Welcome to the Bakery!

(There will be spoilers for the campaign, as well as discussions of game play beyond the campaign’s end.)

Before I get into the review, here are my cliff notes hastily jotted in discord to level set:

The Nine have always intrigued me, largely due to their usage of the color teal and their wayward child, Xur. Their lore has been quite interesting despite me starting later into the life of Destiny 2 and being forced to play catch up. Having the next chapter in the life of Destiny being themed around The Nine had me hooked from the second it was announced. In my typical fashion, I played the campaign on legendary with my day-one fireteam partner, my dad. Since I’ve started playing we have always done our first play throughs together and this campaign was no different.

To no one’s surprise, the campaign is quite strong from a narrative perspective. They successfully introduced us to the new “Big Bad”, gave us some incredible back story on Ikora Rey (also some incredible hair), and introduced us to new characters including a new people – the Aionians – and a new location, Keplar. We’ve known Crow’s past for some time, but to learn about Ikora prior to being the legendary Warlock she is now was very cool. As a fan of trains and someone who lives in Chicago, I also enjoyed those aspects as well. Although less so the usage of the railcar system by the Nine.

‘Next stop – resuscitation by The Light’

Too soon?

Anyways, Keplar as a location is beautiful, albeit a bit confusing and quite easy to get lost. The map is decent-sized and has a lot of areas that have both upper and lower spaces, which at times had me longing for the dashed line in Death Stranding that seeks to say “Hey, this is EXACTLY where you need to go”. But overall, lots of secrets and places to explore. Unlike the introduction of Neomuna, I felt like I could wander without being in constant fear of being one-shot by a wily red bar.

Orin, a character we’ve had history with, utilized her rights under at-will employment and broke free from The Nine. Her quips and dialogue often had me laughing and she has one cool set of Titan armor….*hinthintbungie*

And before the pitchforks come out, let me get to one of my favorite NPCs: Lodi.

Lodi is an incredibly written character voiced by the talented Brian Villalobos, whose been such a wonderful addition to the Destiny 2 community. He’s charming, he’s hilarious, and personally I feel as if his reactions are correct and similar to how my own would be if I found myself in his shoes. Why is everyone just walking around like everything is totally normal? Lodi’s entwinement with Ikora pre-badass-Guardian-powers was also intriguing and seeing his new assistant-to-The-Nine position at the end of the campaign has me excited for more.

Gameplay for the campaign had its highs and lows. Some of the missions were incredibly fun and I appreciated the ingenuity of how Bungie developed mechanics and encounter puzzles using matterspark, mattermorph, and the relocator. Matterspark did give many people motion sickness, which Bungie attempted to address quickly, and getting my Samus on was fun…at first. As I’m never a fan of jump puzzles, mostly because I am terrible at them, having to do them AS A GLOWING BALL made me question my sanity a few times.

The usage of matterspark on the final boss not only cost my father and I a few runs as I failed jumps but was an interesting choice on Bungie’s behalf. It was no surprise that people expected there to be some form of matterspark in the new raid, Desert Perpetual. However, that was not the case. By the time I’d gotten to the end of the campaign, matterspark had worn out its welcome to a small degree and I found myself over having to “ball is life” as I began to refer to it as.

Mattermorph and the “portal gun” were used much less than matterspark and felt less arduous. I am unsure if its solely because of the lessened use or that interacting with either took less time than rolling around jumping and charging your ball-self. I also just found the Relocator silly and if you’ve not fought ads with it…go log in and see how much joy you feel blowing one of those annoying stasis captains off of the map. Overall, the usage of these elements was clever and fresh, but matterspark well..sparked..the most controversy and did not seem to make Marie Kondo’s cut.

Overall, I enjoyed the campaign and did complete it twice on legendary. My Titan I purchased the skip because I needed the exotic faster than I could clear the campaign…little did I know how poor that choice was. But we’ll get to that later. I must admit, I have not completed any of the small, post-campaign side quests as I got sidetracked by two things: unlocking the new exotic and the power grind.

The new exotic, the Graviton Spike hand cannon, is silly fun and the first weapon to allow stasis in the secondary weapon slot as its an arc/stasis archetype. While the quest was not one you loaded into, think Starcrossed, it was quite long. It required a lot of hoofing it around Keplar and finding things and more than once I longed for a compass, a dotted line, or perhaps someone smarter than I to lead the way. I was not prepared for how angry I would become at the final step – the Sieve.

The Sieve, in theory, is a fantastic event. It’s the fact that I’m even using the word “event” that makes my blood pressure start to rise. The Sieve occurs on Keplar and not only allows you to unlock Graviton Spike, but is also the only way as of now to get the new exotic armor pieces if you had not completed the campaign on legendary for all three character classes. If you’ve not ran it, I highly suggest it as its quite fun but very scrappy. So bring your survivability and be ready for a good time. However, what kills my enthusiasm for Sieve is that its on a timer.

This activity is only available every two hours and once available is only there for a thirty minute window. This feels very similar to the Vex Incursion Zone, an activity that saw the advent of a bot to ping players when its was live. If you completed the event, a gamble between having other players to assist or hoping your PS5 doesn’t hard crash, you were guaranteed an exotic you did not have. The Sieve is similar, requiring a completion of several rounds to guarantee the exotic. But therein is the issue.

Not only is it not available consistently, meaning sitting and waiting or logging in and hoping for the best, but there are a few other impediments to achieving the desired loot. I’ve loaded in and had only one teammate or had teammates leave and not be replaced. This resulted in only completing one round or so, which is not enough to trigger the guaranteed exotic. I’ve also been loaded in near the end of the activity with no hope of making it to the final chest, despite joining right as the timer hit 0. And then I’ve completed the event and the roll I received of the new exotic was so terrible, it was sharded in seconds. Each time, I’d have to sit and wait another two hours and hope for a full team or a better instance. Most often, I’d log out and play something else. I understand the thought process, to some extent, but overall do not find an event that is only available every two hours to be enticing. I just find myself not caring. Luckily only my Titan needed to bang his head against the wall to become Thor and once I got a roll, albeit a substandard one, I was done setting alarms on my phone.

The other barrier to completing the side quests on Keplar, aside from my ADHD *Alexa play I Forgot That You Existed*, is The Portal. The below image may be upsetting. Viewer discretion is advised.

The Portal was released alongside Edge of Fate and it has become the focal point of most playtime beyond campaign completion. In theory, The Portal is quite cool and a very good idea. In actuality, it can feel like a virtual prison.

Power-leveling has almost always been a thing. And The Portal is the answer to the question of ‘how?’. Previously, your leveling capabilities were capped by access to daily and weekly bounties as well as pinnacle activities. The Portal sought to remove that barrier and while there are daily and weekly challenges, you can play to your hearts content for pinnacle loot across solo, fireteam, and pinnacle (exotic missions) ops. You can “play how you want”! Except the power grind is one of the slowest and grindiest tasks I’ve ever experienced in my time playing Destiny 2. So much so, it has me using nonsensical words like “grindiest”. Personally, I topped out at 303 on my Titan and can’t be bothered to go any further.

(Not quite to 300 here, but I couldn’t deny you my fashion and more importantly, my AWESOME armor stats.)

Others climbed to 400+ in preparation for the raid race or simply to access higher tier loot and weapons for better builds and aspirations of other high end content, to unlock Guardian ranks, and for their own personal satisfaction. And if you scroll twitter or go through the Destiny 2 directory on youtube, you can see just how burnt out and frustrated many are with the power grind. Add that frustration to the fact that the most fast and efficient way (prior to the 8/22 TWID, which we are not getting into now) to level was mindlessly loading and re-loading into solo ops, discontent grew. You also couldn’t really play how you wanted if you wanted to be efficient.

Above and beyond what I mentioned is that of the content itself. The Portal is all old activities: lost sectors, strikes, exotic missions, and PvP content. This content we’ve been running for years and now leveling power for a myriad of reasons is tied to running content we’ve already ran hundreds to thousands of times, hundreds to thousands more times. The idea of The Portal is amazing, but with no new strikes or inclusion of raid or dungeon content (at least at the time of me writing this), it’s stale and makes you feel trapped.

Except Starcrossed, I could never hate Starcrossed.

Outside of that, there is no need to go to other planets at all as you. Raids and dungeons, outside of Desert Perpetual, don’t drop pinnacle gear either. So they are only fun to play if you just want the experience, assuming you’ve already done them and/or don’t need the exotic – which is still locked to one chance a week per character.

While I won’t dive into my complete feelings on live service games or the challenge of keeping up with content expectations, I will say beyond the campaign Edge of Fate became stale kind of quickly. Which is a wild thing to say when I’ve never had more fun builds to play in my life. But between the new armor system and trying to amass each perfect piece of armor for said builds, there is simply no content I want to play to enjoy those builds. I log in, I click through my menus, I consider loading into K1 logistics, I wave sadly at my cute Titan whose solar Lorely build is a the build of my dreams, and I log off. I feel as if Edge of Fate was more a quality of life/structural update than a content update.

Keeping a live service game full of content is an impossible task. There’s simply never going to be “enough” across various play styles and gaming “appetites”. There’s also NOTHING wrong with playing other games while you wait for new content, which is what I am doing. I love Destiny and I don’t want to burn myself out when there is new content on the horizon. Ash and Iron will be here September 9th and I cannot wait.

Overall, Edge of Fate has strong framing (again, we are not including that fateful TWID), but the rest of the metaphorical house is not built yet. And I, as an avid fan, am sitting back and waiting to see what they build. I may critique Destiny 2, but it’s one of my great loves and I only voice my thoughts because I love it and care so much for it. I think Edge of Fate is a great step forward, but it remains to see where this marathon (get it..) is going to take us.