Destiny 2: Lightfall Review

mar 6 2023

Photo courtesy of Bungie

Destiny 2's latest expansion, Lightfall, has been out for a couple days now and the reaction has been... confusing. There's lots of catastrophizing about how this is the worst expansion ever, total disappointment, bad writing, cringey characters... all of which I kind of expected. We've never had two great Destiny 2 expansions in a row, and last year's Witch Queen was phenomenal and near universally praised. It would have been hard to top no matter what, but it seems Bungie really grappled for the high rises and ended up falling flat on their faces with its successor.

But the question really is: is any of this criticism even valid?

I'm not going to sugarcoat it: the plot is pretty bad. The setup is nonexistent, and the plot majorly hinges on two major MacGuffins that are presented as all important, but that the audience never actually are introduced to or understand. The Veil and the Radial Mast are the focus of the story and drive the plot, but we're never actually told what the Veil and Radial Mast are, what they do, what their limits are, or what happens if the Witness uses them. We just know that the Witness wants them, and we hate the Witness, so we have to get them before it does. That's just not a very strong motivation, and it doesn't seem like many players were actually satisfied with this motivation.

There's the explanation that the characters themselves don't know what the Veil and Radial Mast are, so it makes sense that the audience doesn't either. The Veil being vague and handwavy, fine. It's supposed to be a mystical unknown thing, but I would have at least liked some theorizing from Osiris or Nimbus about what it is. Doesn't it literally power Neomuna and their virtual apocalypse bunker? Wouldn't they at least have some idea of its powers and capabilities, even if they don't know exactly what it is? The Radial Mast has even less excuse, since it gets destroyed by the end of the campaign. Bungie aren't setting up a mystery around it, it's just there and gone in a flash. Wouldn't Rohan's sacrifice be a lot more meaningful if we actually knew what he was sacrificing his life to destroy?

The post campaign exotic quest alleges that the Heart in the Black Garden is a failed Vex copy of it, so we can kind of theorize based on the Heart's properties what the Veil might actually be. But that's post campaign content, when that information would have served better if it was giving at the beginning of the campaign! There's also some random dialogue from the Neomuna Civil News that seem to imply we are supposed to know or suspect what the Veil is, referring to it as "breaching the Traveler's pale heart" and "transporting the Traveler to another location." If Osiris had said even once during a mission that he suspects the Witness is trying to kidnap the Traveler and it needs the Veil to do it, I think it would have alleviated a lot of people's confusion and frustration with the vagueness surrounding the Veil. It wouldn't even be a big leap for him to make, seeing as the Witness could have learned from Savathun's plan to bring the Traveler into her throne world.

Some people will have an issue with cliffhangers or unanswered questions no matter what, but I'm the type of person who likes those things. I like having a bit of room for interpretation and not just being spoonfed a story, so my criticism of the plot doesn't just begin and end with "They didn't tell us anything." The root of this criticism lies in the fact that Lightfall is all setup, no payoff. That could work, in theory... but that setup has to be really good. And it just wasn't.

Bungie heavily marketed Lightfall as an 80s scifi action movie blockbuster type of expansion, which... yeah. What they said is what we got, and there are both positives and negatives to crafting an expansion around that concept. The positives are strong vibes/aesthetics, lots of fun, and characters who are vibrant and funny. But the negatives include the overreliance on external, unexplained, and otherwise irrelevant objects to drive the plot and frenetic pacing that doesn't leave a lot of room for theorizing and exploring. While that may work for a two hour movie, it simply can't for a video game expansion in which players may take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days completing the campaign.

One of the final shots from the cutscene seems to suggest that the leaders/main characters (Mara, Elsie, Zavala, and Ikora) were literally just standing in the HELM with the lights off without moving for however long the Lightfall campaign lasts... which leads me to believe the plot is supposed to take place over a couple hours, at most. It would recontextualize a lot about Osiris' urgency and why there's no time for characters to even guess at what the Veil and Radial Mast are, as well as why the other leaders didn't follow us to Neomuna to try to ally with a new civilization. But this timeline is never made obvious outside of Osiris' general calls for urgency, which aren't helpful for establishing a general timeline. Also, I just don't think this works for a video game! Instead of just spending one or two hours in the dark about some irrelevant objects and then getting a satisfying conclusion like you would with a movie, you're playing a video game for hours upon hours not understanding what is going on or what you're meant to be invested in and then not getting a satisfying conclusion, because this is just part one of a larger story.

Bungie's weekly blog post addressed the community frustration with the unanswered questions, saying:

We know there are still plenty of questions left unanswered at the end of Lightfall's Campaign that you're all eagerly awaiting answers to. As the events of Season of Defiance get into full swing this week, know that this is just the beginning of the next year of storytelling that will connect the events of Lightfall and The Final Shape. We can't wait for the community to learn more about The Witness's origins, its objective, and the ways we can thwart it and its disciples throughout Season of the Deep, as well as Seasons 22 and 23 later this year.

Frankly, this really frustrates me! In what world is it acceptable to say, "Hey, we know you're dissatisfied with the expansion you paid $50 dollars for, because it introduced a bunch of new concepts and then didn't explain any of them, but if you're patient and shell out $30 for the rest of the seasons, you might actually get some answers!"? The deluxe version of Lightfall is about $100 dollars and includes an "annual pass" for all the seasons in the year, but the base game doesn't come with that, and fifty bucks isn't cheap! From a consumer standpoint, it is ridiculous to expect people to buy every season and grind each weekly reset hoping that some of the concepts from the expansion they already bought are explained.

Charging people for unanswered questions is all fine and good when those questions aren't extremely basic ones like "What is the Radial Mast and what does it actually do?" Even Google is free! Destiny 2 is a live service video game, and I've played it long enough to remember when seasons were basically completely unrelated and irrelevant self-contained stories. Community feedback gradually drove seasons in this direction, and I definitely prefer getting stories that feel like they actually matter. But they walk a very fine line between making seasons feel like they matter and making them feel mandatory, which they shouldn't be. I should be able to take one week off from Destiny 2 and not suddenly be completely lost or worry about never actually finishing Lightfall's story. This is like Dragon Age: Inquisition levels of charging your customers to get a real ending to a story they've already paid for!

Seasons should be interconnected and important. But they're not the main content of the game, and they shouldn't be doing the heavy lifting for expansions! They're side stories, deeper explorations of minor characters and arcs. You need to play the expansion to understand the seasons, but you shouldn't need to play the seasons to understand the expansion. To be honest, I blame streamers and content creators for this move towards mandatory seasons. Streamers are constantly begging for more more more, a stream of flowing content for them to play live and react to and comment on. And I think this is unhealthy for the game! In my opinion, we can already see how this quantity over quality mindset is impacting the overall health of the game.

Not to be a buzzkill, but I think a lot of people were so let down by the writing of Lightfall because they were thinking that Witch Queen's writing was really good, so Lightfall's writing will be good as well. But those people are forgetting that we've gotten a whole year's worth of writing in between in the form of seasons, and the recent seasons of Destiny 2 have been decidedly not as good as Witch Queen, writing wise. Season of the Risen was good, and Haunted was great, but after that Plunder took a dive off a cliff with poor stakes, nonsensical plot, non-compelling antagonists, and frustrating interpersonal conflicts. Seraph suffered from similar issues, but was largely better received by the community because of the long-awaited focus on Rasputin and the visually gorgeous ending cutscene.

I hate to say it, but I think a lot of people were essentially "tricked" but the visual spectacle of Seraph's final cutscene into thinking the writing for that season was a lot better than it actually was, so they were expecting a lot from Lightfall and were let down. Personally, my hopes were in the toilet. It was more than just a personal dislike of Plunder and Seraph; I genuinely thought those seasons were very badly written (sorry Bungie writing team; still love you!). While I didn't think the writing was great, I also was prepared for a lot worse and was pleasantly surprised.

The writing for Lightfall is mediocre. It's Beyond Light level. It's not the best writing they've ever done, but it's also decidedly not the worst. Hello? Anyone remember Curse of Osiris? The biggest problem facing Lightfall's story is that it simply isn't a full story, which I had also kind of expected (and feared) due to the circumstances surrounding Lightfall's development.

So, I don't know if anyone remembers, but in 2020 Bungie did a Beyond Light reveal/future of Destiny stream and announced the titles and release dates of all their upcoming expansions. There were three titles; Beyond Light, to be released in 2020, Witch Queen, to be released in 2021, and Lightfall (working title), to be released in 2022. Obviously, things didn't work out this way, and things ended up shuffling around. Everything went through major delays, and it was revealed that an additional expansion was planned, The Final Shape. Either the writers started writing Lightfall and realized it was too long, so they cut it in half, or they finished writing The Final Shape and realized it was too confusing, so they added a prequel.

Neither of these explanations are very promising, because they imply either a chopped-up story or a half-finished one. If you're finding that the story you want to write is simply too long for what you have the time for, the worst possible thing you can do is just split it in half! Audience members are then only getting half a story, and they're going to pick up on that. There's a sense of pacing and narrative that is disrupted. Cliffhangers and unanswered questions are only so compelling when the audience hasn't been properly introduced to the stakes or the plot because they haven't really kicked in yet in the larger narrative! You're going to have a very unfocused first part and a very overstuffed second part.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I think the story likely was cut in half, with the second half being pushed to The Final Shape, and time constraints set by the upper management prevented them from going back and doing rewrites. There is a lot of evidence to suggest there was some behind the scenes reshuffling going around at Bungie, with some speculating that Haunted was meant to be the final season of the year due to it technically leading into Lightfall. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some major last-minute issues with the expansion.

But what there were no issues with was the gameplay, which is just as good as (if not better than) Witch Queen. Personally, I'm glad that if there were time restraints, they chose to spend the bulk of their time focusing on compelling gameplay, because at the end of the day, this is a video game. It can handle mediocre story (and it did for years), but what it can't handle without serious problems is bad gameplay.

While Savathun's throne world was visually gorgeous, it was also very empty. To borrow a phrase from Datto, the enemy density was very low, which lead to the destination feeling hollow and devoid of anything to do. Once you experienced the public events and the lost sectors for the first time, there was no reason to really go back. It's kind of funny that Neomuna, which is canonically deserted (since all the citizens uploaded themselves to the CloudArk), feels more populated than the throne world! Obviously, we'll have to see how things work out in the long run with Neomuna, but at first glance it seems a lot better and more packed with replayable things to do.

Photo courtesy of Bungie

Whereas the patrols for Witch Queen were mostly "marching orders" from Immaru (blegh, I did not find him funny at all and think he was one of the worst parts of WQ) or menial tasks from Fynch (he's fine), the Neomuna patrols have been cleverly utilized to give the city some character. Citizens communicate with us from inside the CloudArk, like flirty and sarcastic Quinn from the archives and easygoing mechanic Sid. These patrols give a lot of definition and personality to the city! The random segments of the Neomuna Civil News from Jisu Calerondo also help to introduce us to Neomuna's citizens and culture in a subtle, non-infodumping way.

So overall, the writing isn't all bad. Weak plot, but there were also some great character moments strewn in there. People have been decrying Nimbus as "cringe," but I never thought their quips went too far (except in maybe one or two places, which I could overlook). I thought Nimbus and Osiris bounced off each other really well, with Nimbus taking a bit of the bite out of Osiris' criticism and Osiris dulling a bit of Nimbus' relentless optimism. Not saying this is the case for everyone, but I think a lot of the Destiny 2 players who think Nimbus is cringey and annoying simply think nonbinary people to begin with are cringey and annoying. This means they're more likely to be looking for something to criticize and complain about with Nimbus, who I think is genuinely a great and well-developed character.

Photo courtesy of Bungie

There were also a great deal of quality of life updates, centering around simplifying convoluted systems of gameplay like the mod system, weapon crafting shader acquisition, seasonal artifact leveling/mods, power level, and champions stunning. New systems, like the loadout feature and the commendation system, are also fun. These updates make the game so much better in small, nearly imperceptible ways that really add up, in the end. The Guardian Ranks system doesn't wow me, though, seeming like just another list of chores to check off.

I also really dislike the movement of lore from the Triumphs tab to the Collections tab. While this may make more sense logically (A "collection" of lore? Move it to Collections!), I think it's an unintuitive design choice. It was much more convenient when you unlocked a piece of lore from a triumph and then could read it on the same screen. I'm really into lore and I love reading it right away when I unlock it, but even I keep forgetting that the lore tab exists now, because my muscle memory makes me back right out of my inventory without switching over to the collections tab.

Also, Bungie, why are things like campaign skips and power boosts still character based and not account wide?

Overall, I think there is genuine criticism to be made about the poorly executed story, and about a few gameplay aspects as well. But in the end, I find the rush to decry Lightfall as the worst expansion Bungie has ever made, horrible, not worth it, dogshit, worst writing ever, not fun, etc, after a couple of days just insane! People sped through the main campaign and immediately rushed to write their thinkpieces on why the game is dead, nitpicking every single detail that they disliked, without really taking the time to view the expansion as a whole. Then, fans at large whip themselves up into a frenzy and just parrot whatever their favorite "content creator" said as their kneejerk reaction to the expansion, and then it's just this relentless barrage of unearned negativity, which makes the genuine criticism get lost in the crowd and lumped in with the irrelevant hate.

Whew. Getting down off my soapbox now. Anyways, at the end of the day, Lightfall was mid. Bad story, fun gameplay. If you're only playing Destiny 2 for the story, maybe sit this one out, but if you just want to grapple onto your friends and let them (literally) carry you through activities, you will still have a fun time. The bones of the game are the same; it just doesn't have the fine polish of wonderful story that Witch Queen had. The Destiny 2 playerbase seems constantly stuck between two extremes, often at the same time. The current content is the most perfect thing ever created with zero flaws or it is the worst and most poorly crafted thing Bungie has ever done. There has to be some happy medium here, guys!

I, for one, will proudly take a stance and say: Lightfall was mid.