Destiny 2’s Lightfall expansion is the biggest expectation versus reality letdown since Cyberpunk 2077, and much like Cyberpunk, I've struggled to judge it on its own merits, rather than against the marketing cycle that severely over-promised and under-delivered. As the game’s annual expansion, I also have to weigh Lightfall against last year's exceptional The Witch Queen, which set a new bar for storytelling in Destiny, and raised expectations for Lightfall as a consequence. But I want to be fair, to block out the context and just examine it for what it is, rather than what it should have been. Yet no matter how much grace I afford it, Lightfall still falls short.
The campaign picks up almost immediately where Season of the Seraph ended. With Rasputin defeated and the Traveler abandoning his post above the Last City, our foretold nemesis The Witness finally mak🍎es its move. Lightfall’s opening cinematic is spectacular, even if it was mostly spoiled by the trailers. A Star Wars-sized space battle breaks out around the Traveler as the Black Fleet moves in, and we join our allies in a desperate attempt to push back the forces of darkness and protect the Traveler, our🌸 savior, at all costs.
This is an appropriate escalation of stakes, and something we've been building towards since the Traveler awoke and obliterated Ghaul in Destiny 2's original campaign. If this is where Lightfall starts, surely things can only continue to escalate from here, right? The Witness sends his new disciple, Calus, one of our oldest and most compelling villains, to retrieve a mysterious object from Neptune, and we give chase. We're told it's over for the Traveler if Calus gets there first, so we have to beat him to the punch. This, we're told, is the beginning of the end.
This is the most consequential storyline we've ever seen in an expansion. Previous campaigns have involved minor villains and adventures that often felt like distractions, but this is the one everything else has been building towards. This is the point where our archenemy finally reveals itself, where all the other storylines converge and planted seeds start to bloom, and where we should have finally understood what was at stake. Instead, we got a prolonged introduction to an unexplained new power, and more questions without any answers.
It's no exaggeration to say we know as much about Lightfall's major players when the story starts as we do when it ends. The Witness is here, but we don't really know why. It wants the Veil, but we don't know what that is. We fight back with Strand, but we don't know what that is either. Lightfall spends almost the entirety of its eight mission campaign telling us how important Strand and the Veil are without telling us what either of them do. Worse, all the other characters seem ambivalent about these big questions. They seem content to pursue our goals because that's what the story demands of them, but how can we care if we don't really know what we're fighting for?
It feels like Bungie has written itself into a corner with Lightfall. The stakes are higher than they've ever been, but when it comes time to finally pull the trigger, it turns out the gun is full of blanks. When the dust settles we're told there's been a major change to the status quo, but it doesn't feel like that's the case at all. I'm still grinding playlist activities, turning in bounties, and slaughtering aliens by the hundreds with my superpowers. We're told that things will never be the same, but it sure feels like they will be.
Lightfall also fails its characters. The Cloud Striders of Neomuna have an intriguing history and culture, but they're both so poorly handled that by the end I didn't care to learn anymore about them. One of them is so clearly an expendable plot device that he announces his inevitable demise the moment you meet him, and the other is reduced to comic relief. Destiny has struggled to find a balance with humor since Cayde's death, and at this point introducing a wacky goofball character only serves to deflate what we're supposed to understand is a critically dire situation. Even Osiris, who has had years of incredible development at this point, feels both one-note and startlingly out of character here. We have seen grief and self-doubt consume him since his return two seasons ago, but it's unclear what his emotional state even is in Lightfall other than really, really passionate about teaching us Strand.
Strand is the saving grace of Lightfall, even if the campaign leaves us with a terrible first impression of the new subclass. Mission after mission we're allowed to dabble with the new power momentarily without ever being shown the full extent of its abilities, which left me feeling bored and unimpressed. It wasn't until after unlocking all of the aspects and fragments post-campaign - including the ones Bungie released early because the reception to it was so negative - that it finally clicked. Strand is a blast. The mobility and control it offers makes it feel so different from the other subclasses and fit a niche in a way that Stasis never managed to. I don't blame Bungie for putting so much emphasis on Strand this expansion, but Lightfall wasn't the story to do it in.
It's impossible not to let the story color my impressions of Lightfall outside the campaign, but the more time I've spent in Neomuna the less impressed I've become. The city is Destiny 2's first urban patrol zone, and compared to the massive scale and wide open areas of other locations, it feels distractingly unnatural. The city is empty, both for narrative reasons and for gameplay necessity, but that doesn't explain why it feels so hollow. Destiny's planets are transportative and spellbinding. They're rich with details and design that make them seem like real places you can explore. Neomuna feels more like a glorified Overwatch map. It's well designed for combat encounters, and I'm fond of the new Terminal Overload public event, but it doesn't feel like a world packed with secrets that I can't wait to explore. It's so rigid you can barely take one step past the edge of the street before ending up out of bounds. Compared to the Dreaming City, which feels endless and full of history, Neomuna feels dead on arrival.
Everything about Lightfall feels scaled back. There are fewer new weapons to craft, and all of the guns are reskins of old ones. There's fewer weekly activities on Neomuna than there were on Savathun's Throne World, and the raid didn't unlock anything new to do. The post-campaign missions were narratively stronger than the actual campaign, and the Vexcalibur exotic mission is exceptional, I will give it that. But we're just at the end of Week Three, and I feel like I've exhausted Lightfall in a way I've never felt with previous expansions.
Then there's the bugs, which have put a serious damper on my enjoyment of Lightfall. Launch bugs are nothing new, especially with all the new gear, the difficulty rebalance, and the major overhaul to the loadouts system - which I'm enjoying quite a bit - it's to be expected and it will get smoother out. But this is the buggiest launch Destiny has had. Between the terrible PC performance issues, the long list of deactivated weapons and mods, the invisible players, the inconsistent Artifact, and the one-shot enemies that are, apparently, tied to frame rate, it's a lot to contend with. Things will improve, but it just contributes to the overall feeling that Lightfall was rushed and under-baked.
The story of Lightfall will not be over until next year's The Final Shape begins. Narratively, Destiny has been moving in a more cohesive direction for the past couple years, and Bungie is promising that Lightfall will tell one continuous story from season to season. That's the justification for why the Lightfall campaign was so unsatisfying, but future developments won't be able to make up for poor storytelling now. Lightfall was originally planned to be the end, but Bungie decided it needed one more expansion to tell the full story. Right now, it's hard to understand why. This is not the penultimate chapter in Destiny's decade-long story anyone wanted, but even without everything weighing on its shoulders, Lightfall still disappoints.
Lightfall is the seventh and penultimate expansion planned for Dღestiny 2. Guardians will travel to Nep💦tune, and ultimately take on the Shadow Legion. It adds a new subclass, the Strand, a matchmaking function, and a new raid, the Root of Nightmares.
