My turn to roll a grenade into the room, lol (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, March 02, 2022, 21:27 (1000 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I will say, if he only played the first mission, it’s not super impressive. The first one feels like a pretty normal Destiny mission—Go here, kill the dude to get the battery to put into the machine, do that three times then it’s done. Once you get onto the Throne World, it gets really good. The boss fights are all fun, there’s some neat (though not crazy or difficult) puzzle mechanics.

I am very, VERY disappointed in this expansion so far.

I played the whole campaign on Legendary, have replayed about half of it on normal (2nd character) and have done a fair bit of the post-campaign open world stuff that’s available so far.

I think I understand why so many people are saying things like “this is the best Destiny campaign”. In my estimation, a lot of it comes down to the fact that Bungie has removed the majority of the the rough, annoying edges that have plagued so many of their previous campaigns. The boring, tedious “fetch quest” activities are mostly gone, there’s far less annoying back-tracking over and over again across patrol environments… in many ways, this is the closest they’ve come to a typical FPS campaign since the Halo days. And IMO, that is both the best and worst thing about it. If they trimmed any more “fat” out of this campaign, they would be all the way back to the old days of simply selecting your mission from a main menu and pressing “play”. The places where the campaign really drags are the few times they have you go out into patrol spaces and do patrol-style activities. Most of the campaign is 90% of the way back to traditional, linear Halo-style missions. And yeah, in many ways that’s way better than previous Destiny campaigns. But I see that as a huge problem in a way, because it’s really highlighting to me what a complete dead-end the “open world” patrol spaces have become. Bungie just can’t figure out how to make them engaging or exciting in any meaningful way. The Dreaming City was phenomenal IMO, and other than that I don’t think there is, or has ever been a Patrol space in D2 that offers any enjoyment beyond the first hour of driving around to see the sights (with the lone exception behind D2 Mars purely for the Escalation Protocol activity… I loved that).

So I’m playing this campaign and thinking “yeah, they’re finally getting back closer to the old Halo style campaigns they used to make”… but then the whole thing turns into a snake eating it’s own tale, because as soon as I start thinking about Witch Queen in direct comparison to Bungie’s Halo campaigns, it falls miles short. It’s just not in the same league at all. The gameplay is just so much more repetitive in D2. Bungie’s Halo campaigns had so much more gameplay variety, better storytelling, and more memorable moments that begged to be replayed over and over, because they played out so much differently every time you played them. Witch Queen doesn’t really have any of that, IMO. If I pretend that D2 is the only shooter that exists, I might be more impressed with this campaign. But Titanfall 2 exists, and Mass Effect 2, and the Bad Company games, and The Last of Us, etc. I would never expect a D2 expansion to match the scope or scale of those sorts of campaigns, but quality? Sure. So basically, I feel like the Witch Queen campaign trades in a lot of the potential that D2 has to deliver something truly unique for a safe, basic, competent attempt to imitate the kind of campaign Bungie mastered 15-20 years ago.

A big part of my disappointment with this expansion comes down to the new destination. I think it’s awful. I find it ugly, uninteresting, and sterile. It also feels like the most artificially “gamey” destination in D2. Half of it is this fortress that is just a series of promenades and building facades, none of which seems to have any discernible in-universe purpose or function, with random groups of enemies just standing around waiting for you to shoot at them. I know this is basically what all patrol spaces are at their core, but Bungie usually does a decent-to-great job of making the environments look and feel like places that could really exist, and had a function/history to them. This whole patrol space just feels like a Doom 2 multiplayer map to me. There are a few big exceptions to this… a few locations that offer some truly impressive sights that made me just stop and look around for a while. But they’re generally way off the beaten path, and so far away from the usual “patrol” activities that I doubt I’ll see them more than a handful of times. Of course, there’s also the issue that the actual activities we do in the new patrol space are the same level of lacklustre, mindless busy work that has dominated patrol zones for years now. The “secrets” and “puzzles” are (so far) so dull that I stopped engaging with them after the first hour.

I think this expansion has driven home a realization for me which has been sneaking up on me for about a year now, which is that after 7+ years, I think I’m finding Destiny’s basic PvE combat formula is showing its age. More often than not, I feel like I’m just going through the motions as I clear through wave after wave of enemies. I’ve done it all so many times at this point, the fact that I’m using a “new” hand cannon or SMG or whatever just isn’t enough of a change to keep it feeling fresh. The light-baring hive are a total non-event, IMO. Even on legendary, I killed every single one of them so fast that I barely had to worry about their abilities.
I will say, I think the Glave is a fantastic addition. It’s the first time in forever that I feel like a new kind of gameplay has been opened up. The way you can shoot, block, and melee so fluidly and seamlessly is a lot of fun, and it is the one gameplay addition that feels truly NEW in this game in years.

All that said, it’s still Destiny. The gunplay and movement still feels great, the art team still does incredible work, the music and audio production are top notch, and the story has some interesting lore and is going in some cool directions (i do still feel like the moment-to-moment script is still awful though… most of these characters still talk and act like their straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, which does not at all fit with the deeper story they’re trying to tell). So there’s plenty of stuff here to like, and plenty of quality work to appreciate. But for me personally, I’ve never felt so checked out of D2 so soon after a major release. For me, D2 needed a big, strong shot of truly fresh air to get me excited about it again, but Witch Queen is just more of the same, albeit a marginally better version of “the same” compared to the last few expansions.