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DecemberReview: Destiny 2: Forsaken
With Armor 2.0, Bungie is fully embracing the RPG potential of its franchise. New weapon and armor mods allow players to mess around with different elements and stats to build a character that fits their play style. Players can not only tweak little things like Resilience but also stats like how fast your abilities recharge. It's an exciting system that hardcore players will love tinkering with. It's also available for every player, regardless of whether or not you purchased Shadowkeep.
Destiny 2: New Light comes with all content and activities associated with Years 1 of Destiny 2. That includes Destiny 2, Curse of Osiris, and Warmind. New players can access these campaigns by visiting Amanda Holliday in the Tower’s hangar.
The cycle of Destiny whiplash continues with Destiny 2: Shadowkeep. Like during the Destiny 1 era, we started with a lackluster opening, then got two awful expansions, got our significant overhaul, and now we're at the stopgap. Much like Rise of Iron , it's hard to shake the feeling that Bungie is just buying time until the inevitable next entry in the franchise. In this case, Destiny 2: Shadowkeep feels like Bungie is slow-walking to Destiny 3. The campaign ends up going nowhere, ending in an unsatisfying cliffhanger we likely won't see resolved for a while. Meanwhile, as great as the Moon is compared to its incarnation in the first game, there's no getting around the fact that we've already seen and paid for this before. The core gameplay is still the star of the show, the Moon is a fun place to play around in, the Strikes are imaginative and the new Seasonal Activity is a standout. But you can access all that without owning Shadowkeep (though the Seasonal Activity does require you to own the Season Pass). Destiny 2: Shadowkeep isn't bad, but it also feels wholly unnecessary when most of its selling points (Strikes, the Moon, Armor 2.0) can be played without owning it. This is one nightmare we didn't need to have.
A fallen Servitor, The Warden is a boss incorporated into the Forsaken expansion. The enemy is stubborn and longs for inclusion in the world after being trapped in this strange glowing orb, which is reminiscent of another Bungie creation in 343 Guilty Spark from the Halo ser
Despite all the regression with the campaign and monetization and the rehashing of older content, Destiny 2 still looks quite good. The Moon is an atmospheric place to visit and traversing the caverns the Hive call home produces a sense of dread that other locations in the Destiny 2 experience can't provide. Meanwhile, the short visits into the Black Garden are gorgeous thanks to all the colors and lush jungle mixed with Vex machinery. Destiny 2 may be two years old now, but it's still looking good.
Bungie is now quadruple-dipping with Season Passes, loot boxes (via Engrams), direct cosmetic purchases and a Battle Pass. The Battle Pass in particular is annoying by adding an additional layer of time-consuming grind to a game that already requires a lot of grind. The scummiest part of the whole system, Read Webpage though, is that Bungie has built the Eververse store straight into the Director menu. Previously, monetization could be ignored entirely because it was secluded to the Eververse Store at the Tower. Now, Bungie has made sure that it follows players everywhere they go. It's sad to see such regression after Forsaken made Destiny 2's monetization feel fairer to players.
Destiny 2: Shadowkeep's greatest strength is what's kept Destiny so popular all these years: the gameplay. The blend of shooting and looting remains as addictive and satisfying as ever, even if we're still firing at the same enemies we've been fighting since 2014. Bungie has done a solid job altering and perfecting the formula over the years and Shadowkeep represents the next big step in its refinement, Armor 2.0.
Destiny campaigns have always been mind-numbing thanks to heavy-handed writing and mission design that overly relies on mundane busywork. The stories nearly always end up being vague, open-ended and unsatisfying. Forsaken changed that by making the story more personal and finding new and engaging ways to push that narrative forward. Shadowkeep, on the other hand, is content with regressing all that hard work. Aside from strong opening and closing missions, Shadowkeep barely delivers any meaningful revelations or character development. You, Eris Morn and the remainder of the Vanguard remain blank slates with surface-level characterizations. With the most emotive member of the cast, Cayde-6, dead, Destiny desperately needs NPCs with some personality. Unfortunately, that isn't found anywhere in Shadowkeep.
There is a wide variety of landscapes and enemies that players can encounter while exploring the multi-dimensional world of the game. Additionally, the lineup of bosses gamers face is wide-ranging in both appearance and ability. Which Destiny 2 boss is the best fit for each zodiac s
Over the past two years, Bungie has done good work slowly removing some of the more disturbing aspects from the Eververse store. Gameplay-focused items like armor, sparrows and Ghost shells have been moved out of the store and are, like in Destiny, offered as in-game rewards. At this point in time, the Eververse store purely sells cosmetic items, including weapon ornaments, emotes and finishers.