I’ve been sitting in a state of disbelief since finishing the Lightfall campaign. Bungie has spent years meticulously moving pieces around on a cosmic chess board, and it was all to lead us to this moment. Lightfall was meant to be the culmination of years of storytelling, the beginning of the end of the last battle between good and evil, and a cards on the table moment for our ultimate foe, The Witness, who is finally stepping out of the shadows.
Lightfall, unfortunately, is none of those things. The campaign is essentially a glorified tutorial for our new power, Strand, that fails to tell any kind of cohesive or satisfying story. By the time it’s over, we’re no closer to understanding anything of Destiny’s big questions than we were before it started. I had a lot of questions about The Witness, Strand, The Traveler, The Veil, and Neomuna before I started, and I have even more questions now.
A week ago, this didn’t seem possible. Last year’s The Witch Queen campaign was an incredible achievement in storytelling - not just for Destiny, but for video games. That story brought another Big Bad into the forefront, Savathun, and sent us on a journey to investigate her past and understand her motives. It was filled with surprises and major twists, and by the end we discovered some things that fundamentally changed what we know about Savathun, the Traveler, and our place in the Universe. The Witch Queen solidified many of Destiny’s core themes and set a new bar for the quality of its storytelling. Over the next year, each season built on that story and walked us ever closer towards our destiny: the Day the Witness would come and begin the second Collapse.
The Witness does indeed come, and Lightfall begins with an appropriately explosive space battle with the Black Fleet. From there we join Osiris as stowaways on an enemy ship heading towards the Neptunian City of Neomuna - a hidden world where something very important to both the Traveler and the Witness has been hidden, the Veil. Your objective in Lightfall is to find and stop Calus’ Shadow Legion from delivering it to the Witness. We don’t know what it is or what the Witness will do with it, but it seems safe to assume those are things we’ll figure out throughout the course of the story.
If you’ve finished the campaign, you know I’m being facetious because we never learn what the Veil is. The Witness gets it, they do something to the Traveler with it, and then Zavala tells us the Traveler is gone. I’m not sure how he knows that based on what we saw happen, but that’s the biggest problem in the campaign. Everyone around us either knows the answers to our questions and won’t tell us, or does not seem to care about the big questions at all.
When we get to Neomuna we meet the Cloudstriders, and we learn that during the collapse an escape vessel from Earth made it to Neptune and has remained hidden here ever since. The Cloudstriders are augmented with superpowers and protect the Neomunis, who are all living in a virtual world called the CloudArk. The Veil is connected to and possibly powers the CloudArk, so the Cloudstriders (and the Noemunis we meet) must know what it is. No one ever tells us what it is. The fact that the Witness wants it is supposed to be enough for us to care, but it’s not.
Even Osiris, who should be more invested in finding out what the Veil is than anyone, is completely disinterested in learning anything about it. All he cares about is harnessing the power of Strand, a mysterious force we discover as soon as we arrive in Neomuna. The Veil is the McGuffin that gives us purpose, but at its core Lightfall is the story about how we learn to master Strand. Like the Veil, we never learn what Strand is, why we can control it, or why it’s so important. I know more about the nature of this ability from the marketing for Lightfall then I do from actually playing the game.
Osiris tells us it's the key to defeating Calus because the Emperor has prepared for all of the power he knows we have, so we have to use one he doesn’t know about. This manifests in the form of suppression beacons throughout the campaign that negate our other powers, but ultimately the entire justification for Strand feels like a contrived way to center the entire expansion around a cool new combat mechanic, which feels like a massively wasted opportunity.
Lightfall and next year’s The Final Shape are two halves of a grand finale to the current Destiny storyline that started all the way back in 2014 when it first launched. Lightfall should have been the Infinity War to The Final Shape’s Endgame, and in some ways, it was. Our true foe, who has been lurking around the edges of the story all these years, finally made themself known. We tried to face them, first in a space battle, and then by challenging their acolyte over an object of power. We even acquired a new weapon to take on our enemy, and even though it briefly appeared that we had won, we ultimately lost. Lightfall has the same progression and end point as Infinity War, but without any substance. Imagine if, instead of shifting between all the different perspectives we see in Infinity War, the entire movie was just about Thor going after Stormbreaker, and even after he gets it we never find out what Stormbreaker even is.
The other unseen perspectives will be explored over the course of the next year. The Season of Defiance campaign establishes the ‘War on Two Fronts’, and we’re already seeing how the Vanguard, the Awoken, and the House of Light respond to the Witness’ ongoing attack on Earth. This week's TWAB acknowledges that there are big questions left unanswered in Lightfall and promises they will be in due time, but it’s hard not to feel like it will be too late. This should have been the moment that Bungie pulls back the curtain and establishes the stakes, but instead we got a total waste of a campaign about nothing that goes nowhere.
The Witch Queen and the year that followed built up so much good will for Destiny, the marketing for Lightfall did an incredible job building hype for the expansion, and more people were playing Destiny 2 during the launch of Lightfall than any other time in history, but this campaign utterly deflated what should have been a real moment for the game. The Witch Queen gave me so much confidence in Bungie's ability to tell a long form story like this, but now I’m worried it won’t be able to pull off The Final Shape.