Lightfall is wrapping up and The Final Shape releases this week, so it’s time to take a look back over the last 15 months or so at Lightfall, the seasons, the highlight and the lowlights.
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Without any further delay, let’s dive into Destiny 2 Lightfall.
Campaign
First of all let’s start with the campaign. I don’t think there was much wrong mechanically with the campaign. Strand was dished out at a faster pace when compared to Stasis, however, still more slowly than fans would have liked. You got strand for parts of the campaign, but you had to wait until post campaign to unlock all the fragments and aspects, and if you play all 3 players, then was a pain. Normal and Legendary campaigns were good, plus we had the addition of the Tormentors, which still to this day scare the hell out of me when they arrive.
Story wise, the campaign was not good. We went off to Neomuna, met the Cloud Striders, Osiris was out of character and whinging for much of the campaign. Meanwhile the Vanguard of Zavala, Ikora and everyone else were watching as The Traveler somewhat faced-off against The Witness and the Darkness Fleet. Calus stole the show in the cutscenes and The Witness failed to provide the terror that a Destiny 2 enemy should. The whole concept of The Veil was introduced, which was then provided more context in the seasons following, but ultimately didn’t fix the story.
4/10
Seasons
Seasons in Lightfall were mixed. The first season that launched with the campaign was lacklustre, with Bungie killing off Amanda Holliday in a story high point. The season attached to the launch always seems to struggle and this was no different. Season of the Deep introduced fishing into the game in a surprising move, plus one of the hardest exotic missions I can remember. Season of the Witch is where things started to get good again, with a great story of Eris becoming Hive. Season of the Wish then capped off the year with a good season, albeit a very long one due to the delay in Lightfall. Bungie did go on to add Into The Light, which was a mini-seasons worth of content, but I will talk about that later.
7/10
Loot
Loot over the past year has been strong, influenced by the release of Strand. Some highlights for me includes Rufus’ Fury from The Root of Nightmares Raid, Indebted Kindness from the Warlords Ruin Dungeon, the Ros Arago IV which highlighted the auto rifle meta mid year. Round Robin was a very sought after hand cannon at the start of the year and Quicksilver Storm and dominated PVE.
Solar became super strong over the course of Lightfall which was Solar weapons jump up the charts including Sunshot, Zaouli’s Bane, Fixed Odds, Heliocentric QSc and the Calus Mini Tool seeing a lot of use.
7/10
Activities
The Coil stands out to me this year, which is from Season of the Wish. That struck a very good balance between loot and activity variety, plus challenge too. Season of the Wish had some good activities, which were a throwback to the Court of Oryx. It’s also worth shouting out fishing as an activity in Destiny, I never thought I would see the day when fishing was added, but it was good for a brief period, and very different.
6/10
Raid and Dungeons
We’ve had a good varity of Raids and Dungeons in the year of Lightfall. The Root of Nightmares was dismissed as being too easy by the community, although I thought the Planets encounter was one of the best they have done. Overall it was easy. The reaction to that was the reissue of Crota’s End in Season of the Wish. Crota ended up being a meme in Destiny 1 for being a glorified strike, however, Crota came back for revenge this time around being a really tough day 1 raid. Ghosts of the Deep was the Dungeon in Season of the Deep, which drew a lot of criticism for being too long with the underwater sections, plus the boss health on the final boss wasn’t fun. Warlord’s Ruin on the other hand was a great Dungeon in Season of the Wish, introducing a new weapon architype with the rocket powered sidearm, Indebted Kindness.
7/10
Exotic missions
We had a couple of exotic missions with the additon of Lightfall including The Variable and the hunt for the Vexcalibur. Starcrossed was introduced in Season of the Wish for Wish-keeper, the Strand Exotic Bow. I would say the latter was the better of the two missions. Wikid Implement, the stasis exotic scout rifle was introduced with an exotic version of Deep Dives, which was one of the tougher exotic missions we’ve seen, although strictly not an exotic mission.
6/10
The Craftening
There was a bug introduced into Destiny 2 where you could craft perks from weapons, both legendary and exotic, onto other weapons that shouldn’t have them. A good example of this was being able to craft shotgun damage output onto an auto rifle, so The Ammit AR2 became super popular for a weekend. This bug was found right before Trials, everyone thought Trials was going to be cancelled but Bungie just ran with it, and allowed people to craft some crazy weapons and also get through content. This meant melting Crota with juiced up auto rifles, running through Grandmaster content like they were normal strikes. It was an amazing weekend, and was great to see Bungie embracing it, then fixing it in the background not too long after.
10/10
Layoffs and player decline
We can’t really do a review of Destiny 2 without mentioning the troubles Bungie had over the last 12 months. Largely due to a lacklustre DLC, player counts dropped off a cliff, which led to Bungie missing their revenue projections by a reported 45%. This led to public criticism from Sony, and Bungie laying off a bunch of their staff. Sentiment in the community from October until March was very poor. Final Shape was delayed, meaning Season of the Wish would be hugely extended, and for a time it was hard to see how Bungie could claw this one back, and it seemed like the hawks at Sony were circling to take over Bungie once and for all.
Into the Light
Then Into The Light was announced. I don’t think many of us expected much from Into The Light. This was going to be some filler content provided by Bungie, but we thought they would be heads down adding more to The Final Shape, and that’s where their focus would be. It turns out Into The Light was content rich, bringing back 12 weapons into the game, introducing Limited Edition versions. Onslaught was the newly introduced game mode similar to a horde mode, although not quite the horde mode we have wanted, but it was very close and a great addition into the game. We had the reintroduction of two favourite Exotic missions with Whisper and Zero Hour, plus the hugely successful Pantheon game mode, the raid-boss rush where we took on multiple raid bosses back-to-back. This was just as much or more content that a season and together with the hype for The Final Shape, it did so much to get players hyped and powered up for The Final Shape. Hats off to Bungie and the team for pulling this one out of the bag, it’s some of the best content we’ve seen all year.
9/10
Overall, there’s a lot to enjoy in the year of Lightfall. It’s a 7/10 for me in total. Strand, Onslaught, Warlord’s Ruin, Crota’s End, Pantheon and some of the loot are highlights. Lowlights include Season of the Deep, The Variable Exotic mission, elements of the Root of Nightmares raid and definitely the Lightfall camapign. I think the most important thing is we finished strong with Season of the Wish and Into The Light, and I am looking forward to stepping into The Final Shape with you all in the coming days.
Let me know what you think in the comments.