Destiny 2: Lightfall Falls Short: On Destiny’s Disappointing New Direction
Much has been made of this moment in Destiny 2‘s history, and that makes sense. It’s almost been nine years since the first game came out and Destiny’s radically transformed in so many ways over the almost decade since I first booted up the Alpha and explored the caves of Old Russia. Some of the steps the series and Bungie have taken over the years have been mistakes and slip-ups, but both proved resilient and capable enough to turn any momentum into positive one. The Taken King, Forsaken, and Witch Queen expansions are all fine examples of Bungie taking the game I’ve loved and shaping it into something so much grander. At times it even felt magical. Lightfall, Destiny 2‘s latest expansion, seemed primed by its place in the series’ history—as the penultimate chapter in its first saga—to be similarly grand and magical. At the very least it could feel climactic. And then… well, then it became a victim of Destiny’s own history.
Lightfall, like Destiny’s past, is unbalanced, not to mention unsatisfyingly vague. At the eleventh hour, it adds a whole new set of powers for players to use, a supposedly bustling new human civilization we knew nothing about, and is supposed to bring our Guardians one step closer to the final act of the series’ main conflict. The expansion especially seemed positioned to answer some questions about the Witness, a villain who emerged from the Witch Queen’s campaign as the big bad that’d likely close out this chapter of Destiny. Putting a face and shape to “the Darkness” players fought for so long was exciting and the Witness remains a tantalizing mystery, but only because Lightfall hardly tries to uncover anything about them or their motivations. We certainly do things in this expansion, like protect the CloudArk (Neomuna’s kind-of metaverse everyone’s plugged into) and try to stop the Witness from interfacing with something called the Veil, but Lightfall can’t help but drop the ball on these beats, seemingly leaving them in the conceptual phase, like much of Destiny’s early storytelling did. Even this new society’s form of Guardians, these slick-looking Silver Surfer-type warriors called Cloudstriders who measure at least something like eight feet tall, fail to make a great impression across a campaign struggling to make its disparate needs and desires meet. Lightfall wants to be an ‘80s action movie, complete with cheesy montages, and this abrupt shift in tone is befuddling. And make no mistake, Destiny 2‘s writing can be the stuff of corny blockbusters, but at a time when the team might really want to make an impact on players, they confusingly start pulling their punches. And so Lightfall winds up easing off the gas when it should be stomping on the accelerator, giving us half-baked ideas and characters that could’ve been better-serviced by the plot and/or explained to the audience meant to connect with them.
What comes as a real slap in the face then is that when this campaign is over, and the post-game series of quests reveals itself, it actually communicates so much that the main story failed to. The quests for Exotic gear that begin unfurling the second Lightfall is “over” immediately show the promise the expansion held and I’m still having fun exploring what it has to show me. Nimbus, a young Cloudstrider with a surfer persona, gets particularly short-shrifted in the main story, which plays them for laughs and bits of an emotional arc that only pay off in this half of the campaign. And while I’m thankful for the story I’m now getting, I can’t help but wonder if this all can’t be handled better to make the whole expansion feel better across the board. I cannot think of a release that has more clearly shown that Destiny’s formula, from the cadence of ground-breaking expansions to middling ones, to the diffusion of quests in the campaigns, needs rethinking. A formula that only turns out a positive outcome half the time is obviously missing the mark.