Review: Destiny 2 (PC)
Many familiar faces filled the screen as the hour of Destiny 2 played out, characters any player could recognize (Holiday did look slick flying that ship.) Destiny 2 means introducing new faces to the fold, folks that may have been there the whole time, but Guardians were to busy running around the galaxy to pay attention too. At least, that’s what I like to think. Getting down on the people’s level though, actually coming down from their Tower, Guardians will hopefully see firsthand the struggles that the Last City had to go through on a daily basis. New places and new faces means new content. Guardians always had a pretentiousness about them. I enjoyed my Guardian, but it felt like we were all on a high horse policing the universe without a care for those we were actually supposed to be protecting. This isn’t a new concept, though, even having been written into the lore. It’s known that children are told stories at night about Guardians to frighten them. Protectors or a something worse? Guardians are undead soldiers after all, Zavalas haunting speech while returning over and over again, shook me. My guardian has done this exact thing, but actually seeing the impact and hearing how twisted it sounded made me feel like one of the children that lives in the Last City.
Humanity isn’t the only thing occupying the wide-open galaxy; there are the other two races as well. The Exos are powered by the light and that seems to be a living source. Besides humanity fighting its war there are the Awoken and Exo, both related to humanity while not being human. Equally as important to the scope of it all. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of these two races, just know that Bungie does plan on telling their stories eventually. The other major tie in for these two races is all the other high sci-fantasy space stuff going on. Without getting into space dragons (because they exist), there are also things in this universe the Destiny community has yet to encounter, unless counting Xur. Which brings this to the Nine. The Nine have been a known part of Destiny since the game’s release, but the only contact anyone has had with them is strictly through Xur, an agent of the Nine. With Destiny 2 taking us to Titan, players just might get closer than ever before to this elusive group of who knows what (hint space dragons). Doing some digging, it’s known the Nine occupy either Europa, a moon of Jupiter, or Titan, one of the new locals in Destiny 2, Pve weapon rolls a moon of Saturn.
Speaking of space-magic, more lore has been filled in with the arrival of new ghost. Yes, not everyone wants to crawl to the internet to discovery the intricate workings of just what makes Destiny tick, but for lore-nerds like me, this is a dream come true. I will gladly take more lore, because for those who don’t know, Destiny has some crazy cool sci-fi/fantasy lore. When is space-magic a bad thing? It’s not. Any tad bit more of lore to leak out will be greedily consumed until the next one arrives. It might seem like a small thing, but all those NPCs aren’t just spotting nonsense, they are referencing things. It’s the same reason every item has a cryptic description. In fact, this might be the best time to get to know Destiny. Might as well see how it all came to be while waiting for Destiny 2, right? So, go read that lore. It’s crazy and out-there in the best of ways. Just know it’s heavy on the space-magic — a wizard did come from the moon, after all. If that doesn’t sum it up, I don’t know what does.
There are a total of eight maps and five game modes. Supremacy, Clash, and Control are part of the Quickplay option, and new modes Countdown and Survival are part of Competitive. Unfortunately, there is no option to select the game mode you want once you select Quickplay or Competitive. If you really want to play Control, you have to hope that the game’s matchmaking doesn’t randomly throw you into Supremacy or Clash.
Including all content from Curse of Osiris in the base game might have helped ease some of the end-game pains that the launch brought with it. It’s not too much more to do, but it might have smoothed over a few wrinkles by including that extra content. It would also have made the loot pool larger; maybe Guardians wouldn’t be as frustrated at the limited item sets, lackluster exotics and other cosmetics. Giving more isn’t always the best idea, but in this case, it could have been.
