It is impossible to think about the final form without the context of the last 10 years, seven other Destiny 2 expansions and four original Destiny expansions, as well as the campaigns that accompanied the releases of both games. This eighth Destiny 2 expansion is, to some extent, the culmination of the somewhat random decades-long journey that the first game spawned. And although the story itself was not always coherently built towards a conclusion, There is a clear, mostly positive development in all these stages that informs what fate as a whole ultimately looks like.
I’ve noticed in the past that Destiny 2 expansions as a game have high watermarks, but that’s something else. The final form is not just another step forward on a long path of progress, but a leap. At least so far, two days after, the final form is as close as Destiny has ever been to the original promise of the game, when Bungie first described a shared-world Sci-Fi fantasy marksman set in a strange and distant future. It’s not just Destiny 2 as the best it’s ever been – it’s Destiny 2 as it always should have been.
It all starts with a story campaign that throws you into the pale heart of the traveler to prevent the witness, the ultimate longtime villain of Destiny 2, from using the convoluted powers of the game ignoring physics to rewrite reality. It”s immediately obvious that the developer Bungie has taken a different path from the one he usually approaches these chapters, swapping too complicated Jargon plots to focus on the main characters of Destiny 2 as they head towards what could be an upsetting confrontation. The final form is easily the best story Destiny has ever told in an expansion, clearly stating what it is about and at least emotionally how it will work, leaving players on a journey directly from point A to point B and a final confrontation with the witness.
A great advantage of this story and the campaign in general is the pale heart itself. Expansions always bring new destinations to Destiny 2, usually a new planet or a new moon with many cool places for events, but the Pale Heart is inside the traveler, the magical robotic space god who has been at the center of this franchise for 10 years. Going deeper into this magical side of the game, we get a strange, familiar, strange place and often remarkable in its artistic direction.
The idea is that the reality of the place manifests itself from the memories and emotions of the people who are there, recreating familiar places from the entire history of Destiny, but which are often recombined in a strange way or twisted by corruption. The Pale Heart is a beautiful and fascinating place to explore, both heaven and hell of the Destiny universe. It looks entirely at the weirdest side of the game, which includes some of the best elements of Destiny 2, and offers a ton of different places to action, run and climb, a variety that it uses to offer new game scenarios and action experiences that feel fresh and interesting, although the players have a lot of different options to choose from
The campaign combines many of the best elements from Destiny 2’s years of gameplay to create an exceptional experience, especially on the difficult legendary difficulty level. First of all, this is the most mechanically intense campaign. Just about every big experience has an extra layer to deal with, like toxic air that requires you to periodically zap a specific object while standing next to it to get a protective Buff, or enemies that drop “runes” when they expired that correspond to locked doors. You need to remember which images you have seen before to activate the correct keys.
Usually these elements are relegated to the most difficult and intense raids and dungeons in Destiny 2, the best and most entertaining content. They are simpler in the campaign, but still engaging, adding a cerebral layer to the explosion through hordes of Aliens, increasing the Chaos in a fun and dynamic way without ever being overwhelming or frustrating. The large number of new and compelling mechanics, both in the campaign and scattered throughout the Pale Heart itself, is remarkable and makes almost everything they do in the final form interesting and different from what players are used to.
The second major addition is a brand new enemy faction called The Dread, which adds several new enemy types to actions and significantly rewrites the calculation of Destiny 2 fireactions. Destiny has added new enemies to its long-standing factions in recent expansions, or slightly modified the functioning of some of them to force them to adjust their tactics, but these are minor adjustments in addition to the type of tactical changes in the entire fabric that the Dread can bring to a action, especially to the most common and toughest of these forces exercise forces that until now were mainly within the competence of the players. They focus on debuffs that slow you down or freeze you in place, hang you in the air so you can’t maneuver for a few seconds, or grab you and tear you off the cover and into harmful. Bungie has put a lot of its focus on panic into playing with its positioning and getting it out of safety, and that makes actioning these enemies difficult. They are a phenomenal addition to the Destiny 2 action landscape, changing the composition of the actions in a significant and surprising way and supporting a series of new challenges.