Random Thoughts on the Witch Queen Campaign

For my birthday, my brother bought me a copy of Witch Queen, the new expansion for Destiny 2. I had been holding off buying it for myself for quite a long time, due to the fact that I don’t really play much Destiny 2 in general. However, since it had been gifted to me, brother and I decided to play through the main Witch Queen campaign, a whole new story to be unraveled.

In all honesty though, I’m not too sure about it all. I can’t tell if I liked it or not.

Felt short

Maybe it’s because I wasn’t playing solo, but the entire campaign felt very short to me. Not as short as either Forsaken or Beyond Light, but it was over way more quickly than I expected. Each of the individual quest parts weren’t that long, and also included the new strike into its play time, perhaps as padding. However, I kinda felt myself rushing from place to place, since, well, someone had stolen the Light from us, and we needed to take it back.

Well, Savathun didn’t really steal it. We could all still use our own Light to do things. But she was clearly plotting to do a lot of different things, and one of those was that she planned to capture the Traveler and store it inside her own domain. I don’t know why, but that seemed familiar. Turns out the Cabal had attempted something similar a while back.

Really though, it’s all a mess of confusion. There’s confusion and lies all over the place, to the point that Savathun, the mistress of lies and deceit, gets caught out too. Turns out, pretty much everyone involved gets tricked or tripped or in some other way, very bamboozled. It’s a confusing quest.

The Throne World is beautiful.

As always though, the campaign was a feast for the eyes and ears. Savathun’s Throne World is absolutely stunning, a citadel and a pinnacle of Savathun’s mind, made real. The Lucent Hive that follow Savathun are also much less hideous and more streamlined, compared to the Hive you find in the wild.

That being said, I’m not so sure about the swamp areas. They seem… kinda random. Maybe they reminded Savathun of her home world, where she originally came from or something. But yeah that’s all just murky base terrain. The cool stuff is all inside the massive citadel that Savathun built for herself.

Either way though, the art direction is astounding and the sounds and music are also amazing. The art team really nailed the look and feel of pretty much everything in Witch Queen.

Maybe I should play the campaign again.

Really, the thing that holds me back a bit is that I played it with friends, who had already done everything before. Because of that, I ended up completing the campaign really quickly. I barely even got a chance to look at the puzzles. I would have worked out the puzzles anyway, they weren’t that hard, but playing in a group sped things up way more than I thought. Playing with a friend did mean I didn’t waste hours on puzzles, but I never really got a chance to stop and sniff the Hive version of roses.

I suppose though, we did get something genuinely terrifying. The very last part of Witch Queen doesn’t actually have much to do with the Witch Queen. We can now put a face to the otherwise featureless Darkness. We finally caught a glimpse of the Witness.

And it is on its way to our little solar system…