Destiny 2 review-in-progress
It’s Destiny, without all the bullshit
The evolution of Destiny, like that of many long-term online service games, has been a veritable saga. Three years ago, Bungie launched Destiny amid staggering levels of hype, and the massive canyon between expectations and reality led many people to write off the next big thing that wasn’t. After the trying times of the first two expansions, Destiny came into its own with 2015’s The Taken King, but could never shake the reputation hanging around its neck like an albatross.
It’s understandable that Bungie would want to make a full sequel, to leave the baggage of Destiny behind and start fresh. At the same time, of course, Destiny 2 has to relish and reward the relationships that existing players have built with the franchise over the past three years.
Catering to newcomers and veterans alike is a tough balancing act. Some longtime players are still mad that all their existing gear, which they earned over dozens or hundreds of hours with Destiny, is gone — narrative justification be damned. And while everyone’s excited about being able to play Destiny 2 on Windows PC, the lack of support for cross-platform characters is frustrating.
But that may all end up as water under the bridge. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay to Destiny 2 is that it makes its predecessor seem even worse in hindsight. I spent nearly 20 hours with the sequel during a preview event three weeks ago near Bungie’s offices in Bellevue, Washington.
During my playtime, I repeatedly found myself wondering how I had ever put up with all the nonsense in Destiny. Because most of it is gone in Destiny 2.
[Ed. note: This is a review-in-progress based on nearly 20 hours of playtime with Destiny 2 on a PlayStation 4 Pro at a preview event held by Bungie and Activision last month. As we spend more time with the launch version of Destiny 2 over the next weeks, we will update this write-up with more final impressions from Samit, as well as from Russ Frushtick, Polygon’s editorial director of live video. We will also add a score to that final version of the review.]
If you can tell me exactly what happened in Destiny’s campaign — without resorting to Google or the Grimoire, the lore cards that weren’t even in the actual game — then you deserve a prize. The confusing plot barely provided enough of an excuse to fly around the solar system and shoot aliens, while its clunky dialogue was dragged down by an overuse of sci-fi gobbledygook.
Bungie’s writers stepped up their game in Destiny’s expansions, and they’ve taken another stride forward in Destiny 2. The inhabitants of Earth have never been in a more perilous position than after the Cabal invasion of The Last City. The surprise attack results in the destruction of humanity’s only safe haven on the planet, and the loss of everybody’s Light — the mystical force gifted by the Traveler that sustains and empowers Guardians and Ghosts.
Much of the story concerns the nature of the Guardian initiative, with the three class Vanguards going off on their own introspective searches for meaning (along with quests to find a way to fight back against the Cabal Red Legion). So far, the writing has asked weighty questions like what does it mean to be a Guardian, but I didn’t see much of a payoff during the story missions I played. (Bungie stopped us at what seemed to be three-fourths of the way through the campaign.)
The effort to save the solar system is the propulsive force behind Destiny 2’s narrative. But it’s almost as important that there’s an actual villain in the story to give a face to the alien invaders. Dominus Ghaul, the Red Legion leader, has an inferiority complex to match his imposing figure. Confounded by the Traveler’s decision to give its Light to humans — inferior beings, in his eyes — Ghaul attacks the giant white orb and takes the Light by force. Of course, nobody thinks they’re the bad guy, and the cutscenes involving Ghaul do a good job of explaining his motivations beyond wanting to extinguish life on Earth.
I don’t want to oversell the story here; it’s a standard sci-fi tale with familiar tropes and roles. But it provides a suitable framework to explain what you’re doing in the campaign. There are strong characters among old friends and new faces alike, and you learn about Destiny’s universe as you get to know them in cutscenes and mission dialogue. This applies whether you’re an existing fan or a new player; the dialogue differs to account for that.
Outside the campaign, the four destinations’ individual hosts anchor open-world activities on the respective worlds. Each of these characters has their charms, but the best one is Failsafe. As the only survivor of a Golden Age-era shipwreck on Nessus, Failsafe is an AI with a split personality — alternately friendly and sarcastic. (“Seems like you met my friends: Failsafe, and her evil twin, Failsafe,” Cayde-6 says.) She’s kind of like a more helpful version of Portal’s GLaDOS, and it’s tremendous fun to
hear her interact with Ghost.
Failsafe and her cohorts are characters that you can walk up to in Destiny 2’s open world, which is another feature that somehow didn’t exist in the original game. Destiny had problems galore, but most of the game’s issues stemmed from a fundamental lack of content. In order to level up, players had to repeat the same few activities ad nauseam (and the activities themselves lacked variety or excitement).
PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER
[During the event, we all spent about three hours playing competitive multiplayer matches in Destiny 2’s Crucible. The game’s new modes are some of my favorite additions.
In Countdown, which was available in the beta, the defenders must try to kill their opponents before the attackers can set one of two charges — and must defuse a charge if it has been set. The Survival mode is a thrilling elimination-style offering in which each squad starts with a shared pool of eight respawn tickets. Once the members of a team use up those lives, they can no longer respawn. There’s nothing like a Survival round coming down to the last Guardian standing on each side.
It’s hard to tell, but the maps didn’t seem appreciably smaller despite Destiny 2’s lowered player count of four-on-four Crucible games. The change might have been intended to make gametypes like Control feel more dynamic, but in the limited time I spent with it, the opposite was true. Covering three capture points with four people is a challenge, especially if your opponents have built up a big lead.
Either way, this is another area of Destiny 2 where we’ll have to see how things shake out over time.]
Destiny 2 offers way more (and more varied) open-world activities than its predecessor, and they provide a steady stream of useful loot. Patrol missions have largely been supplanted by two new activities — Adventures and Lost Sectors — while Public Events now play a much larger role.
Adventures are the new side missions, and they serve as an elegant way to convey backstory and contextualize the campaign. Lost Sectors are semi-hidden areas in the world, denoted with a recognizable piece of graffiti that looks like a prehistoric cave painting of a tunnel. While it’s possible to repeat them and get loot each time through, I found myself wanting more. Calling them dungeons is a bit of a stretch: None of the ones I played were any more difficult than shooting all the enemies until they were dead.
Thankfully, I got plenty of challenge and excitement out of Destiny 2’s Public Events, which are my favorite open-world activity so far. Each one presents a unique problem to solve, so it’s rarely as simple as shooting anything that moves. Every Public Event has a tougher “Heroic” difficulty level that’s unlocked by completing a hidden objective. In Destiny’s expansions, Bungie often relegated these more complex mechanics and challenges to dedicated areas. It’s smart for Bungie to have layered them directly into Public Events here.
Public Events aren’t just more interesting in Destiny 2. The game’s new speed-focused interface makes it much easier to do them. There’s now an in-game map — another baffling omission from Destiny — and it highlights Public Events in real time, so you’ll know exactly where and when to expect them. This is a crucial design change. Even if you happened upon a Public Event in Destiny, you might’ve failed to complete it if you weren’t a one-person army. Taking the guesswork out of tracking Public Events should encourage Destiny 2 players to congregate around them, which will likely increase the chances that a group of Guardians will be around to team up to take on the challenge.
It’s also easier to get around using the map, thanks to landing zones for fast travel and a waypoint system that lets you mark locations and activities. (I remain confounded, however, by Bungie’s decision to keep Sparrows locked behind random drops in Destiny 2.) These kinds of quality-of-life improvements make a huge difference in the experience of playing Destiny. They eliminate much of the busy work that was inherent to the original game, and they keep you from feeling the need to go outside the game for third-party tools like a Public Event tracker.
Aside from the kinds of exercises you’ll repeat, Destiny 2 offers some brilliant one-off activities. One of the highlights of my sessions was the side quest in which I unlocked the Gunslinger subclass for my Hunter. Sure, you feel awesome when you get to unleash the Golden Gun super attack at the end. But the journey is just as great, with storytelling that makes you feel like you’re becoming one with the Hunters. (Destiny veterans will be thrilled to hear that they can also unlock The Taken King’s subclasses — Nightstalker Hunter, Stormcaller Warlock and Sunbreaker Titan — in Destiny 2.)
Doing these types of activities will earn you reputation with various allies, and it’s a great way to get regular rewards. More importantly, it’s fast. It took forever to grind faction rep in Destiny, but I earned enough EDZ Tokens for Devrim Kay to award me a bright engram within just a few hours of doing open-world activities in the European Dead Zone on Earth. That doesn’t include strikes, which I couldn’t get around to trying in the time allotted during the event.
AFTER LEVEL 20 IS STILL WHERE THE RUBBER WILL MEET THE ROAD
By the end of the preview event, my lady Hunter had reached the level cap of 20 with a power of 211. (Your Guardian’s gear level is still a weighted average of the stats on your weapons, armor and class items, but in Destiny 2 it’s called “power” instead of “Light.”)
In the original Destiny, the consensus held that the game didn’t really begin until the post-20 grind — the campaign was just a (thin) excuse to get you to that point. That’s not quite the case in the sequel, since there is plenty to do before you ding 20 (including a lengthy campaign with a worthwhile story.) But after level 20 is still where the rubber will meet the road in Destiny 2.
Bungie told me that finishing the campaign will unlock a bunch of new activities and pursuits. And the game’s reward economy in missions and open-world settings seemed well-tuned, regularly providing me with meaningful loot that raised my character’s power level. In addition, you receive a bright engram each time you rank up past level 20. They’re a lot more valuable than Motes of Light, the equivalent reward in the original Destiny.
But while I have some sense of what I’ll be doing after I hit level 20 in Destiny 2, I don’t know if that grind will feel fun. The heart of Destiny is repeating endgame activities so you can get high-level rewards, either by earning enough in-game currency to buy them from vendors or by earning loot drops. That phase of Destiny was a pain because of the way Bungie structured the gear system and reward economy. It doesn’t seem like those issues will plague Destiny 2, but at this point, I can’t say for sure because I haven’t had the chance to see the endgame.
I also didn’t get to play around with some of Destiny 2’s new systems for tweaking gear, like weapon modifications. You can get mods as loot drops or from bright engrams, and they’ll allow you to do things like alter the damage type on an energy weapon. Infusion works differently now: It requires Legendary Shards, and the number of shards needed depends on the rarity of the gear involved. That all sounds fine on paper, but we’ll have to see the systems in action to evaluate them.
At the very least, what I’ve played of Destiny 2 is an incredibly promising start. In plain English, it feels like Destiny without all the bullshit. It seems like the sequel Bungie needed to make — not a fundamentally different experience, but improved enough over its predecessor to reel veterans back in and attract people who skipped the original Destiny. Now we have to see how it holds up.
