Tomorrow marks the beginning of the final three weeks of Destiny 2’s “Echoes” episodic story content, at week 11 of the de facto season, long after most other storylines would have full concluded in past Destiny content. Now, by the time this story ends, it will be 14 weeks to see it to a conclusion with six weeks of breaks in the middle there.
Act 3, wrapping up the Vex-based storyline, has a lot to prove, given that the story has been very slow-moving so far. We only met the big-bad of the episode, the return of Maya Sundaresh, in the very last story installment three weeks ago. Now there are only three weeks out of nine total that will feature her from here. That seems…like not great scheduling.
The finale of the story has to be solid to justify this many months of investment and these odd breaks, though Bungie has also promised one of its biggest exotic missions, something they’ve said has only been possible thanks to this new, stretched-out episodic model.
But “size” hasn’t really mattered in this episode. It has given out more loot and created more involved story content in terms of scale which includes a speed-run activity, a patrol zone objective-based activity and three full battlegrounds with mostly new level geometry.
That hasn’t really mattered. Most fans…still don’t like this episode, on the whole. I have not seem many people, if any, say they prefer this model to the old seasons, though I’m not sure even Bungie is saying it’s necessarily “better,” just that it’s what needs to happen with their resources and the current state of the game.
This is not to say other episodes may not be better received. This is indeed an episode that had to be developed alongside The Final Shape, while the next ones may have more room to breathe. The Episode 2 story of the Scorn, Fallen and Crow already looks more interesting than the Vex plot here. But I am concerned that the next storytelling schedule, where three weeks of story content is dumped into the Act launch, meaning five weeks of no story in between them, is going to feel even worse than what we have now. Both of those feel worse than the 8-9 weeks in a row of story content delivery for seasons.
My expectations are that I do not imagine that the conclusion of the Maya Sundaresh story is going to be anything mind-blowing, or even all that interesting. I do expect the exotic mission to be great, as they essentially always are, but whether it’s worth running more than a few times depends on the weapon and how it’s upgraded, which we just don’t know yet.
Destiny 2 is in a weird place. I am curious to see how a big “finale” feels in an episode but again, we’re not even going to experience that until week 14.
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