d2 lightfall I came across a recognizable-looking hangar bay on my way out of the first objective of Bungie’s newest Destiny 2 update, Lightfall, after taking control of an enemy vessel and setting it to explode. It was eerily similar to the Covenant hangars Master Chief attacked in one of Bungie’s first games, Halo: Combat Evolved, with its two-tiered design, a swarm of room-filling purple ships, and wall-length energy shields heading out into space.
Whether intentional or not, this visual double-take makes me realize that Destiny 2 is a game that is engaged in conversation with a rich past. With the exception of Bungie’s older games, Lightfall was released 20 years after Halo’s inception. While Bungie’s 2001 smash hit Destiny 2 may be largely unrecognisable in terms of polish and mechanical complexity, if you know where to look, it’s easy to see. You can see the layers and layers of history in the level design, the monsters, and the weapons (which were all homaged in Destiny 2’s 30th Anniversary update).
In many respects, Destiny 2 is designed for people like us who might see the traces of this past and who might even spend two paragraphs discussing a completely unrelated Bungie game in a Lightfall review. After all, the game has always had one foot in the past. There are pages in its menus titled “Moments of Triumph” and “Seals” that celebrate everything you’ve accomplished in the six years after the game’s first release. While continuing to destroy its heritage elsewhere, Destiny 2 celebrates it continuously.
The majority of the situations in Destiny 2 are no longer available. As new campaigns are published, older ones are retired. Playing the game is like entering a constant present that is created from the technical and narrative raw materials of the recent past. One example of this recursive pattern is Lightfall.
The narrative of the expansion goes all the way back to the opening moments of the first Destiny, when we all gasped in awe at the sight of that enormous white orb known as the Traveler floating Damocles-like over humanity’s Last City. What is The Traveler’s deal, anyway? is a question that Lightfall starts to address.
As dramatically as a moon-sized sphere is capable of doing at the start of a campaign, it launches into Earth’s orbit and challenges its longtime foe, the Witness. What was once a mysterious, passive entity has now actively taken part in the happenings. We have now witnessed the Traveler altering things and, in turn, changing itself, albeit it is still mostly a mystery.
The mechanical process of playing Lightfall also has an old-meets-new vibe to it. The campaign also gives players a new superpower called Strand in addition to an arsenal of new weaponry with a wide range of benefits (as is typical in any of Bungie’s expansions). With Strand, players can grapple through the air, hook onto foes, and smash them with a satisfying explosion, among other things.
You can see the forms and behaviours of earlier elements in Strand’s extraordinary mobility and its repetition of Destiny’s famous action of grasping and dunking orbs. Strand modifies the way the game was previously structured rather than completely reinventing it. Additionally, it helps gamers who have exhausted their patience with old content by making it feel new again. Old Strikes and Gambit sessions are given new life because they may now be addressed from an airborne perspective, free of gravity and common sense (judging by how simple it is to jump from a cliff).
D2 lightfall Setting
The setting of Lightfall is where it diverges the most from Destiny’s history. Even though you begin the game in the middle of a conflict near Earth’s orbit, Destiny quickly transports you to the planet Neptune, a whole new location.
Neomuna, the city that serves as Lightfall’s main setting, is a futuristic landscape that is covered in vibrant neon and whimsical percussion riffs. A pleasant addition to Destiny 2‘s already extensive visual patchwork is the Frankenstein-ed cyberpunk look and the wacky sci-fi patina that feels inspired by comics like Silver Surfer and Guardians of the Galaxy. Nimbus, an 8-foot-tall nonbinary humanoid dressed in a chrome, Hajime Sorayama-inspired costume and sporting a slick codpiece, will be your main point of contact.
It’s hard to say whether the gameplay and artwork, as polished as they are, will be enough to draw in the uninitiated given that Lightfall’s story leaves many unanswered questions and is only the beginning of a year’s worth of narrative and gameplay content. This demands a level of time investment that many new players might balk at.
Are they prepared to resume grinding when the campaign is over and dedicate themselves to a world that largely ignores them in favor of celebrating its “Veterans” (players who have been playing for six years or longer)? A game like Destiny 2, which has both its own history and a history that goes back to earlier series, is undoubtedly impressive. However, it begs the question of whether there is any room for individuals who have no connection to that past and who approach the game as spectators, seeing only a fraction of what must seem like a lifetime of recollections