Destiny 2's Lightfall Expansion Falls Short on Story and Setting

Destiny 2’s Latest Expansion is a Light Fail (So Far)

Written by Timurhan Vengco and Timothy Valdez

Spoilers Ahead

Bungie’s Destiny 2 (D2) had one of its best years with the release of the The Witch Queen expansion in February 2022. Even as newer players, we can tell The Witch Queen showed that D2 was making strides towards the endgame of the almost 10 years-old “Light and Darkness” saga. Last year, players witnessed the return of D2’s biggest villains somehow wielding the “Light,” a force that is provided by the Traveler, this universe’s machine-god, to the player (aka the “Guardian”) in the game, which grants them extraordinary elemental powers and the ability to revive. Further, Bungie made several needed updates to D2’s gameplay, including revamping the elemental powers, adding in the more challenging mode for the campaign, implementing a weapon crafting system, and more. The Witch Queen saw the highest scores for a D2 expansion (85% on Metacritic) and the highest player counts in D2’s history.

As a result, Bungie had all the momentum heading into this year’s major and penultimate expansion, Lightfall. Unfortunately, our hopes were quickly dashed after spending a few dozen hours working through most of the expansion’s content.

Story and Setting are a Nim-bust

Lightfall’s campaign opens with an absolute bang, as the Guardian and their allies come face to face with a full scale invasion by The Witness, the universe’s ultimate big-bad, and his Black Fleet, as they plan to bring on the second collapse of humanity. The Witness brings the war to multiple fronts, including Earth and Neomuna, a newly discovered pocket of human civilization hidden on one of Neptune’s moons. However, Lightfall’s story quickly becomes an uninspired and incoherent mess once the Guardian makes their way to Neomuna. Rather than focus on the ensuing war OR lean into a “war on two fronts” angle, the solar system’s most capable soldier is essentially diverted away from humanity’s last stand and tasked to complete a glorified side quest far away from the main action…

…and it’s all downhill from here. Aside from the fact that Lightfall’s campaign feels like an 8 hour aside rather than a central story, D2 consistently spends too much time telling rather than showing the audience why the excursion to Neomuna matters. While on Neomuna, the Guardian is tasked to stop the Witness and his disciple Calus (another character revived from long ago in D2’s story) from gaining access to “The Veil.” While almost every character, good or bad, exclaims how important the Veil is for the Witness, we never learn why this object is so important or what it can do to help bring humanity’s destruction. Instead, the plot is mostly constructed by various tasks, such as “defend this” or “eliminate that” rather than making any meaningful headway into the lore of the Witness’ conflict with the Traveler.

D2 also fumbles opportunities to develop meaningful characters and moments within the campaign as well. While on Neomuna, the Guardian meets the 2 Cloud Striders Rohan and Nimbus, who are cybernetically-enhanced beings sworn to protect the moon and its people. Unfortunately, neither is given any interesting backstory or characteristics. Instead, their personalities are essentially rough caricatures of Murtaugh and Riggs from the Lethal Weapon movies, where Rohan is “too old for this shit,” and Nimbus is a brash young-gun trying to prove himself. To make matters worse, neither is given any meaningful dialogue, and as a result, there is absolutely no emotional weight when (spoiler alert) Rohan sacrifices himself to stop Calus from obtaining the Veil earlier in the story. Even Nimbus barely seems to react in any meaningful way to signal any deep loss.

Even the new setting of Neomuna is as empty and lifeless as the story of the campaign. Trailers, ViDocs, and other media from Bungie in the past few months showcased Neomuna as a neon urban metropolis reminiscent of Cyberpunk 77’s Night City or Batman Beyond’s New Gotham. This was teased as a big departure from any of D2's various settings. However, the city is as hollow as the campaign’s story or its characters. While skyscrapers tower over the Guardian and their fight with the Witness’ forces, it is devoid of any real life beyond holographic representations of a few citizens. The lifeforms that do fill Neomuna are for the same enemies that we have faced already in many other seasons and storylines across D2’s history.

Some Light in the Dark

With everything said about the campaign so far, we want to emphasize that there are bright spots. Lightfall brings back the “Legendary” campaign mode from The Witch Queen, which provided a worthy challenge whether we played solo or in a fireteam. To add to the challenge, players are also introduced to the “Tormentor,” a new enemy type that truly struck fear while making their way through the campaign. This new enemy forces players to maneuver around them as they can suppress our subclass abilities and take out almost an entire health bar from a single attack. Even though the Tormentors were a bit overused, they were a welcome addition to the campaign, since many of the foes we do encounter in the campaign are reskinned versions of other current enemies. Additionally, we are happy to report that Lightfall’s post-campaign content has some interesting content (in addition to the expected, grindy activities), such as a secret quest inspired by King Arthur’s excalibur and the seasonal content that sees the Guardian rescuing POWs from the warfront on Earth.

Our only complaint is that until very recently, the Legendary campaign’s difficulty spiked greatly in the last couple missions. After playing through all of the dungeons and some of the raids from previous expansions, we are confident in saying that this stretch of the game was some of the most difficult content to overcome – to the point where Bungie released a patch to make the struggles feel less impossible.

Despite the campaign largely falling flat in terms of the story, D2’s gameplay is still a brightspot throughout the campaign and its other modes. The first-person action shooter mechanics still feel extremely tight, each weapon has a unique feel to it, and the subclasses are still fun to play with. Lightfall introduces a new subclass, “Strand,” which is a psychic elemental power that allows the Guardian to manipulate the strings of reality (literally). This update to D2’s sandbox felt impactful and simply fun to mess with, as the subclass not only provides huge DPS opportunities, but now players can suspend enemies in mid-air or unravel them from existence. Strand also encourages more mobility than the other subclasses, as this power grants the Guardian the ability to use a grappling hook that allows for quicker traversal, as well as latching onto enemies and pulling themself into them to deliver devastating melee hits. The developers did a great job making Strand feel distinct, and thanks to the massive updates to the other subclasses during 2022, players have several interesting options for various builds and gameplay decisions.

D2 also made several changes to help the game’s quality of life moving forward. Players finally have the ability to create loadouts within the game, so it is easier than ever to switch between builds favoring certain subclasses, PVP content, etc. Bungie also overhauled its modding system, so creating builds is much more streamlined than before. We hope that these are signs that Bungie will continue to create more in-game tools to better track loadouts and inventory, and we can rely less on third-party sites to manage and analyze our inventory in the near future.

Bungie also improved its skill-based matchmaking in PVP content. In the past, we were usually destroyed in sweatier PVP content such as the Trials of Osiris or Iron Banner, but so far, we were pleasantly surprised to be faring equally against most of the fireteams we have come across in these first few weeks. Players can also now provide “commendations” to other players to signal if playing with a certain person was a positive experience, as well as a Guardian Ranking system to show how experienced a player is with the game and its various activities.

Now, we want to reiterate that these new tools aren’t perfect. Guardian Ranks are a huge grind to get to the higher levels, the commendation system is a little shallow, and moving items between the Guardian’s inventory and the vault is clunky. However, there is just enough positive change to make us feel hopeful that Bungie will continue to improve the players’ experience with each subsequent update and season. Additionally, we are still waiting for Bungie add any meaningful updates to many of its existing activities, including no new PVP maps, no new strikes, etc.

Concluding Thoughts

As a whole, Lightfall was one step back, then two steps forward for D2. The campaign’s story, characters, and setting were largely forgettable and disappointing, especially considering this is the penultimate expansion before next year’s expansion The Final Shape concludes the Light and Darkness saga. However, Bungie made just enough improvements to the gameplay and overall player experience to ensure D2 is still one of the most fun MMORPGs currently on the market, and we are legitimately looking forward to seeing if subsequent updates and seasons will help rectify a lot of the criticisms we laid out so far.

As it stands, we both give Lightfall a 7/10.