Look, I gave it 15 weeks, and reaching the end of Destiny 2’s first Episode, an extended version of its old seasons, I cannot be anything but disappointed.
The finale of the season, sorry Episode, arrived yesterday, capping off nine weeks of story with six weeks of breaks inserted. The end was…lacking, and I would apply that to the rest of the Episode as well, now that we can see its entire (Final) shape.
In the finale, we were asked to run the Encore exotic mission yet again, for the third week in a row, in order to progress the story. This version had new dialogue and I think quite literally two extra yellow bar minibosses, and that was it. Same final Hydra fight and that was…indeed the final mission. I know Bungie is proud of this exotic mission, and it is pretty good, but making it the thing you run every week for the last three weeks of the season was goofy. Oh, and the final epilogue quest asks you to run it a fourth time to find collectibles, about five minutes after you just finished it.
The final showdown against Maya Sundaresh took place entirely in a cutscene, where she briefly paralyzes you, Ikora and Saint, but Ikora and Saint break out and slap her with Void abilities. She splashes into a radiolarian river and dissolves, but the game makes it clear she doesn’t die.
To recap, the entirety of the story in the last 15 weeks has been:
- Collecting plant samples for Failsafe, where I’m still not quite sure why we did that, and this was probably 70% of the Episode
- Saint going through a quickly-resolved existential crisis that he wasn’t the “real” Saint that Osiris used to love, before deciding that actually it doesn’t matter
- Maya Sundaresh saying she will make a new golden age by infecting everything with radiolaria, while attempting to pull a copy of her wife out of the multiverse who agrees with this plan, and none of them do
- Sundaresh dissolves in a river with the unspoken promise of “I’ll be baaaack!!!”
The format of this was bad with the three weeks on, three weeks off idea. So was introducing Sundaresh after six (12) full weeks rather than right away. So was telling players to run the same exotic mission for the final three weeks of the season and having that also be the last story mission of the Episode.
I don’t want to say the Episode did nothing right. There were indeed a lot of activities here, including three new battlegrounds that very much feel like full-on strikes. Encore is pretty good as a mission, and the gun you get from it is great. There was more loot than normal in general.
But as a cohesive whole, this did not work, and I think things are only going to get worse when Bungie drops three weeks of story per Act on day one, leading to 4.9 weeks of no story development so players can “play at their own pace.” While that was a common request, I do not think this is going to go well in practice (imagine on day one of Act 3 being told to run Encore four times).
Destiny 2, of course, is moving away from Episodes after the next two. This was a stopgap and the “Frontiers” plan involves two smaller expansions and four seasons-but-not-really seasons “Major Updates.” So no, this concept will not stick around. I do hope the other Episodes are better, at least from a story perspective, but this was not a good start. Or a good ending, as of yesterday.
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