but if you're looking for a tl;dr it's that I hope the live team keeps on the same extremely strong tick they had between WQ and LF because the expansion itself sure didn't do it for me this time around.
Lightfall Campaign spoilers below 'read more'
For the past couple years I've written about the annual Destiny 2 event, be it expansion or series of Seasons, for Giant Bomb's GOTY stuff and I didn't do one last year so I never got to really put my feelings down for Witch Queen. This isn't really the place for those thoughts so I'll keep it brief but WQ was Bungie at their best. Arguably one of their best single-player campaigns not just in Destiny's history but in the company's entire history. A beautiful new location, fantastic post-game content, a great raid to follow-up, and a narrative that both felt like a self-contained story and a terrific setup for the larger world narrative. It gave us so much new lore stuff while re-contextualizing a lot of existing things in a way that felt like a true accomplishment of delivering a story year-to-year like this. FFXIV Shadowbringers shit.
It was probably its fault that everyone went into Lightfall with those expectations in mind, then. That lightning would strike twice and whatnot. It didn't! Actually, maybe it did only this time lightning struck me and now it hurts and I'm upset.
I don't want to write this to break down everything I don't like about Lightfall because listen at the end of the day, Destiny is still Destiny. I still love it, it's still fun to play, and it's still a thing I can passively play while focused on other stuff or dedicate my time and concentration to it and leave feeling rewarded. But Destiny's never been my favorite game because it's just that, it's also because its world and story and characters are incredible, and they wholesale got done dirty in Lightfall.
The entire Lightfall campaign is centered on the securing of a previously-undiscovered artifact called "The Veil" that is only ever referred to as "The Veil" for the entirely of the campaign until you discover it and it's, at first glance, a giant lens and on closer examination, a giant plant thing. You discover its true purpose after an infuriatingly poor boss fight against Calus, both mechanically and narratively, (More on that later.) and realize The Veil is actually an organic thing that acts as a link between The Light (Traveler) and The Dark (The Witness who is either the darkness himself or at least an agent thereof). The link allows the Witness to breach the Traveler and ... slice 'im up and idk mindmeld?
Shit really started to fall flat before but the end of this all is bewildering. The catalyst for it is your ghost being controlled by The Witness (why) despite Osiris pleading he doesn't a second too late (how did he know) and when the Traveler does get ganked, you're not given any indication as to what this means. Is it dead? Is it activated? Is that inside the traveler, is it not, is it a different space a different plane a different world. You don't know! That's the end. Your ghost gets shaken up and goes whoa what happened and you end up back in the Tower where Zavala greets you and goes "So, the Traveler's dead." and ??????? Excuse me???????? It is???? What the fuck?!
Ikora provides some additional clarity by saying she can't feel the Light which might mean it's not actually dead but again, ??????
Destiny's lore has always felt like I never had all the answers never because it withheld anything from me, just that it felt Bigger Than Me, if that makes sense. Like, in the way that if I acted like a scholar I would. I could read, I could infer, I could interpret, and I would understand. With Lightfall I'm just... I don't have the answers because I can't ask the questions because I have other questions I need to ask just to understand the actual situation I'm in. There are pages missing, here, and what I can find is obtuse for no purpose other than what feels like withholding information for a later date. What actually is the Veil? (Someone here has what feels like the best interpretation so far.) What is the Radiant Mast other than A Thing You Needed to Stop. Why was Ghost controlled by the Witness only momentarily. Why does Ghost activate the Veil. Why does the Veil even need to be activated in the first place.
All of those questions come off the tail of a truly unsatisfying final confrontation with Calus, the most long-standing villain in the game to date, who's narratively turned into nothing but an Angry Man Who Wants to Fight You which has never been Calus. Calus' entire thing has been bringing about the end of existence and seeing you try so fucking hard to stop him and succeeding every time. He's obsessed. He loves it. He feeds on it. Slurps that shit up like left over maple syrup on a plate. And after you destroying the Radiant Mast, The Witness gets mad, Calus gets scared, and he just kinda fucks off outta the picture for a while until you go and secure the Veil and now Calus is here and he's gonna fuckin' fight you because.... ? Because he needs to activate it, maybe? Why? How? Does he have a ghost I don't know about that he's gonna use to put into that shit and make it go brrr?
I didn't have the mindset to figure it out because I was so bummed by the encounter itself just... being a mess. An arena meant to encourage the use of Strand subclass when I'm playing on Legendary and need to roll with my bread and butter shit to maximize damage and minimize dying. I don't have a Strand built yet and I'm not gonna fuckin' figure one out now because I'm in a boss fight and also because I don't have the subclass yet I can't actually make a build. After 30 deaths I asked a clan friend to pop in and we duo'd the fight to completion after a few tries from either slinging ourselves off the map with grapples or dying to Tormentor bullshit.
It's a bad fight, mechanically and narratively. The way Savathun's final fight was structured was so brilliant and felt so interwoven with the finale of her arc. Calus might as well have just screamed NICE GUYS FINISH LAST from the center of the arena.
There's also the very personal thing which is that I have no screenshots to show you because frankly... there wasn't a lotta art in Lightfall that had me going like Oh Shit. Neomuna is cool! It's really pretty, and the start giving me hard ODST vibes? That's the good stuff. But beyond that like... yknow, the architecture is familiar. It's got somewhat similar language to Braytech stuff which makes sense considering how hard Bungie's been retrofitting Clovis' dirty hands into everything about humanity's past in that world. The network stuff looks a lot like the Expunge weekly missions from a couple seasons back, which... idk. You're infiltrating a Vex network but I was hoping there'd be a wholly different look for the actual CloudArk stuff? The only time I lost my mind was at the very end where you're approaching the Veil and bomb into a incredibly old Ishtar Collective facility. It's all old Golden Age tech and it's a great moment because you've now stumbled into really really old history. That's the stuff!! That's the stuff I feed off of! And you're barely in there long enough to take it in before you're told hey Calus is here with you and you're gonna fight him.
Deflated. That's largely how I feel. My fault for getting that excited but how could I not? Witch Queen was so strong and Season of the Seraph before Lightfall was fantastic. There's a lot of just... hard guesses people have been throwing around about what could have caused Lightfall to end up the way it did but idk. That's only conjecture, we might never know. I just hope the next year of story is stronger.
