There’s never really a “good” time to review something like a Destiny expansion, as it’s hard to know when you’ve fully consumed it all. I’ve barely scratched the surface on my new exotic collection, I only have 3 of 9 new subclasses and lord only knows when I’m going to be powerful enough to take on this weekend’s raid.
And yet with 50+ hours sunk into Forsaken so far, yeah, I have something to say, and all those missing pieces will be addressed later in different articles. This won’t be a scored review, so don’t scroll all the way to the bottom expecting an X out of 10, but there’s a lot to talk about here all the same.
Destiny 2 spent about half its first year being a pretty major disappointment, which started at vanilla release and carried through the underwhelming Curse of Osiris expansion. Then in the second half, Warmind was a solid bit of DLC that brought a number of new changes that made it seem like the game was heading in the right direction.
It is a bummer that Destiny needed a second “Taken King” moment in the form of Forsaken, as it shouldn’t have taken four years to re-learn some of these lessons, but that’s where we arrived. Fortunately, Forsaken has mostly delivered, fixing many things that were broken, creating a compelling campaign and the most involved collection of mysteries the series has seen yet in the Dreaming City.
We kick things off with the death of our old friend Cayde-6 at the hands of our old rival Uldren Sov. Why Uldren kills Cayde and is commanding an army of mutated Fallen barons, the Scorn, is something of a mystery, but this entire storyline is easily the best written Destiny campaign to date, even if that is something of a low bar. What I found most interesting is that it actually makes Uldren himself compelling, and once you learn his motivations and what’s behind his actions, you start to feel for him a bit, and this whole “revenge at all costs” idea becomes a little murky.
And yet, Destiny can’t avoid at least one major storytelling failure for the millionth time. Despite a teaser trailer that had fans ecstatic that our Guardian, you know, the main character of the entire series, had gotten a voice again, in the actual campaign, other than the trailer line, they speak only a single word. In such a personal story campaign it’s a huge wasted opportunity, and considering the community was giddy with excitement after the “Guardian speaks” trailer, I feel like at this point Bungie has to realize they’re screwing up by failing to give our Guardian a voice. If there was ever a campaign to do that, it was this one, yet in key scenes like Cayde’s death and Uldren’s showdown, we stare blankly, and say nothing, as ever.
Gameplay has changed in a few ways with Forsaken. We now have access to a wider range of loadouts with snipers, fusion rifles and shotguns more easily accessibly in other slots rather than being locked into an overcrowded power slot. The ammo economy is supposed to dictate your loadout to some degree now, but I find I rarely run out of it, meaning you’re pretty free to run whatever you feel like, which is a nice feeling, and the most freedom the series has ever had in this regard, even since D1.
I like the Scorn as an enemy type, and I have to give Bungie some credit for finally introducing a truly new enemy type after five years. Yes, they’re Fallen, but it’s a fully new race with no type of enemy a direct clone of anything we’ve seen before. As such, the campaign contains some of the best missions we’ve seen in Destiny for a while, especially the baron fights which include unique encounters and mechanics, including a few all-time greats like the Mindbender hunt.
The Tangled Shore and these missions are only half the story, however, as you eventually unlock The Dreaming City, a beautiful zone unlike anything we’ve seen in Destiny to date, one that is full of high level enemies and so many mysteries even the millions-strong Destiny community hasn’t solved all of them yet. The Dreaming City does contain its frustrations, like having only one fast travel point, and a new Blind Well activity that is fairly essential for the game (it drops new subclasses), but badly instanced so you can often wander into a complete empty version that will be impossible to complete alone. We’re still running into Court of Oryx-era problems all these years later, and I wish Bungie would figure out a solution.
I am still trying to fully wrap my head around the loot situation in Destiny 2. In true Bungie fashion, they seem to have overcorrected from “too much garbage loot” to “not enough loot” in Forsaken. You can run entire strikes, play entire Crucible matches or 30 minute games of gambit an end up with 1-2 blue items. Legendary gear does start dropping in the wild more often once you hit 50, but the pools here are very shallow. I think there was some idea that all past gear would start dropping with random rolls in this new era, but a ton of it has been retired, meaning you’ll keep getting the same items over and over.
That said, random rolls are a welcome change, and it’s nice to inspect every piece of gear you get to see if it could be a god roll. The best moment of Destiny 2 for me so far is getting a Dreaming City auto rifle with kill clip and outlaw, a feeling that has not been in the game since D2’s launch. Similarly, exotics are now truly exotic, not just in terms of their powers, but their rarity. It takes far, far longer to get an exotic than it used to, so when one drops, it’s truly a big “moment.” I think this is a change for the better, but I do understand a lot of people don’t want to spend 200 hours trying to farm one exotic they thought looked interesting in the launch trailer, and it’s tough to amass all these to simply play around with. You have to work to get them. Good for grinders, bad for casuals, but if we’re being honest, Destiny does tend to do better when catering toward the more hardcore crowd.
Some things are clearly in a bad place now though. While this was just changed as recently as yesterday, Destiny’s new weapon and armor mods are barely in the game at all, dropping in maybe 1 out of 100 legendary items, so I can’t really comment on this system yet. I also wish they worked like The Division’s mods where you can swap them in and out at will, because I have no idea when I’m going to finally commit to a “build” and I don’t want to have to dismantle gear to get my mod back later.
Similarly, infusion is a mess right now. There are two levels, super cheap and super expensive. Infusion costs only 5,000 glimmer if you infuse two items with the same name. But otherwise, it costs anywhere from 10-25 legendary shards, a chunk of planetary materials and worse of all, Masterwork cores. The Maserwork core idea is so bad that I have to believe that Bungie is going to change the requirement soon. As a Destiny addict I had about 150 cores to start Forsaken with, and that’s down to 100 in week one after Masterworking just a few weapons (as it costs about 20 apiece). For players without huge stashes, infusion is practically impossible. This is one change that I think was definitely not necessary, and all it does is make people equip stuff they don’t want to save on costs.
Back to some good news, the new subclasses that I’ve tried so far are all awesome. My favorite is easily fire knives hunter, which is how a class should truly be designed based around a specific mechanic, in this case, constantly refilling fire knives that you can practically spam with how often your melee returns. And the super isn’t bad either. Elsewhere, I’ve only played Superman arc Titan which is fun, and giant maul Titan which is fine, but not as good as traditional hammers. I have not even started Forsaken with my Warlock yet, but there are only so many hours in the week.
I should also touch on the Crucible and Gambit, two further pillars of Destiny past the primary focus of PvE. Crucible is in a much better place than it’s ever been with lower time-to-kill and a wider variety of “acceptable” weapons you can use, making it a less frustrating experience than it has been for months now.
Gambit is Forsaken’s PvEvP activity that combines mob farming and boss burning with some PvP dueling. I think Gambit has the potential to be really fun, as there are some tense matches as you race to burn down bosses and snag invader kills at key moments. But going up against coordinated teams is a nightmare if you’re with randoms that keep dropping 15 motes at a time while punching Cursed Thralls. I do think that Sleeper Simulant is almost singlehandedly ruining the invasion mechanic of Gambit, as it’s a one hit kill from anywhere on the map on another player, even with an overshield, even in a super, making invasion and invading rely around who can hit their Sleeper shots first. It’s beyond irritating and while I don’t want Sleeper nerfed, I wouldn’t mind it being banned from this mode.
Again, it’s hard to fully review Forsaken even after 50 hours a week in because there’s still so much to do. What’s very clear is that Bungie has designed this expansion for the very long haul, with only minor content additions to come over the next year. This is an expansion to get the game back into “hobby” mode, and the new leveling system which gives you miles of milestones every week for slow, steady progression seems like it’s going to achieve that.
While there are some questionable aspects of Forsaken, I do believe this is one of the best additions to Destiny as a franchise since launch. Bungie, as ever, is continuing to learn lessons and give fans what they want, as well as coming up with new creative things themselves like Gambit and the Dreaming City. What Forsaken turns into over the next year is unclear, but this is a very solid base to start with, and I can’t wait to keep playing.
A code was provided by Activision for the purposes of this review.
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