A Glance At Destiny 2 From A Newish Player Who Hasn’t Played Recently and Is Completely Lost

I played Destiny 2 a while back. In fact, it was nearly a year ago! I played during the 2019 Halloween event and picked up some cosmetics, including a cool mask, which was equal to my power level back then. Afterwards though, I found Destiny 2 wasn’t really keeping me interested, so I moved on. However, I ended up getting dragged back this year, after the siblings started playing it.

Honestly though, I don’t know why, but it all feels like a mess.

Punched in the face with announcements.

So, as soon as I log in, I’m treated to a cut scene of bad things happening. The evil black triangles are attacking. I’m immediately sent on a mission to rescue Eris Morn. Basically, I’m being pushed into all the new stuff that’s going on. I don’t know who Eris Morn is, I don’t know what’s going on, but I might as well get on with it.

Once I’ve swapped all my items around of course. Because I loaded in to the mission to save Eris Morn and got instakilled by pretty much every enemy. I had to hide in a corner and swap all my gear around until the game realised I had weapons and could actually deal damage. The rest of the mission played out fine after I worked through the kinks.

After that though? I have a lot of announcements and things to go through.

All the old stuff makes zero sense.

And it doesn’t matter. When I stopped playing last year, I was in the middle of Warmind, the quest featuring the supercomputer Rasputin. Really, ‘supercomputer’ doesn’t quite cut it when discussing Rasputin, but it’s quite an intricate thing, with a lot of work put in to make it usable to the Guardians. Except it doesn’t matter what happened in Warmind at all, because I’m told right off the bat that Rasputin has been destroyed.

In fact, there’s spoilers pretty much everywhere. Okay, sure, everyone knows that Cayde-6 was killed, but I’m walking past the Drifter and he mentions it. Despite me having not even touched Forsaken yet. I wouldn’t call any of it spoilers though. These are things in the past that happened and now they don’t mean anything at all.

If anything, it’s all very contradictory. The previous campaigns are all in the past, soon to be nothing more than history, all the while some players are still working through them. Heck, in one place, I visited a location and there’s a giant pyramid there, that apparently belongs to the Vex. The Vex are trying to turn everything into, well, Vex, and the pyramid… sorry, the Pyramidion, is the source of it. But right next to that pyramid of death and doom is another, larger pyramid.

Literally right next to each other. It’s so… strange.

All in all, the new-ish player experience is pretty mediocre.

There’s no linear path for anyone to follow. I mean, I could tell you to go and play the Red War, but that’s going to cease to exist soon, the same with the other story campaigns. All we really have is a quest that’s tied to the current season pass, but that quest basically has you doing the same few things. You go to each of the friendly characters on the pyramid-infected worlds, do some bounties, report back, then do some more activities on each world. And that’s… kinda it.

It’s made worse by the fact that someone coming back to the game has no path to follow at all, and there’s no refresher mission to be had. The only real focus you have is split in two: do the new stuff, the season pass and the DLCs, or rush around doing the stuff that’s soon to no longer exist.

Also, watch out for the 950+ power level enemies roaming around in some of the soon-to-be-destroyed areas. Particularly Titan, which is actually a very small area. Heck, I’d recommend not going to where these enemies roam unless you are level 950 or higher. Maybe it’s part of the current incoming Darkness, maybe it’s not. But it’s a royal pain in the ass trying to kill Vex for a bounty on Io and then being instantly roasted by a pack of roaming enemies with big question marks by their names who just spawned in.

But the thing is, Destiny’s core gameplay is genuinely great!

The shooting feels great, there’s challenges to be had and there’s loads of guns to get. I can’t deny it, the actual entire core shooty shooty lark is really well made. And there;s so many cool designs and landscapes too. Despite that though, I just don’t… feel like I’m getting anywhere. All my past progress will be non-existent, everything I’ve done on half the planets will be gone.

All I’m left with is, well, a season pass and the Forsaken DLC, I guess. And then, I guess, shelling out money for a DLC, potentially to restore the content that we’re losing.