Lightfall is here, and man is it spicy out there right now. Lots of Players disappointed, frustrated, confused, and regretful of their Lightfall purchase, and I just wanna say before we get into some of the Hot Takes from the community, that from the Gameplay side of things, I actually enjoyed Lightfall’s Campaign on Legendary. Not so much the narrative, which is some pretty big issues, but as for the gameplay, it was mostly enjoyable to me. Especially the final Mission Boss fight, I found pretty fun Solo. Strand is pretty neat, Neomuna has some interesting activities, like the world bosses that really enjoy, the new strike is good, and there’s some other decent quality of life changes that I feel pretty positive about. But, like many of you, I have some issues with it and I’m working on a video that will have ALL my thoughts on Lightfall. But we’re here for some hot takes from the community, and I want to hear yours in the comments below, but without further ado, lets begin.
Up first we’re going to take a look at some Campaign Hot Takes just back to back.
“Bit disappointed in the delilvery of Lightfalls campaign. It started off super strong, and then seemed rushed towards middle to end. Let down for me considering the build up to this one.”
Lightfall campaign was good in some areas but felt flat/rushed in others. Strand seemed overly integrated into the story. Some high stakes moments just didn’t hit. Neomuna looks stunning but empty. I’d say Witch Queen story over Lightfall story.
First Impressions… I hate to say it but, without a shadow of a doubt, there are some massive fumbles. So much promise left unrealized.
Perhaps I went in with too high of expectations, but Lightfall’s Campaign was very disappointing for me. I thought the story focused way too much on getting strand, and the ending felt very anticlimactic. I also didn’t really care about the cloud striders at all.
Maybe it’s just me, but one of LIghtfall’s biggest campaign problems is how “shoe-horned” in strand is. Remember how cohesive the Witch Queen campaign was? I feel a big part of that was the lack of subclass acquisition side-plot and a singular story focus.
This campaign has been a total letdown imo. It felt like a side quest rather than a dlc that left me uninterested in getting to each new step. If witch queen was a 10, this was a 3. There’s plenty left to do, but from the story standpoint I’m disappointed.
Unfortunately, The Lightfall campaign didn’t click for me. Felt like a 5 hour trailer for the Final Shape. Lots of new questions and no answers for any existing ones. I didn’t understand what was going on at any point, and when the big finale hit, I was still lost and confused.
Imagine if in Lord of The Rings, You Never had it described, but all of the characters knew what it was and why it had to be destroyed.
Now these are just a few of the MANY MANY tweets, posts, and even videos critiquing the games campaign. And the consensus seems to be that Narratively, Lightfall has fallen very short and is a lazy MacGuffin filler episode in this Darkness Saga. Now for me? I liked some of the Cutscenes with the Witness and Calus. Like the one where the Witness insults Calus, and Calus tries to clap back and the Witness shuts his as down. That was cool. But outside of a few cutscenes, I absolutely just felt lost in the narrative and didn’t care much about Neomuna or the Cloudstriders, despite having some interesting backstories. The actual in game narrative just didn’t do anything for me.
And after playing for 2 days and soaking in as much of the post campaign content, we still have no idea what the Veil is, and how it works and why the Witness needed it and yeah. Very filler episode narratively. Now like I said, I did enjoy some of the missions from the gameplay side of things. Some genuine fun to be had, but yeah the story was just bad.
Lightfall marketing team needs a raise. We all blindly jumped into this hot mess of a dlc thanks to the amazing marketing team. They did a good job.
And this is true as it usually is for Bungie. They’re marketing is pure hype train every single year, and Lightfall’s marketing was certainly ramped up more than previous years. Lots of Trailers and Promotional material. Like more vidoc and dev team hype videos than any previous expansion. And let’s not forget how they hyped up Lightfall.
They marketed this expansion as having lots of pay off moments but instead it feels like we’ve gotten even more setup.
Yes, Bungie absolutely promoted Lightfall as an expansion filled with answers and big story reveals, but there’s just more setup. Again. And that’s likely because Lightfall and Final Shape were supposed to be the same expansion, but was split up into 2 separate ones. At least, that’s the running theory and explanation by some, and there’s some very good evidence for that.
Which leads me to this take which I found to be pretty funny.
Witness really is lazy… dude could walk up to neomuna and have the veil in 5 minutes.
Exactly true. Which is why the Intro Cutscene to Lightfall, and the Final Cutscene could simply be just 1 long cutscene and it would make much more sense than what we got. It’s like they split the cutscene in half and tried to fit an expansion plot line in between the two.
Nimbus Opens Mouth. Dies from Cringe.
Nimbus is the epitome of cringe dialogue and writing found in so many modern forms of media. Nimbus is a result of Marvel style writing which leads to terrible dialogue such as this.
Now on top of the Cringe dialogue is in my opinion some of the worst designs I’ve ever seen for Characters in a sci fi universe. This tweet from FalloutPlays really sums it up for me.
The Cloudstriders are 110% the Writers “Barely disguised Fetish” meme come to life.
Seriously these characters look awful.
Neomuna looks like a halo 5 forge map
Now I like the look of Neomuna. It doesn’t really feel like it fits in the Destiny Universe, if you compare to most of the stuff we usually see, but that aside. I do like its look. However, I do have to agree that it looks pretty bland in terms of the attention to detail or lack thereof. Most of the buildings you pass by or go inside are just empty showing not much of anything. Without the Bright color tones and cyberpunk lighting, it would look extremely basic. Which to me just shows that it really isn’t a place that Bungie really spent a lot of time creating. I’m no game dev, I don’t mean to sound like a dick when I say that, but it does feel pretty basic. Like a Halo Forge map. Just seems like it was put together pretty quickly, which I found to be the case when you visit a lot of the areas. Like even the Hall of Heroes, is overly simplistic and basic to me. Not everything in Lightfall feels this way, but as a whole I do think Neomuna is a bit bland looking except for the color tones.
I wanted this Calus, Not that goofball Boy Scout one.
This image is from Bungie’s Art of Destiny 2 book and I gotta say, Calus looked so badass here. And every time he’s ever spoke to us in the game I’ve always envisioned he’d be like this. And maybe at one point in the history of his Reign as Emperor, he did look like this. But the version of him we see in Lightfall is a bit of a disappointment. I really did enjoy his Boss fight, I think it’s one of the best we’ve ever had in the Destiny franchise, at least on Legendary, but yeah he looks pretty lame in his new purple suit.
Here’s a bit more of a positive take I definitely can agree with.
Tormentors are Way Better than the Hive Guardians. They have like 10 different attacks and their AI kept us on our toes the entire campaign. PLEASE Let them be used in other content going forward!
Yeah these miniboss enemies were awesome to fight. Every time I encountered them in the Campaign I enjoyed fighting them. They’re super aggressive, they use unique tactics against you. Love it. Fantastic enemy. They’re not perfect, as they’re still prone to some exploits, like any enemy, but I gotta say these are some of the best enemy additions to the game in a long time.
They turned lake of shadows into genuinely the worst most unengaging strike on the planet, you start the strike and push the 2 payloads then kill a miniboss and then the rest of the strike is the exact same.
Yeah this was pretty disappointing to me to see that the reworks to not only Lake of Shadows, but also Arms Dealer were pretty lazy and just awful. This idea of reworking old strikes is something I’ve talked about in previous videos that I’d like to see Bungie do, because its something they did back in Destiny 1, but the Reworks to the Strikes in that game, always improved them with either more fun mechanics, or a random encounter that could be different per Strike run. But here, these two strikes just became more tedious and boring. Really unfortunate to see this be the case because reworking old Strikes could’ve been great if they put some more thought and effort into them.
I just don’t know how the strike playlist is ever gonna recover at this point. Adding 1-2 strikes per year does not help the staleness case whatsoever, and the addition of low-quality Battlegrounds just make the situation feel like a ticking time bomb.
It’s really sad to see the state of Core Playlists, but I’ve been talking about this issue since Shadowkeep and people always blew it off as not a concern and the amount of Strikes or Crucible maps doesn’t matter, but of course they do. Because we spend so much of our time post-campaign, inside these playlists. I won’t talk about this point for too long because I know most of you have heard me talk about it before ad nauseam, but yeah. Lack of Core activity content in a 50 dollar expansion feels just as bad as it has every year since Shadowkeep.
Here are some of Gladd’s day one hot takes, but the one I wanna focus on is Strand can’t compete with Arc, Solar, or Void 3.0. While I think it might be a little bit too early considering we all still need to unlock the rest of the aspects and fragments and there needs to be a little bit of time before we see some crazy builds emerge, I think he might be a bit right here. It’s a fun subclass for sure, but I’m unsure how it will perform in endgame content. However I gotta say that has a Hunter main, the DPS on the super is actually pretty insane. Easily shreds bosses with just the basic attack. For me, the jury is still out on Strand. I like it a lot more than stasis I gotta say.
My Spinfoil hat theory is that Bungie made the campaign meh to entice more people to buy the campaign skips.
Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case considering its $20 dollars per character to skip the campaign, that’s just easy cash for Bungie since there are quite a few people willing to spend that money, but who knows. I don’t know if they intentionally made their campaign mid just to sell campaign skips, but I wouldn’t put it past them either.
Did you know that every weapon in this dlc is a reskin besides the raid weapons?
I used to be of the mindset that all reskinning is bad, and for sure, it can be, especially at the levels which Bungie does it, but I don’t think it’d be all that bad if they kept reskins to Seasons or something. But when it comes to full sized 50 dollar expansions, I think there should be absolutely no reskins. That is the bare minimum if you ask me. I do appreciate the amount of new perks and Strand weapon types, that’s pretty cool, but yeah the weapon models are the same as they’ve always been which is unfortunate.
After trying various builds in both PvP and PvE, I have come to the following conclusion: Armor 2.0 is not progression. It is regression. If the goal was simplification, that has been achieved. Alas, the problem is that it is oversimplified. Buildcrafting now feels uninspired.
I’ve seen this sentiment quite a bit and I agree partially with it. I think the simplification of things like the Champion Mods and other Artifact mods has been really great and appreciated. But the depth of Build crafting has certainly taken a hit for the most part and leads to less interesting Build potential overall. This is one of those things like Strand that is a bit of a Jury is still out type of situation, but I definitely see the negatives of these changes.
I’m going to be honest. With the Lackluster Campaign, empty patrol zone, mod changes, strand being kinda meh, Khvostov tease, lack of core playlist support, having to grind power again and the timegates, I just don’t feel like Destiny 2 is worth playing. Everything just feels wrong.
Yeah I think people are finally coming to the realization that Destiny 2 is a hamster wheel type of game. Filled with too much timegating, grindy tedious quests, and a genuine lack of depth when you look at it objectively. I do actually like some things about Lightfall so far, and surprisingly I might have a more positive outlook on it than most of the people who have said that I’m just a D2 hater, but I do think players have grown wise to some of the glaring problems with the game. And this is the most expensive expansion to date, so with these problems players are having, it really doesn’t sit well.
And like this reddit post points out,
I’ve never seen the community make such a 180 before.
This is very accurate. Players had a very positive outlook on the game during Season of The Seraph. And I personally think that Lightfall Hype is a big reason people were feeling good about Seraph. Seraph itself was pretty average I gotta say. It was better than some seasons, but severely overrated, and I think that Lightfall hype was the cause of players positive perception of it. It is wild to see SO many players switch up their outlook on Destiny in the span of a couple days, but that’s what’s happened.
But anyways guys, like I said, I’ll have a full thoughts video coming out sometime soon, probably before the Raid launch, and then another video discussing the raid itself. But let me know your Hot Takes and thoughts on Lightfall down below in the comments. Thank you so much for watching. I’ll see you all in the next one.
Is video game Destiny 2 fun? Post-play experience
Lightfall is here, and man is it spicy out there right now. Lots of Players disappointed, frustrated, confused, and regretful of their Lightfall purchase, and I just wanna say before we get into some of the Hot Takes from the community, that from the Gameplay side of things, I actually enjoyed Lightfall’s Campaign on Legendary. Not so much the narrative, which is some pretty big issues, but as for the gameplay, it was mostly enjoyable to me. Especially the final Mission Boss fight, I found pretty fun Solo. Strand is pretty neat, Neomuna has some interesting activities, like the world bosses that really enjoy, the new strike is good, and there’s some other decent quality of life changes that I feel pretty positive about. But, like many of you, I have some issues with it and I’m working on a video that will have ALL my thoughts on Lightfall. But we’re here for some hot takes from the community, and I want to hear yours in the comments below, but without further ado, lets begin.
Up first we’re going to take a look at some Campaign Hot Takes just back to back.
“Bit disappointed in the delilvery of Lightfalls campaign. It started off super strong, and then seemed rushed towards middle to end. Let down for me considering the build up to this one.”
Lightfall campaign was good in some areas but felt flat/rushed in others. Strand seemed overly integrated into the story. Some high stakes moments just didn’t hit. Neomuna looks stunning but empty. I’d say Witch Queen story over Lightfall story.
First Impressions… I hate to say it but, without a shadow of a doubt, there are some massive fumbles. So much promise left unrealized.
Perhaps I went in with too high of expectations, but Lightfall’s Campaign was very disappointing for me. I thought the story focused way too much on getting strand, and the ending felt very anticlimactic. I also didn’t really care about the cloud striders at all.
Maybe it’s just me, but one of LIghtfall’s biggest campaign problems is how “shoe-horned” in strand is. Remember how cohesive the Witch Queen campaign was? I feel a big part of that was the lack of subclass acquisition side-plot and a singular story focus.
This campaign has been a total letdown imo. It felt like a side quest rather than a dlc that left me uninterested in getting to each new step. If witch queen was a 10, this was a 3. There’s plenty left to do, but from the story standpoint I’m disappointed.
Unfortunately, The Lightfall campaign didn’t click for me. Felt like a 5 hour trailer for the Final Shape. Lots of new questions and no answers for any existing ones. I didn’t understand what was going on at any point, and when the big finale hit, I was still lost and confused.
Imagine if in Lord of The Rings, You Never had it described, but all of the characters knew what it was and why it had to be destroyed.
Now these are just a few of the MANY MANY tweets, posts, and even videos critiquing the games campaign. And the consensus seems to be that Narratively, Lightfall has fallen very short and is a lazy MacGuffin filler episode in this Darkness Saga. Now for me? I liked some of the Cutscenes with the Witness and Calus. Like the one where the Witness insults Calus, and Calus tries to clap back and the Witness shuts his as down. That was cool. But outside of a few cutscenes, I absolutely just felt lost in the narrative and didn’t care much about Neomuna or the Cloudstriders, despite having some interesting backstories. The actual in game narrative just didn’t do anything for me.
And after playing for 2 days and soaking in as much of the post campaign content, we still have no idea what the Veil is, and how it works and why the Witness needed it and yeah. Very filler episode narratively. Now like I said, I did enjoy some of the missions from the gameplay side of things. Some genuine fun to be had, but yeah the story was just bad.
Lightfall marketing team needs a raise. We all blindly jumped into this hot mess of a dlc thanks to the amazing marketing team. They did a good job.
And this is true as it usually is for Bungie. They’re marketing is pure hype train every single year, and Lightfall’s marketing was certainly ramped up more than previous years. Lots of Trailers and Promotional material. Like more vidoc and dev team hype videos than any previous expansion. And let’s not forget how they hyped up Lightfall.
They marketed this expansion as having lots of pay off moments but instead it feels like we’ve gotten even more setup.
Yes, Bungie absolutely promoted Lightfall as an expansion filled with answers and big story reveals, but there’s just more setup. Again. And that’s likely because Lightfall and Final Shape were supposed to be the same expansion, but was split up into 2 separate ones. At least, that’s the running theory and explanation by some, and there’s some very good evidence for that.
Which leads me to this take which I found to be pretty funny.
Witness really is lazy… dude could walk up to neomuna and have the veil in 5 minutes.
Exactly true. Which is why the Intro Cutscene to Lightfall, and the Final Cutscene could simply be just 1 long cutscene and it would make much more sense than what we got. It’s like they split the cutscene in half and tried to fit an expansion plot line in between the two.
Nimbus Opens Mouth. Dies from Cringe.
Nimbus is the epitome of cringe dialogue and writing found in so many modern forms of media. Nimbus is a result of Marvel style writing which leads to terrible dialogue such as this.
Now on top of the Cringe dialogue is in my opinion some of the worst designs I’ve ever seen for Characters in a sci fi universe. This tweet from FalloutPlays really sums it up for me.
The Cloudstriders are 110% the Writers “Barely disguised Fetish” meme come to life.
Seriously these characters look awful.
Neomuna looks like a halo 5 forge map
Now I like the look of Neomuna. It doesn’t really feel like it fits in the Destiny Universe, if you compare to most of the stuff we usually see, but that aside. I do like its look. However, I do have to agree that it looks pretty bland in terms of the attention to detail or lack thereof. Most of the buildings you pass by or go inside are just empty showing not much of anything. Without the Bright color tones and cyberpunk lighting, it would look extremely basic. Which to me just shows that it really isn’t a place that Bungie really spent a lot of time creating. I’m no game dev, I don’t mean to sound like a dick when I say that, but it does feel pretty basic. Like a Halo Forge map. Just seems like it was put together pretty quickly, which I found to be the case when you visit a lot of the areas. Like even the Hall of Heroes, is overly simplistic and basic to me. Not everything in Lightfall feels this way, but as a whole I do think Neomuna is a bit bland looking except for the color tones.
I wanted this Calus, Not that goofball Boy Scout one.
This image is from Bungie’s Art of Destiny 2 book and I gotta say, Calus looked so badass here. And every time he’s ever spoke to us in the game I’ve always envisioned he’d be like this. And maybe at one point in the history of his Reign as Emperor, he did look like this. But the version of him we see in Lightfall is a bit of a disappointment. I really did enjoy his Boss fight, I think it’s one of the best we’ve ever had in the Destiny franchise, at least on Legendary, but yeah he looks pretty lame in his new purple suit.
Here’s a bit more of a positive take I definitely can agree with.
Tormentors are Way Better than the Hive Guardians. They have like 10 different attacks and their AI kept us on our toes the entire campaign. PLEASE Let them be used in other content going forward!
Yeah these miniboss enemies were awesome to fight. Every time I encountered them in the Campaign I enjoyed fighting them. They’re super aggressive, they use unique tactics against you. Love it. Fantastic enemy. They’re not perfect, as they’re still prone to some exploits, like any enemy, but I gotta say these are some of the best enemy additions to the game in a long time.
They turned lake of shadows into genuinely the worst most unengaging strike on the planet, you start the strike and push the 2 payloads then kill a miniboss and then the rest of the strike is the exact same.
Yeah this was pretty disappointing to me to see that the reworks to not only Lake of Shadows, but also Arms Dealer were pretty lazy and just awful. This idea of reworking old strikes is something I’ve talked about in previous videos that I’d like to see Bungie do, because its something they did back in Destiny 1, but the Reworks to the Strikes in that game, always improved them with either more fun mechanics, or a random encounter that could be different per Strike run. But here, these two strikes just became more tedious and boring. Really unfortunate to see this be the case because reworking old Strikes could’ve been great if they put some more thought and effort into them.
I just don’t know how the strike playlist is ever gonna recover at this point. Adding 1-2 strikes per year does not help the staleness case whatsoever, and the addition of low-quality Battlegrounds just make the situation feel like a ticking time bomb.
It’s really sad to see the state of Core Playlists, but I’ve been talking about this issue since Shadowkeep and people always blew it off as not a concern and the amount of Strikes or Crucible maps doesn’t matter, but of course they do. Because we spend so much of our time post-campaign, inside these playlists. I won’t talk about this point for too long because I know most of you have heard me talk about it before ad nauseam, but yeah. Lack of Core activity content in a 50 dollar expansion feels just as bad as it has every year since Shadowkeep.
Here are some of Gladd’s day one hot takes, but the one I wanna focus on is Strand can’t compete with Arc, Solar, or Void 3.0. While I think it might be a little bit too early considering we all still need to unlock the rest of the aspects and fragments and there needs to be a little bit of time before we see some crazy builds emerge, I think he might be a bit right here. It’s a fun subclass for sure, but I’m unsure how it will perform in endgame content. However I gotta say that has a Hunter main, the DPS on the super is actually pretty insane. Easily shreds bosses with just the basic attack. For me, the jury is still out on Strand. I like it a lot more than stasis I gotta say.
My Spinfoil hat theory is that Bungie made the campaign meh to entice more people to buy the campaign skips.
Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case considering its $20 dollars per character to skip the campaign, that’s just easy cash for Bungie since there are quite a few people willing to spend that money, but who knows. I don’t know if they intentionally made their campaign mid just to sell campaign skips, but I wouldn’t put it past them either.
Did you know that every weapon in this dlc is a reskin besides the raid weapons?
I used to be of the mindset that all reskinning is bad, and for sure, it can be, especially at the levels which Bungie does it, but I don’t think it’d be all that bad if they kept reskins to Seasons or something. But when it comes to full sized 50 dollar expansions, I think there should be absolutely no reskins. That is the bare minimum if you ask me. I do appreciate the amount of new perks and Strand weapon types, that’s pretty cool, but yeah the weapon models are the same as they’ve always been which is unfortunate.
After trying various builds in both PvP and PvE, I have come to the following conclusion: Armor 2.0 is not progression. It is regression. If the goal was simplification, that has been achieved. Alas, the problem is that it is oversimplified. Buildcrafting now feels uninspired.
I’ve seen this sentiment quite a bit and I agree partially with it. I think the simplification of things like the Champion Mods and other Artifact mods has been really great and appreciated. But the depth of Build crafting has certainly taken a hit for the most part and leads to less interesting Build potential overall. This is one of those things like Strand that is a bit of a Jury is still out type of situation, but I definitely see the negatives of these changes.
I’m going to be honest. With the Lackluster Campaign, empty patrol zone, mod changes, strand being kinda meh, Khvostov tease, lack of core playlist support, having to grind power again and the timegates, I just don’t feel like Destiny 2 is worth playing. Everything just feels wrong.
Yeah I think people are finally coming to the realization that Destiny 2 is a hamster wheel type of game. Filled with too much timegating, grindy tedious quests, and a genuine lack of depth when you look at it objectively. I do actually like some things about Lightfall so far, and surprisingly I might have a more positive outlook on it than most of the people who have said that I’m just a D2 hater, but I do think players have grown wise to some of the glaring problems with the game. And this is the most expensive expansion to date, so with these problems players are having, it really doesn’t sit well.
And like this reddit post points out,
I’ve never seen the community make such a 180 before.
This is very accurate. Players had a very positive outlook on the game during Season of The Seraph. And I personally think that Lightfall Hype is a big reason people were feeling good about Seraph. Seraph itself was pretty average I gotta say. It was better than some seasons, but severely overrated, and I think that Lightfall hype was the cause of players positive perception of it. It is wild to see SO many players switch up their outlook on Destiny in the span of a couple days, but that’s what’s happened.
But anyways guys, like I said, I’ll have a full thoughts video coming out sometime soon, probably before the Raid launch, and then another video discussing the raid itself. But let me know your Hot Takes and thoughts on Lightfall down below in the comments. Thank you so much for watching. I’ll see you all in the next one.
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