What's Good About Destiny 2 Year 5

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, folks. It’s the week before a Destiny expansion’s launch and the excitement is palpable. At least in my neck of the woods. Year 5 was kind of a big year for Destiny 2. We finally came fully face to face with Savathun and then learned of The Witness, the true architect behind most of the bullshit we’ve dealt with thus far. We also got revamped Light subclasses and weapon crafting on top of a new raid. But how was the seasonal content? If you’ve read my pre-Witch Queen recap, you’ll know that the content we got for most of last year was interesting to pretty great. And this year continued that trend, albeit with a bit of me not being as into it as the last few years. But to start off, it’s starting a bit differently:

WITCH QUEEN LEGENDARY CAMPAIGN

This also came in the Witch Queen and I felt like if I Didn't mention it, I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence. It’s the same great campaign that launched with the expansion last year, only harder. That’s not entirely true. There are a lot of modifiers that are carefully curated to ensure that the combat challenge here is formidable without being frustrating. The most obvious among them is the power cap that each mission has you scaling from 1350 to 1500 Power Level. I’m doing this on my main character, where all my best weapons and builds are and while it doesn’t turn it into a complete joke, the Legendary Campaign is still significantly more challenging than the base version. Hive Light Bearers feel like a threat again! After mostly a year of treating them as just Champions with the ability to resurrect themselves and without the mod requirement to stun them!

Me being mean to Hive Guardians aside, this is where you and up to two other friends can tackle the best campaign that Bungie has ever done in Destiny history, but significantly more painful. It’s even got loot drops associated with it. Compared to the stuff I’m rocking now, it’s not great, but it’s still there. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels here, it’s still the same great campaign I talked about when the expansion first dropped, but if there’s one issue I have, it’s that the connective tissue isn’t there because it’s all launched from the director. Still a minor gripe for a great challenge of a campaign. Highly recommended.

SEASON OF THE RISEN

This season launched alongside The Witch Queen proper and sort of serves as a companion piece. While the main campaign deals with the mystery of how Savathun and her brood gained the Light, Risen is about a joint operation between the Vanguard and Empress Caiatl’s forces called Project Elbrus to push back against the Lucent Brood’s attack on Earth. Commander Zavala, Empress Caiatl and Lord Saladin serve as the experienced battle commanders leading the joint offensive, and Crow goes along but is a bit apprehensive about Elbrus’s main objective: capturing Hive Lightbearers and psychically torturing them for information. Yikes. I understand that War is Hell, but Goddamn.

In order to enable this…psionically enhanced interrogation, we need to engage with the Psi-Ops Battlegrounds. These continue the Chosen Battlegrounds tradition of being packed with enemies. After that, you found the Hive guardian you needed to bop, weaken them a bit, and then get thrown into their mindscapes by Caiatl’s Psions to weaken their resolve by killing their devotion to Savathun. All of this is weird and good because it lets us flex Void 3.0 more.

While it launched with the expansion proper, our Void abilities had the same structure and system applied to them as Stasis’s Aspects and Fragments. The Warlock's Voidwalker was rad because you could charge grenades, get Devour (indefinite life steal) and yeet black holes at dudes. I also played a bit of my Titan and Sentinel’s new shtick, which was that you could make things explode by punching them, is the most Titan thing I’ve ever heard (and said explosions can heal you). You could also get a melee ability which tosses your void shield Captain America style, get overshields with their barricades and super activations, and even get increased grenade recharge when near their barricades or Ward of Dawn super (the bubble as it’s affectionately called). Basically, you never have to worry about dying because you are the wall against which the Darkness breaks. Oh, and they increased the bubble’s casting animation speed. It’s great.

Over the course of the story of Risen, it tackled some interesting questions; the ethics of warfare, what to do when a new threat is barreling down on you, and whether or not you should let your own morals get in the way of your duty we’re all covered in interesting ways. Crow, being inexperienced compared to the others, naturally finds the whole psychic interrogation stuff distasteful. Project Elbrus ends with Crown dismantling the machinery and Saladin joining Caiatl’s war council as recompense for Crow's stunt killing the chief Psion involved, with the project who was also Caiatl’s oldest friend. Ouch. Here’s hoping Crow catches a break soon.

SEASON OF THE HAUNTED

Well shit, I was wrong. I wrote about the first impressions of this season and Solar 3.0 back when they first dropped and this echoes some of that, and goes deeper. The Leviathan, the ship of disgraced Cabal Emperor Calus, Returns from the darkness and we are sent in to investigate. Because of a pact Calus made with The Witness, the ship is crawling with both Nightmares like in the Moon and the same plantlike Egrigore corruption. These open up the ship as a new and actually pretty big patrol space. The activities are the Nightmare Containments, which do exactly what they say and stop the spread of the nightmares and my personal favourite missions of the year: Severance.

The Severance missions were a series of rituals that you and resident Space Goth Eris Morn perform to purge the ship of its nastiness and help several characters work through their issues and past traumas that manifest as Nightmares. We help Crow overcome his shame about his past as Uldren Sov, Zavala with his doubts about his ability to lead and help him to stop blaming himself for the deaths of not only those under his command, but also his son in a raid long ago, and We help Caiatl deal with her rage in regards to her father joining one of the forces responsible for their homeworld’s destruction, with this one manifesting as Gaul, the main antagonist of the Red War and the one she helped in overthrowing Calus. These missions offer new dimensions to each of the characters mentioned as well as Eris herself, whose own experiences in dealing with the nightmares of her dead fireteam have her functioning as a sort of supernatural therapist. Now if you told me that Destiny 2 would offer up some of the most in-depth and nuanced takes on mental health and trauma in games, I’d have been apprehensive. But they knocked it out of the park and I respect the hell out of Bungie’s writing staff for taking the story in this direction.

And then there’s also Solar 3.0, which I had previously mentioned as well. After using it for a few months, I can safely say that it was decent. Not as good as Void was when it got updated because of the Warlock missing a bunch of stuff, but  I digress. Anyways, I made up for it by way of getting a new melee attack that’s straight up just you snapping your fingers to make a bunch of explosions, Roy Mustang style. Overall, between the story stuff and some of the new weapons (like a craftable Calus Mini-Tool), I think Haunted might be the high point of the year for me personally.

SEASON OF PLUNDER

This one kind of feels like it came out of nowhere if I’m being honest. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The main story for this is that Eramis, the former Kell of Darkness, is thawed out from her prison on Europa by the Witness, and we have to stop her from carrying out bad shit.  How do we do that? By taking the Spider’s personal ship and being goddamn damn Space Pirates, That’s how! That’s right scallywags, get ‘yer eyepatches, tricorns and cutlasses strapped on because WE BE LOOTING THE STARS! It also serves as the backdrop for a treasure hunt for the pieces of the disciple Nezerac, who, through the lore book of the season, is revealed to be the one who directly led the Collapse of humanity’s golden age. But overall, this one is a needed breather after all of the stuff that we tackled the previous season. It also gave us some interesting insights into Mithrax’s past and his shame about them, as well as introducing his daughter Eido as our navigator for the piracy-related nonsense, heck there’s even some nuance associated with Eramis of all characters, showing a side of her that we never saw before and making some of her actions at least a bit more understandable.

The new activities were some pretty interesting ones. The Ketchcrash has us directly going through and fighting our way through Fallen ships and taking out their captains. This leads to the Expeditions, a combat activity where you fight off waves of enemies trying to get at you before you can dig up your buried treasure. These activities are great and all and the crafted loot you can get is also good, chief among them being the Tarnished Mettle Scout Rifle. But the main thing I liked about this season was Arc 3.0. Arc 3.0 is the last of the 3.0 Subclass updates and it’s my favourite of the bunch. Specifically, because we Warlocks were in a great place before the update and the three classes just got “we have X at home” versions of our abilities. We still have Arc Soul (or as I like to call them Arc Buddies), we still got Electrostatic Mind (which caused our abilities to give ionic traces on kills for more ability spam, your welcome Titans and Hunters), and Stormtrance, aka the Palpatine Tickle Fingers, got both its AoE explosion on activation and blink teleport rolled in baseline, which I’m not going to complain about.  

SEASON OF THE SERAPH

The most recent season and the one that ended a week ago. The story here is that Ana Bray and her grandfather, everyone’s least favourite giant talking robot head Clovis, devise a plan to reassemble the last Warmind Rasputin. What follows is us going into a bunch of bunkers across the system and getting the Sunbmind fragments to pull this off. The main thing with this season that got me more than anything was the way characters interacted compared to other seasons. Ana and the Exo Stranger once again known as Elsie Bray are our main contacts on these heists, with others swapping in as needed, such as Clovis, Osiris and even the queen of the Reef Mara Sov. They all bounce off of each other n neat and interesting ways, unless you’re Clovis. Then, everyone just sort of take turns dunking on Clovis and it’s great.

The main gameplay feature that was added was the aforementioned Heists, which are the newest Battleground activity. I’ll be honest, out of all the seasonal activities that we’ve had this year, this was my least favourite. This is because of a multitude of things, like the seasonal weapons not being that great aside from two of them, the activity taking way too long in my opinion, and the story feeling like it initially wrapped too early. But I will say this, it gave me more opportunities to give build crafting a try and the number of abilities I can throw out can be ridiculous. Especially since with the coming changes to build crafting in Lightfall, Bungie just gave us all of the mods needed to make some really silly builds.

And then there’s the way the season ended. All I’m going to say is that if you haven’t done it yet, go do it. It’s really good. And a tad heartbreaking.

Overall, I’d say that the major recurring thing in Destiny 2 this year has been a lot of really good narrative, some okay seasonal activities, and a ton of power creep. Playing the game again reminded me that for all of the nitpicks that I have about Destiny as a franchise and Destiny 2 as a game, there really is nothing like it. It’s still one of my favourite things going on today and I will never stop playing it.

To you, The Witness, you Megamind-looking ass nerd, I say Bring it on.