Fans fear Destiny 2 Lightfall is a return to old habits for Bungie

Latest expansion leaves players underwhelmed

Lightfall, Destiny 2’s newest expansion, is finally out and left some very mixed first impressions among the player base. This concerns, well, basically everything about it from new gameplay features such as the Strand subclasses to the expansion’s storyline and tone.

There are a lot of cheesy action movie one-liners that are thrown around, which is kind of grating when compared to the vibe of the story so far – it doesn’t really fit and hinders the development of new characters into actual personalities instead of what might be failed depictions of popular superhero stereotypes. Older characters on the other hand suffer from flanderization and morph into satirical versions of themselves. It doesn’t help that the entire story is pretty uninspired as players are tasked with chasing after and protecting ever more macguffins without much of any explanation of why these are so important. And then, very suddenly, the story just ends.

One disappointed user on Reddit summed it up like this: “The tone is what really drives me up a wall. I don't personally think it's inherently terrible to have the kind of ‘snappy Marvel dialogue’ in Destiny (even if I personally don't enjoy that), but this is like....the second apocalypse. Literally last week the season of Seraph ended with Ikora telling me to go and hold my loved ones, because we may never get the chance to again. After 8 years of build up, shit was finally getting INTENSE, this was the culmination of all of that struggle. If there was ever a SINGLE TIME in the entire history of Destiny for shit to feel epic and intense, this was it. This was not the time for Marvel quips.”

Destiny 2 is back with another expansion, but fans feels quite underwhelmed by it / Bungie

“This DLC is basically a marvel movie, but not one of the good ones; tone deaf and constant joking in face of the apocalypse,” agreed another poster.

Another player in the same thread commented: “One of the reasons, I believe, that everyone is so mad is because for the last year it finally felt as if Bungie had broken out of the Destiny cycle of poor release that hampers the franchise's reputation and a stellar release that repairs it. We had, in my opinion, two very good expansions in the form of Beyond Light and Witch Queen, and within those we had two years of very good seasonal content. But Lightfall, so far, feels like a return to the spotty, lower quality release that plagued the series in the past.”

This seems to hit the nail on the head: There was a lot of hype for Lightfall’s release as it felt like Bungie really hit the mark with the last two expansions, so sentiment was that this streak would likely continue – Destiny 2 hitting a new peak player count on Steam shortly after Lightfall’s launch supports that. That honeymoon period certainly didn’t last long.

“I have no idea how we went from witch queen to this, like what happened?”, asked one user. What, indeed?

If you’re still working your way through the new content, check out our Unfinished Business quest guide, our action figure location guide, and our tips on how to reach the power gap in Destiny 2 Lightfall quickly.