Correspondence From Limbo

Ice ice Vex-y

Note: due to the nature of Destiny 2 as an almost constantly updating game, it is almost impossible to write a “full review”. This will instead be a summary of my thoughts on the “main” campaign that Beyond Light shipped with as well as some of the aspects of the game that the new expansion introduced.

Destiny: Beyond Light is finally here. The long-awaited new expansion for Bungie’s MMOFPS/fashion simulator has been released after a long delay due to Covid-19. But does this new expansion live up to the hype? Will it surpass the high expectations set by Destiny’s last two expansions: The electrifying Forsaken or the back-to-basics Shadowkeep? Frankly speaking; is Beyond Light any good?

Well, for starters, I am pleased to announce that Beyond Light’s campaign is quite excellent. Following the loss of several planets to the Darkness, Beyond Light takes guardians to the moon Europa in search of answers. Once there, the guardians will find themselves allying with the Fallen exile and former Prison of Elders warden Variks as he attempts to stop the newly reformed Fallen Empire from destroying the Traveller, the source of Light and the guardian’s powers. Complicating matters is that the leader of the Fallen, Eramis, has been tempted by the Darkness, giving her access to incredible power. It’s up to the guardians, alongside such varied allies as Variks and the Exo Stranger, to defeat Eramis and destabilise the Fallen Empire, drawing on the power of the Darkness themselves to do so…

I know it sounds like a lot of confusing words and names, especially if you haven’t played Destiny before, but I promise you, it’s actually really compelling. Aside from touching on lore and story beats that the first game set up (the fall of the Eliksni! Clovis Bray! The Deep Stone Crypt! THE EXO STRANGER!), Beyond Light also manages to tell a story that provides a satisfying follow-up to many of the events that have happened in the Destiny 2 expansions, as well as it’s own, self-contained conflict. While the reveal of The Exo Stranger’s real name or the conversation about how Variks was indirectly responsible for Cayde’s death in Forsaken are nice bits of fanservice and pay-off for longtime players, I do think that it is also possible that new players can go into this expansion without all this knowledge and still enjoy themselves. And there is a lot to enjoy.

The environment of Europa is one that we haven’t seen before in Destiny, a frozen wasteland of ice and snow that hides old Bray Tech facilities and Vex ruins. Snowstorms often blanket the area, reducing your visibility and making it difficult to find your way to safety as a seemingly impossible number of eyes glow in the distance. It’s possibly one of the most dynamic environments we’ve seen in Destiny yet; hunting Eramis’s lieutenants in this frigid landscape is equal parts challenge and delight. Tracking down these mighty Fallen warriors will involve players completing quests in freeroam before they launch the missions required to actually face them. Fallen battalions need to be defeated, security systems need to be hacked, the locations of Eramis’s champions need to be discovered before you can fight them. While it might never reach the heights of facing the Scorned Barons, and the unique quirks and gimmicks each one offered, in Forsaken, these extra steps give a much more impressive sense of scale. Beyond Light makes players feel like they are part of a growing conflict.

Speaking of conflicts, what about the new tools that Beyond Light gives players to fight back the Darkness with? Well, a new expansion brings with it a new sub-class element: Stasis, the power of the Darkness itself, which manifests as weapons and grenades made of ice or that freeze enemies. For example, I’ve been playing as a Hunter and their new subclass “the Revenant”. It has access to throwing stars infused with ice, and it’s super “Silence and Squall” has guardians throw two sickles, one which freezes enemies, the other which shatters them and creates a whirlwind which damages anything near it over time. But it isn’t just a fun way to deal damage or control the battlefield. The status subclasses of ALL of the classes, Hunters, Titans and Warlocks, have a new level of synergy, providing abilities that allow for freezing enemies and then shattering them for massive damage. Since any player can shatter a frozen enemy, regardless of whether or not they were the one who froze them, this allows for a whole new type of interconnectedness between guardians, one that we haven’t really seen outside of the buffs that some Titan and Warlock abilities can provide.

But it isn’t just the new subclasses and areas that Beyond Light adds to Destiny 2, it also adds an old, rather familiar area from Destiny 1. That’s right; The Cosmodrome makes its fateful return to the game after mostly being used as the location of the tutorial mission for new guardians. Now players can roam the full area, from the crashed and rusted aeroplanes to the marooned vessels stranded by the coast. It’s an amazing experience, one that brought me a lot of nostalgia as an old Destiny 1 player, and I’ve spent almost as many hours reacquainting myself with the old area as I have exploring Europa.

The Cosmodrome is also the site of the reworked tutorial missions. The bones of the old tutorials are still there; in fact, the first mission is more or less the same as the opening mission of Destiny 1 aside from a change to the end which opens up the world in an amazing way. These new missions are incredibly fun, and I recommend that even old players complete them, as they add such a wonderful narrative element to the experience. This tutorial campaign also rewards you with the exotic sub-machine gun Riskrunner, which will definitely help you against all the Fallen you have to face on Europa.

But for everything that Destiny has added, it has also taken away a fair bit from players. The planets of Mars, Titan, Mercury, Io and the huge Cabal ship called The Dreadnaught have been removed from the game; locked away into the Destiny Vault. This is a huge amount of lost content, and while I understand this decision from both a narrative and mechanical perspective, it is still disheartening to see.

But those aren’t the only things the Destiny 2 is scrapping. Bungie has also announced that they are going to be “sunsetting” weapons and armour. This means that any weapons that are more than two seasons old will become obsolete, with players unable to make them any more powerful and eventually having to scrap them when new and better gear comes along. While this won’t affect exotic weapons, this is still an upsetting decision and represents a steady loss of content which doesn’t make much sense. Bungie said that the sun-setting was to stop people from using the same weapons over and over again, making them have to “move on if they want to remain competitive.” I don’t like this decision; I’ve spent a long time working on my guardian’s look, the weapons and armour that convey both the personality I think my character has and I have as well, and it feels unfair that I will have to change it if I want to continue to enjoy future content. While I haven’t been affected too much by sunsetting yet, it is something that I find myself thinking more and more about as I continue to play. Why should I grow attached to my gear, why should I put effort into deciding on how my character should look if in six months I am going to have to throw everything in the bin. While a new transmogrification system has been promised, it is yet to be implemented into the game and we don’t yet have a clear idea of how it will work. These changes, this removal of content, all feels like a bit of a slap in the face to those who have been following the game since launch.

Speaking of being slapped in the face, the difficulty of Beyond Light’s campaign is incredibly punishing. The majority of the missions require you to either grind or do side activities before you start them or risk being under-levelled. I had to abandon one level, only going back to complete it after I had grinded for a while and gotten better gear. On another one, I died about twenty times whilst fighting against that mission’s boss. While Destiny’s missions usually provide a challenge and make you go up against harder and harder foes as the campaign goes on, I found that the difficulty curve in Beyond Light was incredibly steep, to the point of being unfair in a few instances.

Destiny: Beyond Light is an experience that marks a new era in the game’s history: both narratively and mechanically. It shows guardians using the Darkness for the first time ever, and sheds light on some of the biggest secrets in Destiny’s history. But it also sees the removal of a large amount of content from the game, potentially limiting what players who don’t buy into Destiny’s expansions can do.

But what Beyond Light adds in terms of the new subclass element, the new systems at play on Europa and the synergy between the subclasses make up for these losses somewhat. All of this, and a campaign which is exciting and focuses on some of the most interesting characters in Destiny lore make Beyond Light an incredible experience for existing Destiny 2 players, and I’m really looking forward to seeing where Bungie takes the story next.