Ok, full version. I’ve been in a spending freeze for several months so I didn’t keep up on the Destiny 2 DLC. Some of you might have noticed my absence.

But Friday I learned that things are getting significantly better, so I grabbed the expansion pass and played through the story missions over the weekend. Here are my initial impressions. This has virtually no structure and is just a random assortment of things I noticed and thoughts I had while playing.

I enjoyed the Infinite Forest setting. I’m not sure what the general consensus is, since I stayed away from story mission info up until now, but I thought the environment was really cool to look at and move around in (despite, I think, falling to my death more times than I had in the whole of Destiny 2 previously), and I found the individual mini-arenas enjoyable. Some might find it repetitive, though? I just thought the atmosphere of the place was great.

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/stabbim/video/41784346
Nice respawn location, Bungle.

I was a little underwhelmed by the size of the Mercury landing zone at first, and I’m still not sure about it, but there are things to do. Haven’t gotten bored yet. Not having sparrows is mildly annoying but ends up not making that much difference, which is telling, maybe. But I guess the Dreadnaught in D1 didn’t have them either, and it wasn’t what I’d call small.

I went in nearly blind and wasn’t expecting much out of the “prophecy tablets.” I figured I’d end up getting some consumable or something like that. Was pleasantly surprised to find that it turned into the EXACT type of scout rifle I’d always wanted for my Nightstalker, but had never found (the only high-impact scout rifle I'd found previously had an extremely dumb perk and I dismantled it).

Holy crap that Cabal boss fight with the lasers is annoying. It seems like a fun mechanic on the face of it, but he did his rushing melee attack SO OFTEN that I never really had time to do anything other than concentrate on dodging him. If I ever tried to attack, I wound up in a laser. In the end, I had to do that classic thing where I found a large solid object (a pillar or something, I think it was) and danced around it the whole time, popping off shots as we circled. It worked, but it felt a little cheap to play that way.

As someone who pretty exclusively plays PvE and doesn’t often commit to raids, having the heroic missions as an option is nice. I used to like the modified campaign missions in D1 (Queen’s Wrath?) a lot, and it’s good to be able to do that again. I wish it was for all missions, not just the CoO stuff.

Random thought and not specific to CoO, but this is the first I’ve played substantially since before the patch in early December changed Karnstein Armlets, and I find them super useful now. Previously they were just something I threw on my Stormcaller setup because they looked cool and I didn’t really have anything specific to the subclass, but now they’re really integral to how I play as that class. Maybe I just got better, I dunno.

Like I just said, this is the first I’ve really played much in a while, so Masterwork weapons are pretty new to me, although they were in the game even without CoO. It’s a minor thing, but I really do get a lot of enjoyment out of finding a Masterwork version of something I already enjoyed. Certain weapons that were already adept at mowing down groups become that much more useful. Origin Story = orb factory. I was surprised that the orbs created were for ME - I had assumed this was for teammates when I first heard about it. They’re small orbs, but it does seem to make a substantial difference in how soon I can get my super up. It’s hard to notice the stat differences on some of them, although I can definitely tell my Three Graves (the one weapon I've upgraded myself) is reloading faster, on account of its base reload being so slow.

Side note, I’ve really been enjoying The Dawning. It’s nice having it active while I’m playing through all the CoO stuff. It just means that I tend to accumulate a lot of the Dawning stuff without really trying, and it all piles up alongside the new (to me) CoO stuff I’m getting at the same time. Also, snowballs in strikes need to just be permanent. This is clearly the way Destiny was meant to be played. Maybe in the future I’ll hold off on playing each DLC until the next “community event.” :P