strike in failure. You can get time back by performing different objective, such as shooting blue cubes, jumping through hoops, or just killing stuff. Though sometimes there is no modifier like that and you just have twenty minutes to beat the strike. In my opinion, this just adds so much artificial difficulty to the Nightfall. In D1 you had thirty minutes for bonus score. In D2 it’s a countdown until failure. A countdown coupled with stronger enemies and lackluster strikes creates an irritating chore of an activity, even for the most enjoyable of strikes.
Another returning activity is the player-versus-player Crucible, and much like in D1, balance is a bit of a joke. The problem with games like Destiny is that PvP is inherently unbalanced because some guns will always be better than others, so a meta of good weapons always develops. And due to the randomized nature of obtaining loot, not everyone will have these overpowered weapons. You can use whatever you want, but you’ll be at a disadvantage, especially in the endgame PvP activities. On that point, Trials of the Nine is the new high-end PvP activity in D2 replacing the Trials of Osiris from D1. I disliked Trials of Osiris and I dislike Trials of the Nine, but I know that there are many people who love competitive multiplayer like this.
Concerning normal Crucible, there are three gamemodes: supremacy, clash, and control. Supremacy, a gamemode where you need to pick up an item that your opponent drops after you kill them to register points, and clash, standard team deathmatch, can be both quite fun and enjoyable. Control, a gamemode where you need to hold zones to gain more points on each kill, is not fun and enjoyable. This may be due to D2 PvP being four versus four as opposed to six versus six. For me, the 4v4 just doesn’t work for gamemodes like control, so control is easily my least favorite gamemode. Those three modes are present in quickplay, but there are others in competitive. However, I rarely play Crucible as it is, and at that I never play competitive so I do not have much experience with it.
Even though Destiny 2 falters in some areas, it excels in others. D2 introduces adventures, which are basically side quests. What D2 lacks in the side missions of the first game it makes up for with adventures. Adventures are fun missions that can give you good loot and further the subtler storylines of the game. Also present throughout the different locations are little objects that you can scan and your Ghost will say something about it. Though a small detail, they add a lot to the Destiny universe.
A great addition to Destiny 2 is the inclusion of milestones. Milestones are weekly activities that reward you with good, high level loot for performing a task, such as beating the weekly Nightfall strike or completing Public Events on the weekly planet for the flashpoint mission. Milestones are a great inclusion to aid with the leveling up process.
Another change to Destiny 2 is the addition of the Dawnblade subclass for Warlocks, Arcstrider subclass for Hunters, and Sentinel subclass for Titans. These new subclasses replace Sunsinger, Bladedancer, and Defender from Destiny respectively. I like the change and I thoroughly enjoy the new subclasses. Another change with all subclasses is that they are all divided up into two separate skill trees. These skill trees all specialize in radically different things and lend themselves nicely to different play styles and builds.
D2 also features a radically different loadout system from D1. Pulse rifles, auto rifles, scout rifles, hand cannons, sidearms, shotguns, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and swords all return with the new addition of grenade launchers and submachine guns. Instead of having a primary weapon, special weapon, and heavy weapon like in D1, you now have a kinetic weapon, energy weapon, and power weapon. Kinetic and energy weapons include auto rifles, scout rifles, pulse rifles, smgs, hand cannons, and sidearms. Kinetic weapons deal kinetic damage and energy weapons deal one of the three elemental damages: arc, solar, or void. Power weapons include sniper rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, and swords. I prefer this loadout system to the one in D1 for PvP, because it makes things more balanced with power weapons, however I vastly prefer the D1 loadout system for PvE activities because of the damage that is lost due to basically having two primary weapons.
And an important part of such builds are exotic weapons and armor. Exotics are much easier to obtain in D2, now appearing as engram drops from Public Events, strikes, bosses, or virtually any other loot source. Exotic armor is pretty solid, though some pieces are extremely lackluster, like hunter gauntlets that let you reload sidearms faster even though sidearms reload extremely quickly as it is. Likewise, many of the weapons are extremely boring and lackluster to the point that they don’t even feel exotic. For example, the Graviton Lance is an exotic energy pulse rifle that deals increased damage on the last bullet in a burst. The only problem is that the first two bullets do negligible damage and the recoil is so high that you frequently miss the last bullet if you’re aimed too high. Exotics like this are just annoying and pointless.
Finally, raids return as well. Raids were one of the best features of Destiny and they continue to be in Destiny 2. Raids are challenging encounters that really demand teamwork, however they may require a bit too much in D2. The raids in D2 now give each player a revive token, which they can only use to revive a dead teammate once per encounter. That wouldn’t be too bad in and of itself, but if you don’t revive a teammate within thirty seconds of dying, then your entire team dies. This can lead to some frustrating and pointless wipes. The raids of D2 are also extremely mechanically intensive and punish even the smallest of screw-ups, which bring back some unpleasant King’s Fall flashbacks from The Taken King expansion of Destiny. All gear can also be obtained in normal mode, making the much harder Prestige mode difficulty all but irrelevant.
I thoroughly enjoyed Destiny, and I do enjoy Destiny 2, but it has many glaring flaws. I hope that many of these flaws can be fixed as time goes on, such as the lack of content being assuaged by the release of DLC and seasonal events. 7.5/10
Broad Scope Entertainment 