Beyond Light – Wondering Why I Bothered with a “Part 1”

The other day, I wrote about the main campaign in Destiny 2. Beyond Light, as the name suggests, involves our player character discovering a new way to manipulate the world around us instead of using, well, Light. In that previous article, I named it “part 1” because I thought it’d be really long. Turns out, nothing is long when I have my happy ice sled Sparrow. So, uh, let’s just get back to where we were, having just beaten one of the big boss’s henchmen.

Just a heads up, I will be kinda spoiling things in this article. But Beyond Light has been available for a while now. And while it’s new to me, most people have probably finished their grinds.

The story was mostly average.

I honestly didn’t really… get into the feel of this campaign. It kinda just turned into a scenario we see all the time. Bad guy has good intentions but does it all wrong, generally dying due to their own hubris. That’s exactly what happened to Eramis as she managed to give herself Stasis powers. She ended up not being able to control the Darkness and found herself frozen, defeated by a Guardian that learned how to use Stasis half an hour prior to the final battle.

Exo Stranger though was pretty neat. I felt like I should have known them from somewhere. Turns out, she was in Destiny 1, which I never played. Eris and Drifter were both present as well. But aside from killing a random horde of Fallen, neither of them did much. Also, for some reason, Zavala visited me in the little base camp as well.

The ending annoyed me.

One thing I really don’t like is having control taken away from me. And Beyond Light did exactly that.

The very last part of the quest is to kill Eramis herself, in what I assume is her throne room. For most of this fight, when I wasn’t running away to reload my guns, I actually was beating down Eramis. A fight that I was handily winning for once. But as I got her down past her last health bar… BANG! A cutscene.

I wouldn’t mind a cutscene normally, but it completely fucked up the dynamic of our fight. I was handily beating Eramis using my standard Solar Warlock, fighting frozen stasis with searing flames. But the cutscene completely fucks all that up by Eramis suddenly getting up and freezing my character’s legs. I was winning but then I was suddenly losing.

Sure, we get a cool final battle of Stasis vs Stasis. But by then, I was too annoyed and just wanted to end it all quickly. Which I was struggling to even do because Eramis had 5 Servitors on her, constantly giving her immunity. It’s like the story fell down right at the last hurdle.

Stasis is pretty cool, I guess.

At the very least, Stasis does look very cool. It’s both icy and magical and full of stars at the same time. I haven’t really used the powers yet, but I do want to unlock the sub-classes. The new menu for Stasis is really good as well, much… cleaner and more informative. I can see why there’s a desire to have all sub-classes work the same way Stasis does.

I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me to unlock the sub-classes though. But that’s okay. I have patience. Occasionally.

If I had paid full price, I would have been annoyed.

The Beyond Light campaign is alright, I guess. It felt a little bit short though. Like, very short. I was asked if I wanted to do a dungeon while I was playing Beyond Light and said no, because I was expecting the quest to go on for longer. Not long later, I’m being thanked by Exo Stranger and Variks and my friends were still doing the dungeon. The story is alright, the battles are alright, it’s all just alright. But paying full price for the contents of Beyond Light felt… wrong.

Still, there was one small thing that I did very much enjoy. I wasn’t looking forward to Zavala being pissed off at me by using the Darkness. But no, it turns out that Zavala is somewhat understanding. Of course, he is concerned about what happened and does not like the idea of using Stasis one bit. But at least he is willing to take a chance with us. After all, we did stop a Fallen invasion…