Destiny 2’s Lightfall Campaign is a major step down from campaigns that have come before it, which is especially jarring since The Witch Queen, only 12 months ago, was so fantastic. How did this happen, what does this mean for the upcoming year of content as we lead into the Final Shape, the end of the Light vs Darkness Saga? Today I want to have a look at what went wrong, and where that leaves us in Destiny 2.

There was much build up to Lightfall, and a lot of momentum from The Witch Queen, and Lightfall’s story and campaign appears to have slammed on the breaks when it comes to that momentum leading us towards the end of the current saga. This has been 6 years in the making, and Bungie appears to have taken a few steps back in regards to the story, which is a massive shame, given we’re only a few weeks since the fantastic story with Ana Bray and Rasputin, from the More Than A Hero questline.

Early in the campaign we’re called to Neomuna, the Neon City on Neptune to investigate The Veil. We’re told we desperately need to find the Veil because otherwise The Witness and Calus are going to use it to connect to the Traveler, which is bad, although it’s never really clearly explained to us why that is. We meet The Cloudstriders, the inhabitants of Neptune, although we only meet a couple fo them because everyone else has been digitized and uploaded to The CloudArk, the information super-highway where the residents of Neomuna can live forever.

So much is crammed into a short space of time, which doesn’t allow for connections to develop between the story and the audience. Neomuna is cold and empty, although it’s being sold to us as a city under attack. While certain areas do feel like they are crawling with Vex and Cabal, otherwise the city is cold and lifeless, while somehow looking brand new.

Turning for a moment to the positives of the Lightfall Campaign. The gameplay is good, Strand feels great and there’s a good variety of encounters. The initial cut scenes in the campaign are also great; The Witness feels dangerous, and there’s an Avengers Endgame feel to seeing Zavala, Mara and the gang on the ship looking out into space. The Traveler attacking the Pyramid Fleet is welcome… This huge static ball has been in our skies for 6 years, baring moving even though it’s called The Traveler. Seeing it go out to meet the Witness and the Pyramid Fleet was great, and go on the offensive for once. We’ve known about its tendencies to flee danger and save itself, given thats the way it acted with The Eliksni, leading to Eramis’ hate for the Traveler. One final positive was the showdown between Calus and Caital, a Father vs Daughter battles that has been years in the making. The siege before the final boss fight was good fun, although it would have been poetic for Caital to have taken the final blow against her father, rather than us.

Unfortunately, that’s where the positives end for me when it comes to the Lightfall campaign. Everything is so condensed. I haven’t had the time to build up an emotional connection with the Cloudstriders, therefore Rohan’s death fell very flat. The mission itself was fun from a gameplay point of view, but in terms of caring about the outcome, it didn’t hit the right notes. Tonally, Nimbus doesn’t feel like a well written character, he seems to get over Rohan’s death far too quickly.

Osiris was a major let down in the campaign. Osiris’ character was used very effectively in the build up to The Witch Queen, but he’s been back for a season, put right again by drinking a tea made out of the current raid bosses remains, and thrown back into the campaign to become the whiniest version of Osiris we’ve ever seen. Osiris moans all through the campaign, telling us to hurry up, ordering us about then being super vague about the Veil. Osiris has been a good character in the past, and had to work hard to recover from the Curse of Osiris campaign. It felt like he redeemed himself during Season of Dawn, and the return of Saint-14, but this was a massive step down for Osiris as a character, and has negatively impacted how I feel about him going forward. If I see he’s involved, I’m probably going to be less interested.

Then we have The Veil. We’re told fairly early on about The Veil, but we’re not told about what it is, or what is does and why it’s important. I understand over the months of Lightfall we’re going to get more information related to The Veil, but to introduce something like this so late on in the saga, and then not resolve it through this campaign just feels bad. Then we have references to The Radial Mast and the Veil is connected to The Black Heart from The Black Garden, tying it all back to Destiny 1. This story feels like Destiny 1… confused, and it feels like it’s been quickly written. Then post campaign we have Zavala and Ikora saying The Traveller is gone, when I though it was still there, but The Witness has cut a portal into it and stepped into it.

Lightfall’s campaign felt like a disperate set of ideas that were barely held together with a very thin campaign. Too much emphasis on Strand, not enough story development with The Witness and Calus. By far the best moments of the campaign were with The Witness and Calus. Calus clearly is just a pawn to the used by The Witness, which in itself is disappointing. Calus was supposed to be a super powerful Cabal Emperor, yet his special ability as a campaign boss is just a gun.

The story in Lightfall feels like filler, and it also feels like a pivot has been made within Bungie itself. It has a familiar whiff of Destiny 1. Jason Schrier has done a great job documenting what happened with Destiny 1, and I wanted to turn to a section of an article he wrote for Kotaku at the time, however, he also dedicated a chapter to the making of Destiny in Blood, Sweat and Pixels, his fantastic book about the trials and tribulations of making games today.

The Messy, True Story Behind The Making Of Destiny, By Jason Schreier

In the summer of 2013, months before they were supposed to ship their next video game, the game developers at Bungie went into panic mode.

The storied studio, best known for creating the multi-million-selling Halo series, had spent the previous three years working on something they hoped would be revolutionary. Destiny, as they called it, was to be a cross between a traditional shooter like Halo and a massive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft. It was going to become a cultural touchstone. “We want people to put the Destiny universe on the same shelf they put Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars,” Bungie COO Pete Parsons said in an interview two years ago. Reports suggested that the publisher Activision had committed to a ten-year deal worth $500 million to make that happen.

Two years ago, something went wrong. Destiny’s writing team, led by the well-respected Bungie veteran Joe Staten, had been working on the game for several years. They’d put together what they called the ‘supercut’—a two-hour video comprising the game’s cinematics and major story beats. In July, they showed it to the studio’s leadership. That’s when things went off the rails, according to six people who worked on Destiny. Senior staff at Bungie were unhappy with how the supercut had turned out. They decided it was too campy and linear, sources say, and they quickly decided to scrap Staten’s version of the story and start from scratch.

In the coming weeks, the development team would devise a totally new plot, overhauling Destiny and painstakingly stitching together the version that’d ultimately ship a year later, in September 2014. The seams showed. Reviewers singled out the story in particular, knocking the vague plot, thin characters, and opaque dialogue. One line, unconvincingly uttered by a cold lump of person-shaped metal named The Stranger, encapsulated the game’s narrative problems: “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.”

By 2015, a lot had improved. The most recent expansion, The Taken King, has levity and charm the likes of which Destiny players hadn’t seen before. But questions remain. How did such an ambitious game wind up with such a bare-bones plot? Why did Bungie seemingly change so much of the story before it shipped? And how did it ship in a state that required so much tweaking after it launched? What really happened behind the scenes of Destiny?

In the summer of 2013, just over a year before Destiny came out, the story got a full reboot, according to six people who were there. Bungie ditched everything Joe Staten and his team had written, reworking Destiny’s entire structure as they scrapped plot threads, overhauled characters, and rewrote most of the dialogue. The decision was made against Staten’s wishes, sources say. Destiny project lead Jason Jones and the rest of senior leadership were unhappy with the writing team’s supercut, and their reaction was to scrap it all.

Destiny’s story went through several revisions before the reboot, but the supercut’s version revolved around players’ hunt for the warmind Rasputin, according to two people familiar with the original plans. In today’s Destiny, Rasputin doesn’t do much but listen to classical music in a steel bunker on Earth, but in the 2013 version, he would have starred in a more prominent role. Alien Hive would have kidnapped the machine and brought him to their Dreadnaught spaceship, which was later cut from vanilla Destiny and moved to The Taken King. Originally, this Hive ship would have been part of the main story. “The entire last third of the game took place on the Dreadnaught with you rescuing Rasputin,” said one person who worked on the game.

The story would have also starred a character familiar to hardcore Destiny fans: Osiris, described by one source as an Obi-Wan Kenobi-like mentor living in an ancient Vex temple on Mercury. Although Osiris has yet to appear in the version of Destiny that shipped, he does have a presence thanks to a competitive multiplayer gauntlet designed in his name: the Trials of Osiris. Groups of flawless victors in Trials of Osiris gain access to the enigmatic wizard’s Mercury temple, which was salvaged from the original story and reused here. In the pre-reboot Destiny story, Osiris served as a guide for the main player. He had a robotic assistant whose model was, according to a source, scrapped and reused for yet another character who will be familiar to hardcore Destiny fans: the Stranger.

She wasn’t the only character who would be reused. At E3 2013, Bungie played a Destiny gameplay trailer that showed a slick blue-skinned Awoken gentleman pointing a gun at the player character. Sharp-eyed players theorized that this Awoken was called the Crow, based on a pre-release screenshot of a mission (that does not actually appear in Destiny), instructing the player to “help the Crow loot the Academy archive.”

That theory was correct, sources say. In Destiny’s original story, the Crow would have met the players in an early mission—where we’d have witnessed the standoff from the screenshot—and worked with them to find Osiris. One person familiar with the original story described the Crow as rogueish and charming, not unlike Nathan Fillion’s character, Cayde-6, in the most recent expansion. “Basically, who Cayde-6 is in The Taken King was the personality of the Crow,” that person told me.

Bungie reused the Crow’s model for a new character: the Awoken Queen’s brother, Prince Uldren. They reused the name in the current version of Destiny, too—the Queen’s army of spies are called the Crows, and Uldren is their boss.

I don’t know what has gone on inside Bungie, but the output for Lightfall certainly doesn’t live up to the very high standards set by The Witch Queen. This is often the case with Destiny 2’s great expansions, they aren’t followed with good ones. Forsaken was followed by Shadowkeep, Rise of Iron followed The Taken King, although now many look back fondly on The Rise Of Iron.

This leaves me with thinking what is coming next for Destiny 2, and can Bungie redeem themselves in the year building up to The Final Shape. We are approaching the end of the Light vs Darkness Saga, and the next steps for Destiny 2, which you could presume means we’re about to leave our solar system via the portal created in the Traveler by The Witness. This could present us with a soft reset, or maybe even a hard reset. Destiny 2 itself is aging, it’s a game that came out in 2017, and although Bungie has done a good job in upgrading the engine in the background, the game still shows its age. Plus Bungie have a few other projects in the pipeline; they have the mobile game with NetEase, as well as a potential competitive hero shooter in the works, and an extraction shooter too based on Marathon. Destiny 2 is a cash cow for Bungie, brining in million of dollars, allowing them to fund other projects, but it’s showing it’s age and creaking at the seams. PVP players aren’t happy with the service they are getting and the game has veered into more a PVE game in the past few years. Now, the PVE crowd are getting unsettled by the campaign in Lightfall… you have to wonder if Destiny 2 will survive the end of the Light vs Darkness saga.

I want to finish on a hopeful note. Much of the post campaign content has been excellent, and while the campaign itself was a let down, that may be because of a time restriction. Some of the best story moments in the Witch Queen were drawn out over weeks and months, rather than condensed in the campaign. The Witch Queen had the benefit of years of build up, where as Lightfall really only had one year of build up with The Witness appearing in The Witch Queen for the first time. Season of Defiance is going on right now, and we have some powerful story threads in the game to explore – Crow and Amanda, The Bray Sisters, Osiris and Ikora, the yet-to-be-filled Hunter Vanguard position, plus a whole load more. I am hopeful that Bungie can flesh out the story in Lightfall, and hit the landing with The Final Shape.

Let me know what you think of Lightfall’s story in the comments.