Destiny 2: The Witch Queen Game Review, Seven Years of Hype

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen Game Review, Seven Years of Hype

The release of The Witch Queen has been on the horizon for a long time. Bungie announced the expansion two years ago but has since pushed back the release date several times. During this time, there was little official information about the DLC, so fans of the series had to be content with only rumors and leaks. The wait for a major expansion dragged on much longer than usual, which only increased the degree of hype. And after the appearance of the first details from the developers, who called The Witch Queen’s campaign the most ambitious in the history of Destiny 2, it seemed that the authors were just teasing us.

But as a result, the launch of the add-on really turned out to be one of the most successful in the last few years of the development of the game. The Witch Queen is in no way inferior to the magnificent Forsaken, which Bungie has been working on since Activision Blizzard, with the support of the publisher’s internal studios. And the story campaign in general turned out to be almost the best for the entire existence of Destiny – both the first and the second.

The queen speaks

The persona of the Witch Queen Savathoon should be familiar to fans of the series: the developers began to tease her back in the days of the original game. One of the three heirs of the Hive, goddess of lies and deceit, sister of the infamous Oryx (antagonist of The Taken King). She has been plotting against the Guardians for a long time, but throughout previous stories, she has always remained behind the scenes – smaller-caliber minions have always been involved in the implementation of cunning plans. At some point, it seemed as if the players, in principle, would never appear before Savathun in person. Fragments of lore and hints of the authors intertwined into such an impenetrable tangle of intrigue that it seemed that even the scriptwriters themselves would not be able to unravel it. However, the first minutes of The Witch Queen shows that this is not so. Players almost immediately get to the main ship Savathun, where they meet the queen and her subjects – the Shining Hive. A new type of opponent that uses the powers of light and has the same abilities as the guards.

The story campaign is one of the main advantages of the add-on. Of course, storytelling was also an important part of new content in the past, but more often than not, the story served a practical function. Introduced new characters, and new locations. Even in reference to Forsaken, the story quests were no different from the contents of the strike playlist. The Witch Queen breaks this tradition. This time, Bungie has organized the story along the lines of single-player shooters, with missions seamlessly chained together without the annoying need to return to orbit for each new mission. It’s a small thing, but it works well for immersion and atmosphere. The scenario of The Witch Queen feels like a hybrid of horror and detective story: the Guardians are trying to figure out how the worst enemy of mankind got the powers of the Traveler. The investigation (especially its ending) sometimes throws up really unexpected turns, and every time it seems that the heroes have restored the full picture of events, a new detail is sure to appear, which again confuses all the cards. Several revelations generally change the prevailing ideas about the Destiny universe: the seven-year-long intrigue turned out to be quite justified.

In terms of gameplay, everything is also good: the hordes of the Radiant Hive are unexpectedly interesting opponents. Thanks to the Light, they can come back to life as guardian players, and in battle they use familiar abilities – it’s dumbfounding at first. When the good old knight rushes at you, hiding behind a titan shield, and dexterous monsters in cloaks throw fire daggers at hunters, it is impossible to get rid of the thought that the laws of nature have been violated. And you will have to get used to this feeling even after passing the plot. Opponents continue to rise from the dead until the guard breaks through to the body of the enemy to destroy his Ghost, so you have to calculate the actions in advance. In battles against especially strong monsters, gunfights are already more like fights against live players than mindless mob shooting in PvE

Oh brave new world

As a rule, at the end of the storyline, past additions instantly lost all interest in new locations. The moon from Shadowkeep and Europe from Beyond Light hardly attracted the attention of the player, with the exception of certain key missions – and even those were launched directly from orbit. The world throne of Savathun is reminiscent of the City of Dreams from Forsaken: at the location, you can find many secrets, carefully hidden secrets, and tasks. For example, if you stumble upon an enemy squad in the patrol zone, you can get a mysterious resource – only a local merchant will help you figure out its properties. And if you notice a strange chest in an inaccessible place, you will first have to figure out how to materialize a series of platforms in order to get to the cache.

Such surprises occur organically, without a direct indication of the game, however, in the process of exploration, you do not feel left to the mercy of fate. On the contrary, after the finale of the campaign, The Witch Queen seems to find a second wind: the desire to thoroughly study the world throne seems completely natural. In addition, the end game also has several tasks for new equipment – some of them are remembered almost more than the events of the story. What is the quest to get an exotic grenade launcher, where the guard will have to babysit the Hive worm?

In parallel with the release of the add-on, the Rebirth season started in the game – the first of four scheduled for 2022. He also offers his own storyline, which continues one of the last year’s seasons, where the army of the Cabal and the Vanguard of the Guardians made a truce. However, this time Bungie decided not to separate the two stories, but, on the contrary, thematically united them – the Cabal fighters actively help the players in the battle against the army of Savathun. True, here the narrative is presented in the manner of a series: new story missions appear weekly for a couple of months. In this mode, it is much easier to observe the development of events than from one massive expansion to another with a break of a year.

In terms of the content itself, the season added a temporary Psychic Battlefield activity to the game. Small, three-player missions that take place on alternate versions of the old planets – the passage, as usual, rewards the guards with weapons and armor. True, it cannot be said that the new arenas are fundamentally different from what we saw in previous seasons. It seems that now they serve only as a tool for seasonal storytelling: every Tuesday the player comes in to get a quest, closes the task a couple of times, and then listens to dialogue or watches a fresh staged video. There is nothing remarkable in terms of gameplay here, so the mode is unlikely to drag on for a long time.

However, The Witch Queen can offer not only a plot but also interesting gameplay finds. One of the main innovations was the updated Void 3.0 subclass customization system. – the studio did something similar in Beyond Light when the arsenal of guards was replenished with stasis subclasses. Players can now fine-tune the properties of the void abilities, choosing different builds and combinations of effects to suit their own play style. Do you want to break into a crowd of opponents and split them into particles? Can! Do you want to increase survivability in order to stay in difficult activities? To health. Class restrictions no longer restrict freedom of choice so much. In addition, the new variant of melee weapons, the Glaive, is a great base for creating unusual builds.

Another important innovation was the mechanics of crafting weapons. Players have been asking the studio for a long time for some sort of choice about what gear they get as rewards. Bungie repeatedly carried out careful experiments, but in the end, each time stopped at half measures: previous attempts to implement the mechanics still depended heavily on the hated randomness. The Witch Queen, on the other hand, allows you to collect dream weapons manually, picking up perks to your taste with your own hands – there is no element of chance. Unlike many other MMOs, an item cannot even accidentally “break” during creation. The main thing is to find the right drawing and upgrade it, so that later you can customize the final product as you like. Bungie has assured that it is closely monitoring community feedback on new mechanics.

The Witch Queen is a telling example of what Destiny 2 could be. Epic, bright, dynamic, and exciting. Decent story campaign, with an interesting new location, and correct changes in mechanics. All this is very pleasantly surprising because Bungie has done a lot of work on its own during the quarantine when the studio staff worked from home. It remains to be hoped that the next seasons will be able to withstand the bar of quality – then 2022 promises to be one of the best in the history of Destiny 2.

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