What's Good About Destiny 2 The Witch Queen...'s Campaign and System Additions
The truth is a funny thing. What you believe to be true could easily be the opposite for someone else and you’ll do anything in your power to hold it as tightly as possible, even if it might be detrimental to you in the long run when it’s revealed to might not be all it’s cracked up to be. This is the underlying theme of The campaign for Destiny 2’s Witch Queen expansion, which was finally released last week after much anticipation and a six-month delay. I’m mostly gonna be talking about the campaign and new base mechanical features this time around because I’m saving the annual recap/thoughts for when Lightfall drops In a year. Also, I’m gonna do my best to keep spoilers light to nonexistent because not everyone’s done the campaign yet (somehow), and spoiling it unsolicited would be a dick move. With that out of the way, let’s begin.
We start on a freshly spat back out of the darkness Mars, investigating a detachment of Rogue Cabal who’ve discovered the ship of Savathun, whom we’ve aided last season in expelling her worm (a parasite that granted her immense power at the cost of immense, terrifyingly existential hunger). We investigate the ship and discover a suspicious-looking Hive Knight. One that once we kill, COMES BACK TO LIFE AND ACTIVATES A VERSION OF THE SENTINEL SHIELD SUPER. In that one moment, it becomes horrifyingly clear: Savathun has stolen the Light. From here, we embark on an investigation spearheaded by Ikora Rey to look into how Savathun stole the light and how we can mitigate the damages it’ll inevitably bring about. This is, by and large, the most ambitiously told and well-done campaign in Destiny’s eight-year existence, bar none. It’s an incredibly engaging mystery story that offers some great insights into Savathun as a character and delivers twists and setup so big that I, an admitted amateur lore nerd, didn’t see coming and I mean that in the best way imaginable. It’s also the most mechanically satisfying campaign to play on top of that, but I’ll get to it in a bit, but holy shit the ending. It’s so good because of the setup for the future and the massive implications it brings about.
While Savathun is the focal character we learn more about (which is great because she steals the goddamn show whenever she shows up), the already established cast also gets a chance to shine. I think this might be the most I’ve seen Ikora do in a Destiny campaign since I think The Red War and this pleases me because I love Ikroa Rey. With the aid of her Spy network The Hidden, she launches an investigation into the Throne World of Savathun and learns the big-time revelations alongside us and it does a good job of showing how both she and our preconceived notions of Savathun are challenged by said revelations like us, it’s great stuff. We also get Eris Morn being her creepy self, which is also good. And then there’s Fynch. Fynch is a Hive Ghost that defects from the Lucent Brood that sees what the Hive is doing and decides to help you. He’s a great addition and some much-needed comic relief for a story that is decidedly very grim. He’s also voiced by Ian James Corlett aka Cheetor from Beast Wars, so 10/10, the best character.
The campaign and expansion are set in Savathun’s Throne World. It’s a disturbing and gorgeous locale that reflects the thoughts and feelings of the owner, with dark caves, fetid swamps, and Hive architecture in one half and bright colours mixed with a bright white citadel, sacred temples, and light-filled mausoleums in the other half. It’s a fantastic location that captures the two halves of Savathun that we see and have seen very well, on top of giving us some great areas to fight in during the campaign. The campaign itself is 8 missions, six of which are set in the Throne world because look at it, it’s gorgeous, and while also giving off big Doom Eternal vibes. I’m cool with this because Doom Eternal is rad and any reverence paid towards it is fine by me. Mechanics-wise, I love it. The game gives you the option of selectable difficulties of classic and legendary and this is a great addition because Destiny doesn’t do the replayable campaign thing all that often. It has you traversing the aforementioned throne world fighting off all manners of Lucent Hive, some of which have over shields that when destroyed manifest as arc energy moths that will track you down and explode if you don't shoot them AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE SHOOT THEM. Sorry, I have had bad experiences dealing with these things. The biggest threats amongst Savathun’s army are the Lightbearers, special Hive deemed worthy of having Ghosts of their own, and the ability to wield the Light to devastating effect. They come in the form of Void Sentinel Knights that can drop barricades to protect allies on top of gaining two armoured shields they can yeet at you like how Sentinel Titans can yeet their shields at enemies, Stormcaller Wizards that can channel and shoot lightning at you because of course they can, and my least favourite to deal with: Solar-powered Acolytes that can call in a special version of the Gunslinger Hunter’s Blade Barrage Super that tracks. I’ve died to these things a lot and I hate them so much.
They are usually seen as minibosses on the same scale as champions in nightfalls, but the difference is that they don't need a special mod to take them down. When they die and you take too long to destroy their Ghosts, these Hive Guardians come the fuck back to life for some revenge and no wonder all of the enemy factions in Destiny hate us so much, we are so annoying to kill. But the way we take care of that is by doing a special finisher that has us grabbing the ghosts and crushing them in our hands; the first time we do it is treated as some kind of a moral event horizon in a way because we crushed another guardian’s ghost and that’s fucked up, however, you get desensitized to it pretty fast when you crush these things left, right and centre. In my campaign experience, I ran Stasis for the majority of it and I found that these things do not like being frozen. At all. It completely trivializes them and I love it. But that doesn't change the fact that these new enemies I mentioned combined with the new mission scaling and modifiers in the legendary mode made the campaign more difficult to get through and it made the narrative beats so much more satisfying to get through because they were almost a reward in and of themselves.
Believe it or not, there’s also new mechanical stuff to cover as well, namely Void 3.0 and the new weapon crafting system. Void 3.0 is Bungie's way of updating our Void (and I’m assuming Arc and Solar when the time comes for those) subclasses to be more in line with Statsis when Beyond Light launched last year and to give us something new to futz with mechanically since we aren't getting a new Darkness based Subclass this year. If I had to sum up the void experience following these changes in a few words it’s these: Explosions, debuffs, and invisibility, oh my. I can’t speak for the Titan and the Hunter because I haven’t dug into them, but I love what Void 3.0 has done with Voidwalker in Destiny 2. I can still throw out Nova Bombs that track the enemy I yeet it at that then explodes and into smaller tracking darts that can also slow, but the addition of Aspects and Fragments is a game-changer. I’m rocking a setup that focuses on overcharging my grenades (or eating them as we Warlocks call them) to gain new effects and weakening enemies with debuffs to make me stronger, my favourite among them being the metal-as-hell-sounding Child of the Old Gods that drains enemies and either heals you or gives you ability energy depending in the rift type you are running and the aspect is called Child of the Old Gods, how am I not gonna take it?
Weapon Crafting at this point is a process. You first need to collect weapons with deepsight resonance and attune them enough to extract the resonance, which will eventually let you get enough to unlock a pattern based on said weapon, then you can craft the weapon based on how many materials you have from extractions based on a perk pool to suit your play style. On paper, this is a pretty good system that could use some tweaks and it ultimately is. But the main issue for me is that it feels like a good chunk of the deepsight weapons from the throne world (where a good chunk of the weapon crafting is associated) are not dropping frequently enough to justify using it outside of crafting the admittedly sick new glaive weapons in the campaign and the fact that Deepsight variants of guns feel like a new and annoying layer of RNG to deal with. These seem like an issue that can be tweaked in the future, but for now, I’m sticking with a lot of the stuff that both drops from the world and my Masterworked old favourites.
Like the base expansion of Beyond Light, The Witch Queen is the beginning of the next chapter of Destiny and it’s one I’ve been admittedly been waiting a very long time for. While the weapon crafting has a few issues to iron out, the replayable campaign, an excellent new location, and the introduction of the future of the way the light-based subclasses are gonna be modelled after the successful Stasis experiment of the last expansion all add up to make this possibly my favourite base experience with a Destiny expansion…possibly ever? Yeah, I'm shocked too. One of these things finally managed to dethrone The Taken King for me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to burying myself in this game’s warm, loving embrace.
