Homecoming
It’s been speculated for a while, then teased by Bungie themselves, and finally we see Dominus Ghaul and the Red Legion destroy the place we’ve called home for the last three years. I’m not going to lie, it got me a bit misty eyed seeing the rapid loss of everything we had worked so hard to defend. I’m not going to walk through the ins and outs of the whole mission because I talked at length about it in my preview, but just know it’s an emotional affair. Ghaul will be the easiest villain to hate, because this time, it’s personal. He came into our home and I have never wanted to put a Gjallahorn to an enemy’s face as bad as this commander.
Ghaul is a calculated leader. He’s not the “destroy all the world” types that we’ve dealt with before. The villains we’ve fought up until now have had more ethereal, supervillain type goals. They’ve been alien gods, existing in other realms and outside of time. Dominus Ghaul is real. Dominus Ghaul might just be the most human like enemy we’ve ever faced. His motivations are that of jealousy. He wants to show everyone that the Traveler chose wrong in giving humanity the light and leading us into the Golden Age. He wants to prove that he should have been the chosen one.
This distinctly human and personal nature makes Ghaul more terrifying and unpredictable than the likes of Oryx, Aksis, or even Atheon, who technically exists outside of time itself. A god is easy to predict. The jealous and calculated leader of the most powerful Cabal force? There’s a reason we watch the Tower fall. There’s a reason we lose everything. There’s a reason the Vanguard is broken. That reason is Dominus Ghaul.
New and Reworked Subclasses
Destiny 2 is introducing three new subclasses: Titan Sentinel, Warlock Dawnblade, and Hunter Arcstrider. This will replace the Defender, Sunsinger, and Blade Dancer subclasses that previously fit into these elements. Defender and Sunsinger were crutch utility subclasses that became de facto go-to loadouts in many situations, and Blade Dancer was relatively unimpressive compared with the Hunter’s alternate options.
These utility features are going away in favor of giving each class a unique ability that will transverse all subclasses. The Titan gets a forward facing barricade they can lay down, the Warlock gets a rift that either powers up or heals, and the Hunter gets a quick dodge roll ability. While I was dubious about these changes at first, I’ve come to understand that putting the utility on the class itself will allow for a lot more freedom in choosing a subclass loadout. There’s no more being required to enter the raid as a Defender for the shield buff, or a Sunsinger for the guaranteed revive. The utility is baked into your class of choice, which allows Destiny to take a little more of an MMO stance on distinguishing the archetypal roles of each class and allowing player freedom, instead of forcing them into a loadout corner.
For the gameplay sessions, we had a chance to get hands on with Striker Titans, Dawnblade Warlocks, and Gunslinger Hunters. Why no Sentinels or Arcstriders you ask? Well, they can’t give us everything new at once! There’s got to be something left for release day. It also gave us a chance to mix old with new and see some of the changes they are bringing to the subclasses we are familiar with.
As for the new subclasses, from the limited reveal footage we got, Sentinel seems to be a more personal defense for the Titan, although you can toss the shield like a space faring Captain America for some great damage against enemies. The best defense is a good offense, right? Arcstrider is a reworked Bladedancer that makes it a more of an area of effect attack as opposed to targeting single opponents, which will hopefully solve many of the problems with why Bladedancer was often underutilized. And Dawnblade is like the Sunsinger took a page out of the Titan Sunbreaker’s book, adding more finesse as they toss flaming swords at their enemies from above.
Striker is now a roaming super allowing for multiple slams while it is active, as well as shoulder charges that will eliminate anything in their way. Gunslinger has a new option to be a rapid six shots instead of three shots spread over time. And Dawnblade has you launching flaming swords at your enemies while floating through the air, with a powerful ground pound to lay waste to anything below you. It feels like they are not only trying to make supers feel more powerful, but also to allow them to cater to individual playstyles even more than they did in the first. Again, Destiny is all about moments, and supers are some of the best feeling moments in the game.
Gone is the grid of perks that you can select from on each subclass, replaced by new clusters of nodes that each give four perks. This is called attunement, and again, while I feared at first it was simplifying the game, I realize now that it creates a more risk/reward style of play. Instead of selecting the best loadout that is shared by everyone else, you now have the selection between two loadouts on each subclass that will have a series of pros and cons, meaning that neither is the “right” choice. Simplification creates a depth and player freedom that wasn’t there previously, when we were all basically required to run the same things because some of the perks just weren’t worth selecting at all.
We didn’t hear anything about the Sunbreaker, Nightstalker, or Stormcaller. Some are speculating that we may not see them initially in Destiny 2. The original game only launched with two subclasses per class, and the above three came a year later with The Taken King expansion. There’s certainly the chance that Destiny 2 will take a similar tack, limiting us to two subclasses on each class before giving us three brand new subclasses later this year. Or perhaps these three subclasses are being vastly reworked and aren’t even ready to mention. We barely heard anything about Voidwalker either, so it’s possible that the focus at the reveal was on what was new.
Tell Me A Story
Destiny 2’s story is going to be more engaging and riveting than that of the first. That’s not too hard to do. While Destiny is bursting with rich lore to draw from, lore does not equal story. The lore had to be mined by the players, and only the hardest of hardcore in the Destiny community really have much of an idea of what is going on.
It’s a rabbit hole though. Once you get into reading about the history of a single gun (yes, most every gun and piece of armor in Destiny has lore attached to it in some way), there’s no telling where you might end up. There are the basics, you know, the Traveler, the Vanguard, the Last City, the Darkness. Then we plunge into the depths of it. There’s Dredgen Yor who created the exotic hand cannon Thorn. There’s Kabr who led a fireteam into the Vault of Glass and became lost to time. There’s Toland and his Hive experimentation. Guardians may have heard some of these names in passing, but if you asked 90% of Destiny players who these characters are, they’d likely have no ideas. And yet they are the core of some of the most interesting lore about the long running fight against the darkness that our Guardian was fated to be a part of from the moment we woke up, as if it was our destiny. Did I mention that the Vex are basically a time travelling hive mind that kind of complicates literally everything you think you know?
Destiny 2 promises deeper story baked right into the game. The missions are more cinematic and interactive, fighting with characters as opposed to just hearing their voices over a comm link. It not only allows for a deeper bond with these characters, but also a depth of storytelling that we can feel involved with, instead of just reading offhand. I’m sure there will still be plenty of lore buried within item descriptions and casual conversations in social spaces, but what RPG doesn’t have that? The difference this time is that Destiny 2 will do a better job bringing it to the surface, and making players feel that there is a good reason for playing that strike or that raid, as opposed to just killing all the things for the loot.
On page 3 we explore some core changes to weapon design, new free roam activities, and clan support.
