Destiny 2: The Witch Queen Review
need to know
What is it? The fourth expansion for Destiny 2.
expect to pay $40/$35
Release date February 22, 2022
developer Bunge
Publisher Bunge
review Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, RTX 3080Ti
multiplayer game? Widely
Since its release, Destiny 2 has been cursed for reinventing itself with each expansion – always building toward the hope of a better, more sustainable future. Starting with Forsaken and continuing through Beyond Light in 2020, Bungie has made multiple overhauls to every aspect of the game – weapons, armor, abilities, activities – each time fixing some issues, but introducing loops that inevitably lead to loops Duplicate new question. No matter what changes are made, Destiny 2 always feels like there are some major tweaks from true brilliance.
If The Witch Queen does one thing right — and in fact, it does a lot — it’s that it brings consistency and stability to the game. It adds new features, yes, but they’re all enhancements and advancements to the systems and ideas introduced in Beyond Light. This rare continuity makes the Witch Queen stand out in a more meaningful way: as Destiny 2’s best expansion. Finally, that future is here.
(Image credit: Bungie)
At the heart of it is the campaign, which for the first time in Destiny 2’s history is a compelling reason to recommend this expansion. Previously, Destiny 2’s campaign was little more than a road to endgame — short quests tied together by strictly templated repeatable activities and open-world hectic work. Here, though, it feels like the main attraction.
Each of its eight lengthy missions is full of character, advancing the story through a series of standout encounters and occasional surprises. It starts with your raid on a Cabal base on Mars – after returning recently, err, borrowed In the dark – in order to launch yourself from the cannons onto the titular Witch Queen’s ship. From there, you’ll find a portal to the world of her throne, a creepy alternate dimension made into a physical representation of the owner’s personality.
What is the Throne World of the Cunning Hive God like? The swamp is mainly bordered by a huge ivory castle. We’ve seen a lot of Hive architecture before, and while the broad themes remain, Savathûn’s show-off taste ensures that it doesn’t feel like you’re renovating old land. Aesthetics is also about the story. Shortly after arriving, you discover that Savathûn now possesses light – the same space magic that powers most of your powers. Discovering how this happened was the driving force of the campaign.
(Image credit: Bungie)
I like that it’s not afraid of being weird. Legend of Destiny has always been shit, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from playing the game. Now, though, it feels like Bungie is embracing its more outlandish sci-fi concepts, putting them front and center as they build toward an eventual confrontation between light and dark.
hive mind
As a result, I suspect this will confuse new players. Destiny 2’s new player experience is already pretty bad — in part because of Bungie’s decision to remove the old campaign. The quest system works when you know the history of the game, but it does a poor job of pointing out what you should do and why. The witch queen has little to do with that. While the campaign does a decent job of highlighting key mechanics, it doesn’t have a clear approach to the overall pacing of its story or ending. My advice? Read the book of grief, jump in, and accept the fact that at some point you just go with the flow.
As a veteran player, I’m used to being disappointed by the delivery of Destiny’s story. Shadowkeep was a couple of cool moments that ended up with a bunch of rituals and macguffins. Beyond Light introduces and dispatches its main antagonist with little fanfare, and rushes through major beats with little chance to stop and think about what they mean. But here, over the past year-plus of seasonal stories, the work of making Savathûn feel like a menace has really paid off, and the twists and turns along the way feel quite big and dramatic. Finally, Bungie takes full advantage of the fact that Lance Reddick voices one of the game’s main characters.
(Image credit: Bungie)
Of course, the shootout is also great. This has always been one of Destiny 2’s strengths, and the campaign’s encounter design makes good use of it. I’ve heard that on Normal difficulty, the Witch Queen’s campaign won’t be easily overthrown. But I’m playing Legendary – a new difficulty mode that hard limits your power level below mission requirements and adds new modifiers and elements of challenge. Feels good for anyone with a properly populated Vault and a working knowledge of armor mods. A lot of hard encounters forced me to get involved in the construction of Destiny 2 in a way that rarely happens outside of the toughest endgame events. It allows the complexities of many ability systems, weapon perks, and mods to shine through.
Legendary campaigns are a promising sign of Bungie’s current thinking about difficulty.
Thanks to a new enemy type, the Lucent Hive, some tactical complexity has also been added. These little light-wielding bosses equip yourself with various powers that make them deadly. But you can’t just kill them: unless you melee their ghosts, they will respawn after being killed. This creates different range considerations and forces you to clear any smaller enemies around you, leaving large, deadly targets until you’re sure you can safely kill them.
The Legendary campaign isn’t just a fun challenge, it’s a promising sign for Bungie’s current thinking on difficulty. It’s the missing piece in a game that, until now, has oscillated between mindless shooting (which is fun enough on its own) and cooperative endgame activities, forcing optimization of the entire Fireteam loadout. Legendary campaign has no match game modifier, which makes shields resistant to mismatched elemental weapons. It also doesn’t use champions that require specific seasonal mods to stun. Conversely, you gain incredible freedom when building loads, even if you’re doing it alone.
(Image credit: Bungie)
Inevitably, my run on the Legendary campaign ended with my heavy investment in the new Void 3.0 subclass. This isn’t an entirely new system, but a redesign of the Void ability tree to match last year’s static abilities, using Aspects and Fragments to create highly customizable builds around a handful of Void-specific keywords. As a Warlock workhorse, my main keyword is Devour, which restores health on kills. It’s always followed, but now it’s not just an isolated effect. I can choose how much I invest in each keyword through passive shard bonuses, mods, exotic armor, and even weapon selection.
into the void
There are currently three major drawbacks to this system, all of which speak to how good it is. First, quite simply, it currently leaves an imbalance in the Light subclass. Void is better than Arc or Solar at the moment, although this will be fixed as each will get their own 3.0 rework in future seasons a year from now. The second is that by associating the system with explicit keywords, Void 3.0 is arguably better communicated and more customizable than the Stasis system that inspired it — suggesting that last year’s additions may need their own updates to reach the spec. Third, it highlights how ridiculous it is that Destiny 2 doesn’t have an in-game system for saveloading. As buildcrafting continues to be pushed in more complex and customizable directions, using a third-party site like DIM – which leverages the Destiny 2 API to let you create and equip builds – has become mandatory.
After the campaign, Destiny 2 returned to a comfortable rhythm, chasing loot through repeatable activities, interspersed with the occasional exotic quest. As a destination, exploring the world of Thrones is fun, although I’m disappointed – aside from a few activities and secrets – Savathurn’s status as a cunning god is nothing more than pressing F on a large orb to reveal some hidden platform. The new location provider, Fynch, has its own reputation system, which is established when completing quests in the open world, or through new instance campaigns like Wellspring. Granted, that gives you plenty of reasons to revisit, but I still don’t think Bungie is making the most of its destination. This came into focus during my last trip to the Magic Coast with some friends, before it was removed with the release of The Witch Queen. Another cool space that I’ve had no reason to explore for years other than bounties and busy work.
(Image credit: Bungie)
I also don’t like that Bungie hides Pinnacle activity behind Fynch’s reputation system – it needs to hit the highest level cap. You’ll need a Throne World rank to access the weekly campaign challenges and the Master difficulty version of Wellspring, as well as their rewarding Pinnacle Engrams. Given that the launch of this season’s Grandmaster Nightfalls in Iron Banner, Trials, and next month has caught up with the Pinnacle cap, it makes sense to work on a system that should give out rewards consistently throughout the year.
I’m fine with any season that offers a wave rack grenade launcher.
The rhythm of fate is now so comfortable, and it’s not a bad thing. Again: this is a game that until now seemed obsessed with constantly reinventing itself. But with last year’s Chosen Season, Bungie finally found a seasonal model that seemed to work. So this year the same template returns, unchanged. This year’s seasons will once again be placed in Helm, and once again offer weekly storylines tied to new events, where you unlock upgrades each week to further boost rewards.
By setting the format, any single season is mostly good or bad due to two factors: the activity it adds, and the loot you can get. By these standards, Season of Resurrection, which launched alongside The Witch Queen, is on the better end. Psi-Ops Battlegrounds playlist…good. acceptable. It twists familiar locations to fit into the aesthetic Savathûn prefers, which is cool but overly familiar in terms of rhythm and purpose. But it got passed because the guns were good. I’m fine with any season that offers a wave rack grenade launcher.
(Image credit: Bungie)
In fact, I already have a pretty large wish list of guns to get throughout the game. It’s clear that Bungie took his complaints about Beyond Light’s disappointing small arsenal to heart, as The Witch Queen has added a slew of new guns throughout. They’re also popular because the new Origin feature gives them additional benefits based on where they come from. None of these perks feel particularly excessive – so far, if I use one of my old weapons, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. But I’m more likely to chase new seasonal weapons as they all come with land tanks which increase damage resistance on kills.
Cheer up
There are systems designed to reduce the pain of obtaining specific loot, with varying degrees of success. Bungie will continue to overhaul vendors, allowing you to focus your rewards on random rolling of specific guns. This season is Drifter getting an upgrade. As with the Void Rework, this leads to a slightly awkward imbalance where certain Gambit guns are more accessible than the ones in the Vanguard playlist. But that’s the result of not reinventing the game every year. Instead, Destiny 2 entered the era of rolling, steadily improving. Zavala will have his turn in future seasons.
A more deterministic path is the new crafting bench, which finally gives players a route to the exact roll they want – albeit a slow one that doesn’t completely exempt RNG….
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