The difficulty with games such as Destiny – continually evolving online worlds and communities with whims that change week on week – is that you never really know how well those changes have worked out until some time down the line. Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion came out last month, bringing with it new modes and features intended to win back players who felt the game had become facile and too predictable. It’s now enjoying an excellent Halloween-themed seasonal event, the Festival of the Lost.
The third expansion pack to the first sequel of a billion-dollar game is an odd place to rip up the rule book and start afresh. But time and again, that’s what Destiny 2: Forsaken does, and as a result Destiny has never been stronger.
The most obvious beneficiary of the fresh start is the new campaign mode, which sees the player’s Guardian avenging the murder of Nathan Fillion’s love-him-or-hate-him wisecracking robot Cayde-6. The ensuing quest for vengeance takes the player to two new areas, the Tangled Shore and the Dreaming City, as they wreak frontier justice on murderer Uldren Sov and his henchmen, the Barons.
This is, largely, portrayed through the medium of shooting aliens in the head with extremely satisfying sci-fi guns, of which developer Bungie is still the undisputed master crafter. A bow, handed to the player early on, is such fun to fire it feels almost unfair to the other weapons in the game.
Tonally, structurally and thematically, Forsaken consciously forges a different path from its predecessors. It (mostly) eschews sci-fi nonsense about space wizards for a clearer story about a quest for justice, delivered to the player in a less railroaded fashion than previous games, and with a newfound aspect of moral uncertainty to it. For a series that is basically about space zombies committing quadruple xenocide because their god, a giant marble, upset four alien species at once, it’s refreshing to see even a hint of something other than pure Starship Troopers-level devotion to the cause.
Even the aliens have personalities now. They are individually voice-acted and characterised with backstories. An interlude where one alien explains the pet peeves of another eight perhaps goes a bit too far in hammering that difference home, but the effort is appreciated.
Of course, a game like Destiny isn’t really about the campaign. It’s about what comes next. When Destiny 2 launched last year, this was where the fall came; at the end of a fun, focused and comprehensible campaign, players emerged into the light to find … not much to do. A conscious effort by Bungie to tone down the first game’s slot-machine approach to loot instead left many feeling like they were simply being told to stop playing – and they did.
So Bungie recanted. Now, there’s a surfeit of activities, with daily and weekly milestones sitting on top of, by my count, at least 20 different currencies to collect, as well as the same loot hunt that has powered the core game throughout. But this panoply of activities is a mixed blessing: while it never hits the same level of grind that the very first game did, if you have a problem with compulsive playing, be aware that Forsaken is not a game that you will ever finish. The list of activities to be completed grows as quickly as they’re checked off, and knowing when to stop is an exercise left up to the players themselves. The downside of the bounty system, meanwhile, is that every session begins with 20 minutes of running around getting missions before anyone can actually play.
Luckily, it’s fun. With the Dreaming City, a whole second area set aside for the end-game, Forsaken avoids the trap of simply asking players to redo levels they’ve already played, while the traditional assortment of co-operative Strikes, competitive Crucible matches, and open world Flashpoints provides a varied assortment of activities to hold your attention.
Those are bolstered by the best addition to the game, the “coopetitive” – cooperatively competitive – Gambit. Maybe it’s a function of Bungie’s development schedule, but where competitors are borrowing from the Battle Royale craze, Bungie seems to have looked to games such as Dota 2 for inspiration: Gambit pits two teams of four against each other in a race to kill the most aliens possible, periodically invading each other’s arenas to complicate matters. It’s hugely entertaining, allowing for Bungie’s world-class shooting-aliens-in-the-head expertise to be put to good use in a more competitive setting, outside the tense and twitchy head-to-heads of the Crucible mode.
Bungie knows it has a winner on its hands, already earmarking Gambit mode – and its in-game personification, the drifter – for a starring role in one of the three mini-expansions coming over the next year. The existence of those expansions, sold in a bundle as part of an “annual pass”, has been the source of some grumbling from the community, but going by the first month of the game’s lifespan, Bungie finally seems to be grasping what it means to keep a live game… alive.
Already, players have seen the Dreaming City blossom and collapse, they’ve been given time-limited dungeons and expansive quest lines, and they’ve been mining the game’s lore for hints about what’s to come. The price – £79.98 for the base game, the expansion and the annual pass – is a lot of money, but if you’re so inclined, it could easily be your last video game expenditure until September 2019, when the next instalment is expected. There’s just that much stuff here.
There’s still more stuff that could have been ripped up. Almost every character carried over from the first game is a wooden enigma with whom no human could empathise; the four basic alien races, known to players for years, are getting stale; and the six-person raids, the star attraction of the end-game, are still too hard for casual players to experience.
But Forsaken shows that destruction is accompanied by rebirth, and for the first time in years, I can say that Destiny is a game you should play.
