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(Below is a review I wrote and subsequently lost, shortly after Lightfall released. Enjoy my thoughts from a few years ago with some annotations at the end by present day me.)

Lightfall, the latest Destiny 2 expansion, officially dropped on February 28^th and along with it many strong opinions. For context, I am fairly active on Twitter but exercise the ability to avoid Reddit as a form of self-care. I, like many others, have been waiting the newest DLC with as much patience as I can muster. My (ex)husband and I even took a week off of work so we could play to our hearts content…and were we ever content. But after scrolling the timeline for the last few days it would seem that that was not a widely shared sentiment. To sum it up, I am loving Lightfall. Of course, I don’t intend to just leave it at that or I would’ve simply tweeted it and left it at that. But as I see anger and disappointment pervade the community, I’d like to maybe share a little bit of light.

(Below will contain spoilers for the Lightfall campaign, as far as one can play in the Season of Defiance campaign, the playable events on Neomuna, and the exotic quests. Proceed with caution.)

Similarly to the Witch Queen campaign, I played with my clan of three – father, (ex)husband, and myself – on legendary. This will be the first, last, and only time I will “compare” Witch Queen with Lightfall. The difficulty spike of three fireteam members was fun and challenging for the most part. As a newer player to the D2 universe (September of 2021) the only Osiris I knew was actually Savathun in cosplay as Osiris. I enjoyed getting to spend time with the Warlock himself and thought that his role in the campaign helped give it that urgent, acting-on-impulse feeling. Rohan would describe it as, “headlong and empty handed.” I also enjoyed being the cabal drop pod for once. Nice little uno reverse for the infinite number of times I’ve been destroyed by them personally.

Neomuna is gorgeous – give me all the neon please and thank you. I thought the city felt empty in the way a room feels shortly after everyone has left it. As if you can still feel their existence, their energy, but you can no longer see them. After all Nimbus let’s us know that they have been fighting the Vex for some time and now have Cabal, the Shadow Legion, on their doorstep as well. It made sense to me that people weren’t roaming the streets. Rohan noted early on (foreshadowing much?) that Cloud Striders have no ‘get-out-of-death-free’ cards via Ghost resurrection and that prior to our arrival they had never met Guardians in real time. So, everyone there is human and cannot risk their safety to be out and about when both the Vex and Cabal are tearing the city apart. I did enjoy the yellow holograms scattered throughout and the dialogue regarding the Neomuni using their “mobile platforms” to be digitally present was a nice touch. It harkens to our highly digitized world and the way we experience it differently through technology.

Arguably my favorite part of Lightfall thus far is one of the new characters we are introduced to. Nimbus is the epitome of what me, as a non-binary individual, aspires to be in terms of both physicality and voice. I don’t mind not being THAT tall though. I loved their character immensely and enjoyed that they were introduced in such a way that it let us know their existence was not treated as other by those around them. Much unlike our world today, especially at the atrocious laws spreading throughout the US, Nimbus just exists as themselves in a world that does not hate them for their existence. This is my dream for myself and anyone else who identifies as other than cisgendered or heterosexual. I could literally blather on for days about Nimbus but for the sake of our shortened attention spans and your sensibilities I will say this – Nimbus is supposed to be a little bit cringy and cheesy. I see them getting a lot of hate for that, but that cheese is how they are written. They’re portrayed as young and not quite understanding the gravity of what a Cloud Strider entails but has all the tenacity and grit to be great at their “job”. Throughout the campaign we see bits and pieces of Nimbus maturing as the gravity of all things Cloud Strider begins to rest on their broad and beefy shoulders.

But back to the campaign. We particularly struggled on Headlong as a trio. I ran my first playthrough as a Warlock (and did complete it on all three classes) and was flustered with feeling like I HAD to run Strand when it is a brand new class and did not allow for synergy with the builds or exotics I preferred to use to get me through the missions prior – largely osmiomancy-lock before swapping to starfire protocol with well of radiance. While I understand the intent, especially with the context of it being a training ground for Strand, the mixture of brand new, with the frenetic pacing, legendary difficulty, and add density made for a frustrating experience. (Yes, I am the person who gets frustrated with having specific weapons stopping specific champs – don’t give me 700 guns and limit me to 4 of them – a topic for another time.)

Eventually we discovered that the rally banner would be accessible if only one of the three of us communed with Strand, which allowed me to run Well-lock and secure our W by planting a well and blasting the boss to smithereens. By the third play-through I enjoyed Headlong (and did the time trial with my (ex)husband as well) but WOOF Headlong was a pain point. Looking at other comments on Twitter it seemed it was a mixed bag of love and hate. I won’t downplay the possibility that being autistic and ADHD may have played into my discomfort with the mission as it was borderline overstimulating.

Headlong was really the only mission I had any issue with. The Calus fight with three people is shockingly harder than with only two. Of course, it’s the penultimate fight of the campaign, so I understand the intent, but was surprised how much more damage a singular rocket did with two players versus three. Personally, I loved the Calus fight. It was an all-out brawl. Not a lot of mechanics, but a whole lot of running around and hoping for the best.

(Above is where the original document ended. Anything beyond these parentheses was added today – August 11, 2025).

Lightfall remains one of my favorite DLCs. It also lives in infamy as “one of the worst” if you let twitter tell it. And that is fine! Everyone is allowed their opinion. I just wish people understood that not liking something doesn’t make it bad any more than liking something doesn’t make it good. Opinions are highly personal as are gaming experiences. I eventually went on to secure the ‘Vidmaster’ seal as well as completed essentially everything available to me as a player on Neomuna. Sadly, I’ve not gone back much to visit, aside from a pit-stop to say hi to my beloved friend Nimbus (or Nimbultonium as I, for some reason, call them). One critique I would put out there is that a lot of the planetary destinations feel like there is little to no reason to visit once a DLC or mission is done. And with implementation of the portal, now you just launch lost sectors and the like straight from there – no planetary visitations required. But again, another topic for another day.

While not delving too deeply into the controversy of The Veil, I will say this: I believe the narrative team responsible for Lightfall cooked TOO hard. Lightfall read…well, played…like a novel from one of my literature courses in college. It did not come out and just say anything. There were layers and levels and quite honestly, I believe the writing for Lightfall was too highbrow for the intended audience. An analogy for you – it would be as if the third book in the Twilight series (a book you can love but have to admit is poorly written) suddenly was written by F Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. The messages there-in were subliminal and we were left with a lot of mysteries, which I found alluring as a player. Turns out, many did not and wanted to know everything at the conclusion of the campaign, which made no sense to me as the expansion was a year-long and we eventually got all our answers. I digress.

Whether or not you liked Lightfall, I hope you can enjoy this “blast from the past” written fresh (mostly) after defeating Calus in March of 2023.