A lot of things, but most of them stem from the expansion being very clearly rushed to release. The narrative was also incomplete, and Bungie had to add a bunch of supplemental lore to the seasonal missions instead of putting them in the main campaign where it belongs.
Traditionally, Bungie keeps the seasonal storyline separated from the campaign story, because they’re technically separate purchases the player has to make, so it makes sense to keep those stories apart from each other, so that a player who only buys the expansions but not the season passes won’t be missing out on any narrative threads that they haven’t already invested time and money into.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Lightfall. The campaign didn’t finish telling the story, and spent about half of the campaign time sending the player on a search for a MacGuffin that the game never properly explains, and the other half was spent awkwardly learning how to use the new Strand subclass. Except all the campaign missions where you get to experiment with Strand gave you a super-boosted version of the subclass which isn’t available in normal play, so players were disappointed with how Strand performed in the endgame when it felt so overpowered during the campaign. A lot of the unanswered questions from the Lightfall campaign got explained in seasonal cutscenes, instead.
Now, granted, the seasonal and campaign stories are part of the same over-arching plot, so it’s expected for there to be some overlap. But it’s not supposed to go to the point where you literally can’t understand the point of what you did during the campaign until 3 months after the campaign was released, and only if you also bought the season pass. They introduced “The Veil” in the Lightfall campaign, and it was never made clear to the player what it actually was or what it meant as far as the story goes, until some Season of the Deep cutscenes came out.
There’s also the issue of Strand being completely reworked from whatever “poison” subclass it was originally going to be, and there’s a lot of evidence from the Witch Queen campaign that suggests that the subclass was originally going to be poison (some unredacted text in the game originally referred to poisonous status effects for Strand that are not in the final version). Strand was originally going to be included in Witch Queen, but was cut and pushed back to Lightfall, and in its place in Witch Queen was a really half-baked mechanic called “Deepsight”, which reveals hidden platforms for the player to use to progress through the stages (in places where it’s clear that the player was originally expected to use the Strand grapple mechanic to progress).
To Bungie’s credit, they’ve made some improvements to Lightfall since release, and it is in a much better state than it was when it launched. But the narrative issues are still there.
It’s that sort of feeling that the game is this weird, organic beast that feeds on the “subscriber base” that caused me to leave in the first place.
Sad it worked out that way with Lightfall’s release, but if Destiny wants to be such a good game that the ideal player buys everything, then it has to be that damn good to do so. And it can be, but not always.
Yeah, I’m remaining cautiously optimistic about The Final Shape. I’m still going to end up buying it, because despite a lot of the game’s flaws and the poor release of Lightfall, the storytelling is still fantastic 99/100 times, and I really want to see how the story ends.
But post-Final Shape is going to be a really hard sell, even for players who are sucked into the game like myself. They’ve made some decent progress at fixing some of Lightfall’s downfalls so far, so it’s evident that Bungie does genuinely care about the game still. But they’ve definitely damaged our trust, and are still gonna need to work really hard to earn that back.
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was? What was it?
And yeah I 100% percent wish we had gotten poison instead of janky parkour. (I will admit that baiting the Sorrow Bearer into lunging off the map with Strand jumps was fun though.)
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was?
Well… sort of. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but basically it’s another cosmic entity that’s somehow linked to the Traveler. We end up finding it on Neptune at the end of the Lightfall campaign, and it basically looks like a giant fungal growth. Aesthetically, there’s some similarities to the Egregore that took over the Glykon and Leviathan, but I’m not too sure that they’re really the same thing.
They released this cutscene which goes into a bit of the Witness’s origins, and it briefly talks about the Veil.
That’s the worst part to be to be frank. Incomplete story and lore with the answer of….another $12 every 3 months. ….or pay 50 more dollars to get the story that you already paid…$50 for.
Fuck. That. Also Joe Blackburn had a hard on for player engagement so almost everything got nerfed when lightfall launched… so you have to play longer and shoot things longer.
Shortly before lightfall came out, I dropped the game and haven’t been back.
A lot of things, but most of them stem from the expansion being very clearly rushed to release. The narrative was also incomplete, and Bungie had to add a bunch of supplemental lore to the seasonal missions instead of putting them in the main campaign where it belongs.
Traditionally, Bungie keeps the seasonal storyline separated from the campaign story, because they’re technically separate purchases the player has to make, so it makes sense to keep those stories apart from each other, so that a player who only buys the expansions but not the season passes won’t be missing out on any narrative threads that they haven’t already invested time and money into.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Lightfall. The campaign didn’t finish telling the story, and spent about half of the campaign time sending the player on a search for a MacGuffin that the game never properly explains, and the other half was spent awkwardly learning how to use the new Strand subclass. Except all the campaign missions where you get to experiment with Strand gave you a super-boosted version of the subclass which isn’t available in normal play, so players were disappointed with how Strand performed in the endgame when it felt so overpowered during the campaign. A lot of the unanswered questions from the Lightfall campaign got explained in seasonal cutscenes, instead.
Now, granted, the seasonal and campaign stories are part of the same over-arching plot, so it’s expected for there to be some overlap. But it’s not supposed to go to the point where you literally can’t understand the point of what you did during the campaign until 3 months after the campaign was released, and only if you also bought the season pass. They introduced “The Veil” in the Lightfall campaign, and it was never made clear to the player what it actually was or what it meant as far as the story goes, until some Season of the Deep cutscenes came out.
There’s also the issue of Strand being completely reworked from whatever “poison” subclass it was originally going to be, and there’s a lot of evidence from the Witch Queen campaign that suggests that the subclass was originally going to be poison (some unredacted text in the game originally referred to poisonous status effects for Strand that are not in the final version). Strand was originally going to be included in Witch Queen, but was cut and pushed back to Lightfall, and in its place in Witch Queen was a really half-baked mechanic called “Deepsight”, which reveals hidden platforms for the player to use to progress through the stages (in places where it’s clear that the player was originally expected to use the Strand grapple mechanic to progress).
To Bungie’s credit, they’ve made some improvements to Lightfall since release, and it is in a much better state than it was when it launched. But the narrative issues are still there.
It’s that sort of feeling that the game is this weird, organic beast that feeds on the “subscriber base” that caused me to leave in the first place.
Sad it worked out that way with Lightfall’s release, but if Destiny wants to be such a good game that the ideal player buys everything, then it has to be that damn good to do so. And it can be, but not always.
Yeah, I’m remaining cautiously optimistic about The Final Shape. I’m still going to end up buying it, because despite a lot of the game’s flaws and the poor release of Lightfall, the storytelling is still fantastic 99/100 times, and I really want to see how the story ends.
But post-Final Shape is going to be a really hard sell, even for players who are sucked into the game like myself. They’ve made some decent progress at fixing some of Lightfall’s downfalls so far, so it’s evident that Bungie does genuinely care about the game still. But they’ve definitely damaged our trust, and are still gonna need to work really hard to earn that back.
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was? What was it?
And yeah I 100% percent wish we had gotten poison instead of janky parkour. (I will admit that baiting the Sorrow Bearer into lunging off the map with Strand jumps was fun though.)
Well… sort of. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but basically it’s another cosmic entity that’s somehow linked to the Traveler. We end up finding it on Neptune at the end of the Lightfall campaign, and it basically looks like a giant fungal growth. Aesthetically, there’s some similarities to the Egregore that took over the Glykon and Leviathan, but I’m not too sure that they’re really the same thing.
They released this cutscene which goes into a bit of the Witness’s origins, and it briefly talks about the Veil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0CKckjryVI
That’s the worst part to be to be frank. Incomplete story and lore with the answer of….another $12 every 3 months. ….or pay 50 more dollars to get the story that you already paid…$50 for.
Fuck. That. Also Joe Blackburn had a hard on for player engagement so almost everything got nerfed when lightfall launched… so you have to play longer and shoot things longer.
Shortly before lightfall came out, I dropped the game and haven’t been back.