Posted by In my first impressions article, I talked about the story of the second Destiny 2 DLC: Warmind. The story is the majority of the new content, in a sense. The DLC does add in quite a few exotics, some of which are acquired through quests or finding objects hidden throughout the new Mars map (think Touch of Malice and the calcified fragments from Taken King). And it’s fun having things like this to do. Going out on new quests and adventures is definitely a fun and enjoyable experience, especially after the let-down that was Curse of Osiris.
The map of Mars is vastly superior to the map of Mercury. Mars has really two main areas where public events spawn, much like Titan, but it still has its little offshoot areas. It’s fun exploring these areas and discovering the little secrets. There are also two new public events. The first of which is the returning Defend the Warsat from Destiny. Mechanically, it’s rather similar to how it was in the first game, but some aspects of it have changed. For example, at certain intervals, a Hive poison cloud covers the Warsat, and in order to make it disperse, you have to kill two Hive Wizards. Doing this also awakens a Shrieker. Doing this three times and killing all three Shriekers makes the Public Event Heroic and you have to kill an Ogre boss. The other new Public Event is interesting in the sense that is triggered by the player. Extermination Protocol is pretty self-explanatory: you interact with a pillar and have to fend off a few waves of Hive. But the thing with Extermination Protocol is that it is not an easy Public Event. In fact, it is rather similar to Archon’s Forge in Rise of Iron in terms of difficulty. And like with Archon’s Forge, you can get some pretty good loot from beating it each week.
Now the Strikes are really the low point of this DLC. Like with Curse of Osiris, there are two new Strikes, but they’re literally just campaign missions. In one you fight Nokris and in the other you fight Xol, and both follow the campaign missions exactly. At least in Curse of Osiris repeating the Strikes could be justified lore-wise, but at this point it’s just lazy. Granted, this has been a major problem with Destiny 2. In Destiny, Strikes generally went along with the story and made sense; they didn’t just feel like an afterthought. In the base game of Destiny 2, the Strikes were a bit more removed, but it kind of made sense with the open-world system that they were now using. But looking at it again, this system pushed Strikes aside, and now they really are just afterthoughts. What really makes this annoying is the fact that Bungie fixed Heroic Strikes and made them more fun by adding in modifiers.
Finally, the new raid (at least it was new when the DLC dropped) is the most difficult one yet. I personally haven’t beaten it (it’s difficult to raid when none of your friends play the game anymore), but from what I’ve seen, it’s a good raid with some serious challenges.
Warmind is definitely an improvement over Curse of Osiris (then again that’s not very difficult). It was a fun little DLC with an interesting story and plenty of little things to do. In all honesty, I haven’t experienced everything that Warmind has to offer just yet, so I can’t give a definitive verdict as to whether or not you should buy this DLC if you haven’t already. Personally, I don’t regret buying the game or the DLC, but I know that some of my friends really do.
And now for the future of Destiny 2. Bungie has recently announced the major DLC for Destiny 2, Forsaken, and I must say this: it looks like it could be very promising. A lot of the DLCs for Destiny and Destiny 2 were rather…underwhelming. Hopefully this trend does not continue, because Forsaken looks like it really could redeem Destiny 2 and fix a lot of its problems. For example, Forsaken is going to completely overhaul the weapon system, and I am really excited to see how it turns out. Instead of running two auto rifles and a shotgun, you can just run three shotguns if you wanted to. I feel like this could be a potential nightmare for Crucible, but in PvE I’m definitely excited to see how this works out.
Concerning PvP, Forsaken will introduce a new PvE/PvP crossover mode that actually looks really interesting and really fun. I’m really hoping that this mode doesn’t just flop when the DLC does drop.
I know that a ten minute reveal video won’t tell me a whole lot about the DLC, but what it showed is very promising. Will Forsaken save Destiny 2? I hope so. The only thing to do now is wait and see if Forsaken is any good. The story look interesting (a space prison break) and the raid sounds rather intriguing. I have hope for this DLC, besides, at least it doesn’t have a battle royale mode.
Broad Scope Entertainment 