I’ve played a lot of Destiny. While I’m far from the superfan our own Eric Switzer quite clearly is, over the past decade I’ve poured countless hours into Bungie’s looter shooter. Your girl was there for the alpha, beta, and base versions of the game on PS4 and Xbox One long before The Taken King pulled Destiny from its smouldering pit of mediocrity. I can recall the feverish hype fans were feeling ahead of its release, high with hopes that the creators of Halo could define the first-person shooter genre all over again. Eventually they did, it just took a while.
The beta period instilled a fear that this game was going to be much smaller than we’d expected. After wrapping up all the missions on Earth we set off to the Moon, with a look at the galaxy map seeming to confirm that only a few more planets remained for us to see in the full game. Did Bungie seriously offer a third of its work in a beta as it struggled to get together enough disparate parts to make up the full experience? A damning report published by Kotaku seemed to suggest as much, detailing how Destiny’s original narrative and most of the associated content was thrown out because apparently it just wasn’t working out.
Fans like me spent forever in abject denial trying to figure out how it could have all gone so wrong. The base game is a mess of repetitive missions narrated by a monotone Peter Dinklage with an endgame grind that pushed players away more than it invited them to indulge. Vault of Glass is a great raid and remains a highlight even today, but for a full priced product, it just wasn’t enough.
The House of Wolves and Dark Below expansions were equally lightweight, containing only a few missions that covered environments we’d already been to a bunch of times anyway. It wasn’t until The Taken King that Bungie showed what Destiny was capable of. Turns out a loot-based shooter across a shared world is pretty amazing when you’ve got a compelling villain to fight and a cast of characters you actually believe in and empathise with. Too bad it took so long to get there.
Destiny 2 came along after Rise of Iron and seemed determined to continue this trajectory. While it was still infatuated by proper nouns and highfalutin sci-fi fantasy bullshit, its bedrock of lovable characters and familiar locations didn’t demand an understanding of the lore to have fun. That was more than enough to keep me infatuated until the release of Shadowkeep. After this, I checked out and missed the likes of Beyond Light and Witch Queen, returning with the launch of Lightfall and a sad reminder of Destiny at its very worst. The story makes no sense, missions are dry and repetitive, and Bungie seems determined to throw away any and all potential. What happened?
It was hard to ignore the anticipation for Lightfall ahead of release. Fans were building it up as the penultimate chapter in a battle of Light versus Darkness set to raise the stakes like never before. The Witness was at our door and ready to crush the galaxy beneath its thumb, but instead it meandered through a handful of cutscenes before appearing at the end to steal the thing we’d spent several hours searching for. Campaign levels boil down to an extended tutorial for a mystical new power that the lore never bothers to explain or justify, expecting us to nod along and wonder why we’re ignoring the obvious genocide waiting at our feet.
Each mission was a string of following instructions, shooting everything, and hoping the mix of characters yapping away in your ear would eventually make sense. There was no urgency to finish the fight or stand alongside the allies you’d spent years standing beside. None even bother to check in once you get to Neptune, nor do they question your presence back at The Tower to pick up new quests despite the entire system currently burning to the ground. I get that live-service shooters like this need to extend our disbelief when the narrative operates amidst a platform that houses past, present, future, but the carefree attitude of Lightfall and its complete lack of comprehension drags down a final chapter we’ve yet to even glimpse. The unfolding season is going to have a hard time recovering from this disastrous introduction.
Despite my ample misgivings for the original Destiny, I still love it dearly for all the time I spent with it. After all these years though I hoped Bungie had moved beyond its flaws and was poised never to repeat them. Lightfall however, is a bizarre tribute to past mistakes that once almost doomed Destiny’s potential for good. Before launch, it seemed like nothing could go wrong, and all the pieces were in place for a sweeping space opera with obvious good guys for us to root for and baddies we were bound to vanquish. Dreams were instead washed away with half-baked mission design that sits awkwardly alongside some of the worst culprits from almost a decade ago.