Destiny 2 Review

Destiny 2
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Activision
Platform: Playstation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, PC via Battle.Net
U.S. Release Date: September 6, 2017 (PS4, XB1), October 24, 2017 (PC)

By now I have been an overly content owner of a Playstation 4 for a little over 3 years.  My first PS4 was the white Destiny Limited Edition console back in 2014, and this was something I of course lined up at midnight to get, ripped open, and stayed up all night playing.  I was hooked.  I beat the game that day, ran strikes till I was blue in the face, and just kept on going and going until I passed out around 1 am on the 11th.  Destiny has been a game that I have kept near and dear to my heart, not only because it was my first game on the platform, or my first Platinum trophy, but because the world that Bungie had so carefully crafted (even if it was locked behind the grimoire not in game) was something that I fell in love with and wanted every part of.  I was in love, and still am.  So naturally I bucked up, dropped the insane $250 for the Collector's Edition, and lets just say that it is possible to fall in love twice.

So, this entire thing is going to be riddled with spoilers.  Like a ridiculous amount of spoilers, especially considering I'm not even going to bother to post this until after I finish the raid (a little over a week post release).  Does that mean you should stop reading?  I'm not going to tell you not to, but there is a lot of spoilers, and later I'm going to throw on my spinfoil hat and talk about a few theories I have.  Sooooooooo, here we go:

******************************SPOILER WARNING *********************************

For anyone who played the open beta over summer, you'd know very well the setup to the game: Ghaul, a renegade Cabal badass, is here to take the light for himself.  Now, we've dealt with some pretty serious threats before such as Atheon, Time's Confulx, in the Vault of Glass, Crota and Oryx, literal gods of the Hive, Skolas, the Kell of Wolves who sought to reunite the Fallen houses, and even SIVA, the nanotechnology that was the undoing of the legendary Lords of Iron who were the first to bring order to humanity after The Collapse.  But none of those before hand have even come close to accomplishing what Ghaul did.

The opening scene shows Cayde-6 entering into the Vanguards outpost in the Tower, supposedly returning from slacking off somewhere, only to be greeted by Ikora and Zavala indicating that the perimeter seems to have been breached and the sensors are not responding.  And then the Cabal invaded.  Ghaul and his Red Legion seemingly sweep over the city like a plague that we guardians can barely stop as a massive six armed ship approaches the Traveler with his fleet laying waste to the City.  In the meantime, Ghost and our guardian are on our way back from a patrol mission when we are unable to raise the Tower to report in. We arrive to a partially destroyed Tower, where the Vanguard, Shaxx, and Holiday are mounting rescue operations for the citizens who are still alive.  We meet up with Cayde and Shaxx who help us press onwards toward Zavala, who is guarding against the onslaught, and Ikora, who is desperately searching for the Speaker.  When Ikora discovers her failure, she shows us why she is the Warlock Vanguard and proceeds to wreak havoc across the battlefield while you head to meet Holiday for a ride to Ghauls ship to cut off the head of their assault.

Arriving on the ship, in spectacular style I might add, you are tasked with disabling the shields to allow for a bombardment, however things do not go as planned as the Cabal are able to overcome the City's defenses and you are one of the only ones left in the fray.  Intercepted by Ghaul, he reveals his plan of entombing the Traveler to steals its light and cut it off from the Guardians, while spartan kicking you off his ship a la 300 style.  Naturally things don't go his way as you survive.  Desperate to make it to safety you recover Ghost, escape the city and are followed by a Hawk you glimpsed in a vision during your fall (predicting many things, including the enemy of the Traveler) that leads you to safety.  During your journey you come across a human by the name of Hawwthorne, a non-Guardian who lives outside of the city and was relatively unaffected by the attack, she is setting up a gathering point in Europe by the broken shard of the Traveler, her goal not to retake the City, but to build a safe haven that is defensible in case the Cabal come looking.  Helping her to set up her network and draw in other survivors you learn that Zavala is rallying the surviving Guardians on Titan to mount a counterattack, and while Hawthorne is hesitant, she agrees that this is your decision and you must do what you believe in.

Once landing upon Titan you discover the Hive have found their way there as well, and are attempting to summon Oryx's sister Savathun, as well to the system.  So naturally you get to work to foil their plans, and set up the moon for staging operations once again.  Though even with the power online, and some secret Cabal messages decrypted you're not out of the woodwork yet as the Cabal have a super weapon pointed at the sun ready to blow the galaxy apart should their plan fail.  Zavala calls on you to go to Nesus and rescue Cayde and find Ikora.  Arriving on Nesus you find Cayde stuck in a Vex teleportation loop, with a crashed colony ship AI, Failsafe, watching with pleasure as he struggles.He tells you to retrieve the teleporter he was working on, as he feels it will be necessary to get to Ghaul, despite the super weapon.  After some convincing he tells you Ikora is on Io, the last place the Traveler touched, where she frequently meditates.  On Io you discover a way to destabalize the super weapon with the help of a broken down Warmind (given the designation Jys, a possible reference to Charlemanges sword Joyeuse).

With the Vanguard at your back you return to Earth to formulate a plan of attack.  You need to slip up to the weapon, disable it, and escape before the Vanguard launch their assault to take out Ghaul in the city.  Hawthore tells them of a way inside and battle plans are drawn up which include you stealing a high ranking Cabal officers personal vessel, but like everything else that involves Cayde, the plan goes awry and it is up to you to square off against Ghaul in the end.  He is able to seize the power of the light and a fierce battle ensues, ending in Ghaul becoming a massive creature made of light and calling himself a new god.  But just in the nick of time the Traveler wakes up and shows Ghaul whose boss.

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(mostly)

Whew, that was a fun summary, and believe me I skimmed over a good chunk of it hitting mostly the highlights.  Anyrate one of the biggest stand out features to me for Destiny 2 is the gun play, the first game brought us around two three different weapon slots with different types going in different places for maximum effectiveness in combat.  You had a Primary, Secondary, and Heavy, which while it worked out nicely in PvE, it really overplayed it's hand in PvP, however this new system which replaces Special and Heavy with Energy and Power respectfully fixes a lot of those problems.  The way this works is all Auto Rifles, Scout Rifles, Hand Cannons, Sidearms, Pulse Rifles, and the new Submachine Gun can be either Primary or Energy, with Primary dealing non-elemental damage, and Energy being around for those shielded foes.  This means that you no longer need to deal with people in PvP running around with godly amounts of Sniper Rifle ammo (formerly a Special, now it has been moved to Power weapon), but it makes your PvE games require a bit more foresight.  Beyond just what and how you can carry, each gun feels unique and different from each other, and acquiring the same gun twice isn't going to result in a different gun based on its perks, every gun with the same name has the same perks, so much less farming is required to get quality weapons.  Fighting and shooting is fun, engaging, and you can really tell Bungie nailed their "30 seconds of fun" mantra with this one.

Along with the weapons I would be remiss if I didn't discuss the games armor as well, as each set plays to the class descriptions very well.  Titans, the games beat stick, look much larger and bulkier than in the previous entry, where they didn't feel as large and at times would even come off as being quite slim.  Warlocks almost all wear longer robes now, more reminiscent of a scholar or researcher, while their bonds are very detailed and helmets sleek and streamline.  The Hunters as well have been slimmed down overall to appear more mobile, threatening, and stealthy with their cloaks.  The one complaint that, like many others, have is that the shader system is kind of a crap shoot.  You see shaders are set individually now, and can also be applied to weapons and ships as well as armor, and while that isn't a bad thing, a lot of the better looking shaders are locked behind the games Bright Engrams, which is a form of microtransaction.  Since you can earn these in game, I'm not all that upset, as you earn them rather quickly, but I am a little disappointed that there isn't an alternative way to get them whether that be spending Glimmer (the games currency), or being rewarded through other means it makes the game feel a bit more grindy than I personally feel that it should be.  Either way this issue should be addressed as it would only serve to discourage casual players down the road.

One of my favorite things that Bungie did was redesign the rank up system to better encourage players to play the game, farm activities, and increase the number of rewards that you recieve.  The way it used to work was you needed a sum of 1500 (at the first level) to 2500 (pretty much after level 5) reputation in order to level up, well unfortunately reputation, while it wasn't capped, was slow to earn as you earned between 10-100 per patrol, and around 125 on a Strike mission and Crucible victory (half for a loss), that's not even to mention sub factions which earned at half the rate of Vanguard and Crucible, so while you got it for all activities, it was a MUCH slower gain than your primary sources, and for players like me who almost never did crucible it was laughable.  The new system uses tokens, which can be gained and turned in on any character, so you are no longer locked into receiving rewards by playing that character.  So if you want to gear an alt, grind on a main and redeem on that alt, if you want to kit out your main in raid gear first, turn in all you raid tokens on them and get them all the sweet sweet raid loot.  Overall the system is much more rewarding as you can earn multiple rewards and ranks in a shorter amount of time than you could previously, which will only serve to keep casual players coming back for more and more Destiny.

Bungie, finally offers in game clan support for Destiny 2, and will actually actively reward players for being in a clan.  See now you have a clan banner which levels up over a season (unknown how long this will last) which allows clan members to enjoy increased rewards for playing the game and completing events such as completing public events, decrypting engrams, defeating Cabal, etc.  Plus with an in game interface it makes clans and clan management all the easier for the end user as you don't need to go online, or open the app, or any weird thing like that.

Crucible has also changed, in some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse.  All game modes have been converted to 4v4 away from either 3v3 or 6v6, and for competetive and trials the change is welcome and actually an improvement, in quickplay and casual the change really drags on your sanity.  See the biggest changes which affect that are the fact that there in an increase in the time to kill (TTK) for players, which translates to a larger importance being place on team play and team shooting, which while a positive aspect, doesn't help quickplay as it has historically been a place for players to relax and not really care about team play, or moving together, just getting out and doing some PvP.  In casual play you often encounter 3 or 4 stacks who will work together because their preferred game mode is there and they dominate over the other team.

The final two major gameplay changes come in the form of the Nightfall and Raid.  The Nightfall is no longer reset on wipe, but instead you get a respawn ticker of around 25 seconds, and the entire strike is timer based, starting at 11 minutes and working its way to 0, at 0 you are reset to orbit and you must start over.  Some weeks you have a variant option to increase the amount of time you have by performing a certain task, whether that is killing enemies, jumping through vex hoops (literally), killing oracles, or other means.  This makes the strike more forgiving for less experiences players, but still offers the challenge for more experienced ones.  The Raid on the other hand, is Cabal themed like the rest of the base game, but instead of fighting The Red Legion, you are set against Emperor Calus and his Loyalists who seeks to test you to see if you are worth joining him.  One of the biggest things is the fact that the Raid has 4 different wings which must be unlocked through a series of collecting and defending standards from and endless wave of Cabal forces, after you are able to collect and defend all 3 your way to the next challenge is open.  The challenges are genuinely fun and well thought out, even if not obvious at first.  Our team went in blind and only had one or two issues because of some non-obvious mechanics we encountered, overall though we ran into little difficulty and mostly just needed to refocus after getting stressed.  The raid also offeres a second set of loot in the form of underbelly keys, which reward engrams, tokens, and a chance at exotics, each of these chests however either must be found, or is locked behind a door that is protected by "watchers" who must be silently eliminated.  The final large change here is the addition of the guided games feature which allows players to search for a group for Nightfall and Raid activities (even though raid isn't quite out yet), then these allow clans who sign up to PUG (pick up group) players to be rated, and a higher rating means an easier time of getting people in the future.

The final thing that I would be remiss to not mention is the soundtrack.  Honestly when I think of Bungie I always thing of how wonderful their music and composition is.  Really they're one of the stand out companies for it (standing among CD Projekt RED and Bioware), and in Destiny 2 it shows.  The ambiance set is perfect, the highs are accentuated excellently, the lows are disheartening, and everything in between is executed to a T.  I have yet to look it up, but if there is a soundtrack, and I can get my hands on it I'm going to because I can honestly see myself at the gym working out with this music on in the background, it's THAT FUCKING GOOD.

Overall, while the game does have a few flaws, they are largely out spoken by the sheer amount of content to do, the improved drops and loot system, and the expanded and ease of access of lore in game.  Destiny 2 has some large quality of life improvements, genuine and unforced humor, and a fresh new take on the Destiny name.  I'm excited to see where Destiny 2 goes down the road with it's DLC, and I hope you are too.  Destiny 2 gets 9 completely incorrect names for Ghaul, out of 10.