Destiny 2’s Halloween Event Kinda Sucked Too

The other day, I rambled on about how Warframe’s Halloween event sucked. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of games are having a slow Halloween this year. Destiny 2 at least had a few new things, including some cool Halloween costumes. But, like a lot of other games, Destiny 2’s event was tedious and not even that spooky.

Bye Bye Infinite Forest, Hello Haunted Lost Sectors

For previous years, Destiny 2 had the Infinite Forest. The Halloween event was pretty damn simple: rush through a Vex simulation killing as many enemies as possible, with random areas every time. A massive Hive Knight which was immune to everything kept us on our toes. At the end, you’d get a chest full of loot.

This year though, we have haunted Lost Sectors, and a magic book to fill out. We need to find magic pages for the book by doing normal D2 gameplay, then take the pages to a haunted Lost Sector to decode them. Doing so would unlock a few prizes, like a new shader.

Sounds simple, but it was actually a bit of a pain.

Obtaining pages was very slow

Before we do anything, we need to get some unreadable magic pages. A lot of them are needed, because, well, magic books are useless without pages or people to read them. Pretty much any activity would grant spectral pages, in bundles of 1-3 at a time. The quickest way to do this, funnily enough, was via Public Events. While every activity did create pages, Public Events didn’t require you to go back and worth via loading screens. The place with the most public events was actually the European Dead Zone, and seeing rank 150+ Guardians was actually quite common.

Once you had your pages ready to go, it was time to do Haunted Lost Sectors. Doing Haunted Lost Sectors, you can decrypt up to 10 sheets at a time, to be placed in the haunted book. We basically had to stand on circles to summon a Haunted Headless Guy, and then kill them to translate the pages. There were also plenty of enemies trying to kill you as well.

The haunted lost sectors are weird

I do like the decorated Lost Sectors, but I also find them rather small and cramped. Normally, small and cramped is fine, but there was a LOT going on in these Haunted Sectors. Not only are we fighting tons of enemies, but we also have to kill haunted headless pumpkin-brained Hive Knights too. The Knights in particular were damn annoying, because they’d spawn and throw you backwards, and did the same bloody produce-a-shield-suddenly tactic that normal Hive Knights do. And because the rooms were cramped, the slam attack would cause damage to us as we hit the walls.

Honestly though it wouldn’t have been too bad. However, the inclusion of exploding enemies at random really was not fun. Not only are you dodging normal enemies and a guy with a pumpkin on its head, but you need to avoid enemies that explode as they rush to you. This is made worse by the Sectors being very small and cramped. Especially the Lost Sector on Europa. The starting room for that haunted sector is bigger than the actual fighting takes place.

Rewards were kinda meh

Like any event, there’s always some sort of reward at the end. In the Festival of the Lost, we got two auto rifles from previous years, plus a new Pulse Rifle, Jurassic Green. Weirdly, the gun only really matches the Bright Dust costumes in the Eververse, the three Dinosaur sets. The Pulse Rifle is, well, okay, I guess. Nothing special. But damn you’d get a LOT of them. I came out of one Haunted Lost Sector with 6 of the bastards. Good for legendary shards, at least.

Speaking of Eververse, I ended up buying my first Halloween ornaments. My Triceratops set looks pretty nice, but both Titans and Warlocks are outshined by the Hunter and the Velociraptor set. Still, I like dinosaurs overall so it’s not too bad.

We also had another reward. If you bought all of Eva’s masks, then you’d get a unique Sparrow.  The masks get more and more expensive over time, but, thankfully, candy drops like.. uh… candy. Either way, getting candy for this event isn’t difficult at all.

Overall, tedious but fun.

At the end of the say, this event was, well, alright. But I think I preferred the Infinite Forest. At the very least, it was much larger and not as repetitive as the Haunted Lost Sectors.

There was one cool part of the Festival of the Lost. The entire event was narrated by Glint, a very friendly Ghost. It was genuinely nice having someone talking to you and actually seeming happy and pleased to be with others, despite everything else going on. Glint is a great guy.