Returning Destiny 2 players need to study up for Lightfall, or prepare for some pain

Lightfall has arrived in Destiny 2, and as I suspect many lapsed players have, I’ve used the launch of a major expansion as an opportunity to get back into Bungie’s shooty space wizard MMO. This has worked out pretty well in the past—Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and The Witch Queen have all been fun, if temporary, forays back into the world of Guardians, the Traveler, and the Light. This time, unfortunately, it feels a lot different.

Because this is Destiny, the question of “is Lightfall any good” is completely separate from the issue of whether it’s a good place for new or returning players to jump in. Judging by the broader community reaction to the new storyline, Bungie has whiffed badly on this expansion—the finale that’s been teed up for years has opened with more questions than answers, and the new characters introduced in the Neptunian city of Neomuna are in some cases oddly discordant with the apocalyptic stakes supposedly in play between the Traveler and The Witness.

That said, if a silly story was a make or break issue for me, I’d never have put  hundreds of hours into Destiny 2 to begin with. The world it’s set in has never been required to make a lot of sense because there’s always some new space magic or ancient technology that can be produced out of thin air to explain whatever’s happening. Besides, the real narrative heavy lifting has typically happened outside Destiny’s major campaigns, so if Lightfall feels more like unnecessary setup than a cataclysmic Act 3 truly getting underway, it’s likely we’ll see the momentum pick up in the seasonal content planned for the coming year.

The real trouble is that, after being away from Destiny 2 for the past six months or so, jumping back in with Lightfall has been a largely miserable experience. I began with the normal light level boost (which raises characters up to a baseline of 1600) and dropped straight into the new campaign, which begins with an interplanetary space battle between Guardian fighter ships and the ominous black pyramid fleet.

The first missions felt absurdly brutal. There’s a fearsome new enemy called the Tormentor to face, often while working in a suppression field that temporarily strips my Titan of most of his Guardian abilities. Even on the gentler ‘classic’ difficulty, the campaign that Destiny 2 immediately dropped me into without asking felt more in line with the times I’ve played challenging raids or nightfall strikes. What gives?

Part of the issue, it turns out, is that Bungie has turned up the challenge to keep the pace with new mechanics added to Destiny 2 over the past couple years. Revamped subclasses and new ways to kit out Guardians have resulted in players blasting through content faster and faster, and so Bungie has taken the reasonable step of dialing the PvE difficulty up to match.

For players like me who are returning after an extended hiatus, that means running face-first into a bandsaw of high-damage enemies who can shrug off just about anything I have in my arsenal. Feeling completely outclassed by everything in the new storyline isn’t a great reintroduction to a game that’s usually about being a badass gun jedi.

The solution for this part of the problem is to study up on the latest developments in Destiny 2 buildcrafting. There are aspects and fragments to unlock and slot into your subclasses now, and Lightfall also marked the rollout of ‘Armor 3.0,’ Bungie’s overhaul of the armor modding system. Taken together with the re-tuned PvE difficulty, armor modding isn’t just for players looking to optimize their loadouts for raids and other pinnacle activities anymore—it’s a mandatory part of everyone’s loadout. Not engaging with the new armor modding system is now the equivalent of having nothing equipped in your weapon slots.

After fiddling with my armor mods a bit (mainly stacking as many resilience buffs as possible), I was back in the game enough to at least continue on with the Lightfall campaign. Sadly though, that was not the end of my troubles with Lightfall.

While I appreciate the checkpointing system that lets me keep progress I’ve made in story missions, I’ve found some encounters to be pretty discouraging. In one, I’m fighting a Cabal boss in an area of the city divided into two parallel corridors walled by tall buildings. The boss periodically calls for reinforcements, which arrive via those big boulder-shaped drop pods the Cabal use. If you’re standing where they land, it’s instant death, but normally you get some visual indication of where they’re about to land—as well as a chance to respawn, since this usually happens during public events in patrol zones.

That’s not the case here. The pods arrive with little to no warning, and there’s no clear indication of where I’m allowed to stand during this encounter. Since it’s a boss fight, respawning is restricted, and so if I get hit I’ll have to start the whole fight over again. I opt to play it safe by sniping at the boss with a scout rifle from the entrance to the area—it takes forever to take him out with my under-leveled gear, and it isn’t remotely fun, but it gets the job done. Boss fights in general have been multiphase slogs that restrict respawning and start me over when I get one-shotted by a tank or powerful enemy. When this happens, I don’t want to try again—I just want to shut the game down and do something that has more respect for my time.

Another thing that’s sapped my will to keep playing is the technical issues. Destiny 2 has often struggled with these, particularly around launches, and that’s understandable—it’s a complex online game that a lot of people are playing at any given time. But that doesn’t make it any less discouraging to get booted out of the game in the middle of a lengthy mission due to a mysterious Battleye ‘plum’ error. I’ve tried correcting this using several methods I’ve turned up on Reddit and in various forums, but it’s still popping up routinely four days after Lightfall’s launch.

I’m a pretty forgiving player—I don’t mind sitting through a lousy story or dealing with occasional bugs and crashes if I’m having a good time. That’s just not happening with Destiny 2 right now though. I’m not having fun. Past expansions have offered something compelling to keep me going, something fun to look at or a new zone that’s interesting to explore. Neomuna is pretty, but in terms of being an interesting space to discover and dig into, it feels empty and disorganized. The new strand abilities seem cool, but I’m only allowed to use them at highly specific moments for the time being. At any time, I might be kicked out of whatever it is I’m trying to do to advance the story and reach the point “where it gets good again.”

So, as much of a bummer as this is to say, I can’t recommend Lightfall as a re-entry point for lapsed players, much less a starting point for new ones. Folks who are still accustomed to grinding ritual activities on a nightly basis will no doubt grit their teeth and get going on the Season of Defiance, and I’m sure there’s plenty to discover once Lightfall reaches its post-campaign cruising altitude. With so many other games competing for my attention, though, I think I’ll be sitting this one out.