So this is why Bungie has appeared so tone-deaf over the last year in regards to Destiny 2. Clearly, they were busy making this epic Forsaken sizzle reel that had the more than one hundred thousand watching in the Twitch chat going berserk with joy.
I’m quite certain I’ve watched every Destiny reveal stream to-date and Forsaken’s was by far was the best. It has less to do with the content – which does look great, by the way – but more to do with the fact that Bungie clearly crafted this stream to tackle just about every major complaint fans have had with Destiny 2 since launch. Vault space, mass shader deletion, restricting weapon loadouts, mods, weapon randomization, and the general feeling that there’s less worthwhile to do in Destiny 2 than there was in Destiny 1, was all there and addressed in the Forsaken reveal.
There’s going to be a Dreadnaught-like area called The Dreaming City, which is the homeland of the Awoken. This location, as Bungie described during the stream, is going to be the end game hub of Destiny 2 going forward. It’s going to be the home of the raid, but will also be full of secrets, lore, and loot for players to discover. The way they described it feels reminiscent of how exploring the Dreadnaught was like in Destiny 1. Between Court of Oryx, ghost hunting, gathering the calcified fragments needed for Touch of Malice, there was so much to see and do in the Dreadnaught and is a fond memory for many players. Plus, they also noted that raiders would be able to able to change the landscape of this new area by their actions, a new feature in Forsaken that sounds very intriguing.
Although it took a year, Forsaken appears to finally allow the Crucible to just be fun again like it was in Destiny 1 instead of being an obsession about balance. Destiny 2 players have just wanted some power weapons like Shotguns and Snipers to come back into the energy weapon pool. Bungie decided to do that and allow you to run whatever the heck you want in any slot. Meaning that yes, you could fly around with three swords now if you wanted to. This sounds almost too crazy and it will be interesting to see how this works in practice, but I certainly prefer the route of trying crazy, fun, and broken ideas while adjusting from there. The couple of days where Prometheus Lens was completely broken in Crucible was some of the best fun players had in Destiny 2 to-date.
Destiny 2 really needed a new activity, too, to go along with the new raid and (the hopefully new and improved) Crucible. The new Gambit mode that’s going to be added in Forsaken sounds like a beautiful marriage between PvP and PvE on paper. It sounds like a true competitive PvE mode. PvE has always been fun in Destiny 2. That’s never been an issue. The problem is the biggest and most rewarding PvE mode – the raids – are inaccessible if you don’t have a dedicated crew, and the rest gets dull quickly. This looks like something that PvE can sink their teeth into and replay over and over again with pleasure. We’ll know for sure when we get our hands-on with that E3 build Bungie said they were bringing in just a few days.
This is just scratching the surface of what was shown in the Forsaken reveal. The new supers looked awesome. I don’t play a Warlock, but that teleporting void super had my jaw on the floor. It was almost comical how over-the-top these supers appeared, and that’s a great thing! The new collections tab is something that should have been in the game since day one, along with weapon randomization that will hopefully – finally – make that second, third, and fourth Better Devils as exciting as the first. Oh, and Bows for everyone in Forsaken? Sure, why not!
We’re going to learn a lot more about Forsaken as the summer rolls along, but one thing is certain: Bungie and Destiny 2 desperately needed this kind of positivity about this reveal. After Curse of Osiris and Warmind, which were by and large disappointments in a lot of ways, the entire community was hanging their hat on the notion that Bungie would deliver in this year 2 expansion, similar to how The Taken King reshaped Destiny 1 for the better. Except this time, the situation is way more dire. There was no House of Wolves moment for Destiny 2, where an expansion came in and at least shook things up enough to keep people playing with new content. Warmind tried to do that with Escalation Protocol, but it just isn’t the same. If this expansion fails, then Destiny 2 might finally, actually be dead. However, barring a massive deviation from what we were just shown and what the final product is, Destiny 2 appears ready to finally (hopefully) be the game it should have been at launch.
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