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Root of Nightmares is here, and the reception has been generally positive among the Destiny 2 community. It takes place on an exciting location, The Witness’ ship, which took a blast from the Traveler’s eye beam at the start of Lightfall and is now filled with wild, Tree of Silver Wings-style growths. It’s stunning to look at, as all Destiny 2 raids are, and the encounters are well designed and interesting. Unlike last year, there were no major connection issues or bugs preventing players from completing it or jeopardizing the race either. The l🌞𝄹aunch was smooth, the raid is neat, and overall it’s a nice addition to Destiny’s selection of activities.
There’s not much to complain about, but it still feels like something is off. Root of Nightmares just doesn’t have the excitement and significance behind it that other Destiny raids have, and it's hard to put a finger on exactly why that is. It's an important event - a showdown against a powerful foe that has been building in the background since Shadowkeep, which came into focus during last year’s Season of Plunder. But when he finally went down it didn’t feel as special as many of our previous raid experiences. It wasn’t as thrilling as Deep Stone Crypt, nor as nostalgic as Vault of Glass and King’s Fall. It wasn’t as spectacular as Vow of the Disciple, and we had never even heard of its boss, Rhulk, until the raid launched. Nezarec is a great villain and the raid is well put together, but it's hard to ignore that the magic wasn’t quite there.
A large contributing factor to thatღ feeling is the Lightfall campaign itself, which launched only a week ago and is still fresh in everyone’s mind. The story of Lightfall is such a huge dis꧑appointment that it’s still a little hard to get excited about Destiny right now. Even though Bungie has stated twice now that we won’t start getting answers to Lightfall’s big questions until the next season, there’s still a lot of pressure on both the Root of Nightmare and the Season of Defiance storyline to make up for Lightfall’s shortcomings. Both the raid and the season are solid, but when there’s this much negativity in the air, anything short of greatness is bound to be perceived as not good enough.
Then there are all the usual raid c♚omplaints. A lot of people are frustrated that the race for World’s First was so short, which is something people complain about every year. The fireteam that won the race, Team Hard in the Paint, finished in just two hours and 25 minutes. The only raids that were completed faster were Scourge of the Past and Eater of Worlds, but those were both mid-expansion raids, and one of them was a smaller ‘raid layer’. Root of Nightmares also had ‘big room’ encounters and a final boss fight, rather than the customary encounter-boss-encounter-boss structure. With the race being so short, some people are calling Root of Nightmares a glorified dungeon.
People complain that Destiny has gotten easier over the years without acknowledging the fact that we’ve all gotten better. We seem to have the same debate after every raid, but then later we use the raid we complained ♛about last year to ding the new one. I’m sure, eventually, we’ll look back on Root of Nightmares fondly too.
It’s just a lousy time to be a Destiny fan, and Root of Nightmares biggest problem is that it wasn’t specular enough to change the convꦛersation. Lightfall was originally part of the plan when Bungie laid out the roadmap to The Final Shape. When it was announced during The Witch Queen reveal, the studio said that it needed an extra expa🦂nsion to tell the full story. Hopefully we’ll understand why that is by the end of the year, but as it stands it’s difficult to see why the shallow story told in Lightfall needed its own expansion. Root of Nightmares is a good raid, but it doesn’t do much to help answer that question.