Bungie’s latest expansion, Lightfall, felt like a step back in regards to the storytelling we’ve been used to for the last few years. Witch Queen’s story was fantastic, plus Season of the Seraph followed that up with another hard hitting story. Lightfall feels out of place for a few reasons, and today I’m going to look at why that is, how Bungie changed their original plans, and why we should be getting the original Lightfall story in the upcoming expansion, Final Shape.
Lightfall’s campaign didn’t go down very well with a large majority of the audience. IGN gave their review in-progress a 5, and then after the raid came out they upgraded that slightly to a 6 out of 10. Destiny 2 Lightfall currently sits at a ‘Mostly Negative’ rating on Steam. Once you get through the campaign, the game opens up and it gets much better, but for many new and lapsed players, they probably won’t get to the stage where the game gets good because they may have been turned off by the lacklustre story.
Lightfall’s story is a bit of a mess. We start off with a great cutscene with The Witness showing up in our Solar System, and the Traveler has left Earth’s atmosphere to meet the Darkess Fleet in space. For the first time we see The Traveler fight back, by blasting a beam of energy into The Witness’ Pyramid Ship. Unfortunately then The Traveler is surrounded and trapped. Then the whole campaign of Lightfall happens, we head off to Neomuna, find Strand and the whole campaign feels like a Strand quest rather than helping out The Vanguard who are sat there watching The Witness and the Darkness Fleet having a showdown with The Traveler. We’ve killed Gods in this game, and rather than defend Earth against The Witness we’re on Neptune. Lightfall’s campaign doesn’t feel like it relates to the cutscene at the start and the end, in fact this cutscene looks like it’s been split in two, and the Lightfall story is dropped in the middle.
Back in 2020, at the reveal for Beyond Light, Bungie announced 3 expansions – Beyond Light, Witch Queen and Lightfall. Beyond Light released in the latter part of 2020, delayed by a few months, but no big deal because covid was happening and that likely had a massive impact on everyone in the studio as they had to get used to working from home. In 2021 Bungie announced they would be delaying The Witch Queen by 3 months to February 2022, but they also announced they would be adding another expansion to finish off the Light vs Darkness saga, and this would be The Final Shape. At the time, we thought that The Final Shape would be the additional expansion, but it appears as if Lightfall is the additional expansion, rather than The Final Shape. Given the nature of the Lightfall we got, it appeards as if Bungie has pushed the original Lightfall Story into The Final Shape, and Lightfall is a filler to get us to The Final Shape.
Lightfall was originally presented to us as a dark expansion – Our Light would literally fall. The original design of Lightfall was much darker, and I believe this was intended to be the final part of the story. The Lightfall we got was the polar opposite of the original design, it was repositioned as a Neon Action Movie, bright and colourful, in stark contrast to the dark original, seemingly placeholder design. This is why Lightfall feels out of place – the story was changed, created as a filler and rushed. The Cloudstriders story didn’t have room to breathe, the Witness and Traveler cutscene split in half, even Calus coming back and not putting up much of a fight, and the whole story of getting Strand on Neomuna, it doesn’t really make sense in the context of our other subclasses.
Strand is arguably the main attraction of Lightfall, this is a new darkness subclass, gives us the grapple mechanic and we’re weaving the threads of matter in our hands. While this was delivered in Lightfall, it would have made much more sense to have this as part of the The Witch Queen Expansion. Thematically it works much better as part of Witch Queen, given there are darkness relics on Savathun’s Throne World, the green of Strand work much better on Savathun’s Throne world and you can see iconography from the Strand subclass on the Witch Queen armor. In Lightfall we find Strand on Neptune, but this isn’t consistent with us being given Darkness subclass powers by the relic in Beyond Light.
We are given Stasis by a Darkness relic on Europa, and yet we simply find Strand on Neptune? That doesn’t make sense. I would imagine original plans for Strand were for it to be a part of The Witch Queen expansion, and it probably had much more of a poison focus, especially given we had Osteo Striga in that expansion as the pre-order Exotic weapon. In Witch Queen we did have a relic grant us power, but in the end this was Deepsight, essentially an ability to help us navigate Savathun’s Throne World, plus interact with the weapon crafting system in The Enclave.
It’s highly likely COVID hit the studio hard in 2020, and Bungie had to change plans. They released Beyond Light, then changed plans with Lightfall and The Final Shape. It looks like they bumped the original Lightfall story to The Final Shape, created a new story for Lightfall, moved Strand into Lightfall and then focused The Witch Queen expansion on redesigning arc, solar and void 3.0 subclasses.
Where does this leave us with The Final Shape? Before going into this I do want to say I know there’s a whole bunch of leaks out there, and personally I don’t go into leaks, and certainly don’t broadcast them here. I prefer to experience the story in-game, even if it’s not quite what I was expecting. Regarding The Final Shape I would imagine we’re going to have our Avenger’s Endgame moment, where we and all races team up against The Witness in a final showdown before we head off out of our Solar System to kick off the next saga in Destiny. We have Mithrax of The Eliksni, Caital from The Cabal, Queen Mara Sov of The Awoken, Crow, Osiris, Ikora, and Saint-14 to name a few. It’s likely that Savathun will come back, given she’s been given The Light by The Traveler, and her remains are within the Tower somewhere, given Eris has been doing an autopsy on the body. I imagine Savathun will make her return to face off against her sister Xivu Arath and The Witness. Xivu feels like the last great enemy we haven’t yet seen, and throughout the year of Lightfall content I imagine we’re going to be building up to that moment.
Landing The Final Shape feels like it’s going to be a tricky one for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the final chapter in the Light vs Darkness saga, which is the culmination of a 10 year story. Ending these types of stories rarely goes well, just look at TV shows like Lost and Game of Thrones. As well as ending the Light vs Darkness saga, we have to kick off a new saga, which will likely see us venture out of our Solar System to go on new adventures. Normally with an expansion we have a big campaign, which then leads into seasonal stories that part continue the story from the expansion, while also setting up the next one. In The Final Shape it’s likely we’ll face off against The Witness and Xivu Arath, and at some point go through the portal cut into the Traveler. Whether this is going to be the location of the raid, or a gateway to a whole new system, we’ll have to wait and see.