Ikora in Seraph: Were fucked and this may be our last time together so I want you to know that it was an honor fighting with you Ikora in Lightfall: Oh we lost, we'll get them next time!
caiatl was pretty good especially the part where she calls the shadow legion cowards i just feel that she needed a much more presence on neomuna, where are her ships? also she should have dealt the final blow on calus
Broh imma be real. I dont feel like we lost. Like at all. Sure Traveler has hole it. But why the fuck do I care ? Ghost still can rez me. Still have light. And besides over the last year we learned the Traveler is a cowardly bitch who only thinks for itself. Further more we just killed Calus a discple of the witness who was threatening the last vestiges of our golden age. On top of that Humanity for the very first time since before the collapse find's itself surrounded by allies it can trust. Then when I got to talk to Zavala he bassically echo's those thoughts. Barely mentions the hole in the traveler and instead focusses on our allies. Its dogshit writing. When I watched infinity war when I came out of that theater I felt both gutted but elated. I had just watch super heros which had never failed before even in the darkest day fucking lose. And they lost super hard. The villain fucking won. What I watched with this campaign feels nothing like that.
Lightfall's Campaign left me with a "That's it?" feeling and its painfully sad. As you said Byf, this was THE moment for the story; and yet there were no satisfying revelations or answers, and all I was left with was more questions because they shoehorned the "need" to master Strand into the story that they left out the entire point of the expansion.
I liked the having to step back and struggle with a power, we’ve always just vacuumed up paracausal powers with no drawbacks so that was refreshing. Did it need to as large a part in the campaign? No I don’t think so
It's nothing new but still improvement over previous DLC. Warmind DLC ending: Anna: Ok guys, this is it! *the end* Shadowkeep DLC ending: Witness: We are your... Salvation... *In a minute, Guardian just stands in the tower without any explanation*
I think they should have made the strand thing a quest for the season pass and folded the seasonal story into the main campaign. We really can’t say definitively what this expansion is going to be like until 3 or 4 weeks before the final week of the last season of this years expansion is over and we sit back and go over all that has happened. Not ideal but it’s unfortunately Destiny’s design. Yeah they did have a chance here to do something special and blew it and this story seems to be dry and empty but then again so was everything else we did except for witch queen and from an exterior perspective it was ONLY interesting because of TTK and how starved for lore we had been up to this point with how Forsaken never resolved the curse and Shadow Keep went in circles…so yeah I feel the pain, been a Halo fan since the beginning and look where it is today…I feel this, but we’ll need to see how this year plays out.
Could you imagine Rohan teaching us all year through the seasonal stuff and THEN dropping this on us at the end? "Yeah my decade is up" Could have been so many feels...
imagine the last season before finale shape is just us with Rohan in his last moments. Would of been amazing. Instead he died destroying the Radial mast, which is another thing that is introduce in LF, all characters know (including ghosts) what it is, but yet the player has zero background on.
@@darmorel549 bro that whole mission they said radial mast like 20 times, and every time they said it is thought “are they gonna give us some context on what this is?”
@@darmorel549 I mean honestly just knowing that the Mast was a darkness imbued doohickey of sorts that was powering Calus' ship was enough explanation why destroying it was good imo but yeah expecting us to care about Rohan dying was laughable.
The Witch Queen integrated some amazing things into the campaign DURING the campaign... The Evidence Board. Alters of Reflection. Memory Fragments. All of this was INTEGRATED into the main campaign story. it wasn't a "campaign mission" but it was quests during that helped explain the story, the serious threat of savathun, why she was there, why she was such a threat. It even lead to amazing plot twists that answered a lot of questions. The campaign was SOLELY focused on Savathun and the threat of Savathun. That's why the Witch Queen campaign felt so much more complete.
Don’t worry lightfall is now integrating itself into seasonal content. Now for the low price of $40 you can enjoy the full story of a stand-alone expansion
The extra talk of savathuun was annoying we already knew everything they haven't stfu about her for years before the dlc by the time witch queen dropped I didn't even care I'm enjoying lightfall way more qnd can't wait to see what's next through seasons and the final dlc
the witch queen campaign also had alot more to it, it had more than just the 8 story missions, and the missions were longer. on top of that, all the things introduced throughout the campaign, like savathun's worm and the altars stayed relevant post campaign and set up more things as well as answering more things. Lightfall has done a great job of fleshing things out in the post campaign story, but not as much as witch queen. Lightfall suffered from having strand too focused on and Calus as a villain. while it's always great to see calus since he's such a well written character. his story and lore, as well as the cabal's didn't really have any room to add more context or huge plot twists like Savathun and the hive did.
My biggest issue was the lack of consequence. We didn't lose a single character we cared about. Rohan's sacrifice meant literally nothing b/c it was telegraphed so hard
It also wasn't a character we cared about. We were literally just introduced to Rohan, so it meant nothing. If it was Zavala, Ikora, Caital, Osiris, Mara Sov, Elsie, or Mithrax, that would have hit harder. Plus, it wasn't even a cutscene.
This comes down to fear of losing narrative mechanisms. The death of Cayde-6 will forever be the most brave they have been when it comes to moving the story forward. A critical error in storytelling, or writing in general, is to assume that the reader knows exactly what you're talking about. Instead, like our Guardian, we are in the dark.
Not only was it telegraphed, and a character we had exactly 0 attachment to, LITERALLY NOBODY CARED IN THE STORY Immediately after the fact when you go to nimbus he has maybe 2 lines about it and then goes back to being a silly plucky unbelievably annoying dude
"This was the worst time to rediscover mediocrity". This is exactly how I felt finishing the campaign. I don't understand how this wasn't caught in storyboarding
At this point I don't think bungie has Profesional writers on staff nor qa for the writing they really need some people that understand good storytelling and narrative structure to proofread their crap
I think it is all part of the plan, you aren’t supposed to know everything yet. Think of the mysteries we’ve unraveled so far what we’re unraveling now. If we just knew everything about what was going on, and what exactly everything was there would be no mystery, no unwrapping no payoff for a conclusion 😊
The fact that Lightfall and The Final Shape were once a single expansion is really starting to show. Lightfall feels like the first act of the finale, not a story that could stand on its own
yearly releases really just dont work in gaming, it ALWAYS ends up failing, I honestly wish that lightfall and final shape never got split and we just had a 2 year gap from witch queen to final shape but knowing this community they would complain equally as much because of "content drought" you know what has a lot of content? OTHER FUCKING GAMES
Honestly I hope bungie delay final shape to really nail the landing, there are simply too many threads and questions to need to be answered 10 years in and still waiting on further explanation of what any of this conflict really is
@@flamingscar5263 People complained about the content drought. Then those same people complain about the seasonal model. It happens. Its usually why I stay away from social media and form my own conclusions on things.
I was really really looking forward to a morally gray ground to interact with the Cloudstriders. But no, they were immediately friendly and teamed up ona whim. I wanted to see tension between us, Osiris, and the Cloudstriders. It could've been as easy as saying they don't trust us and will not reveal the secrets of the veil to us.
Would've been nice...it felt very off putting to me how we manage to track this place down that was once only a vision Osiris had and then we are like immediately allies and best buds with these dudes who just blind trust us.
We (complete strangers) rolled up in literally the same drop pods being used in the massive invasion of their city. Rohan even mentions how the Cloudstriders believed the immortal warlords of Earth would come to Neomuna as conquerors. It would have been more logical for them to try and ice Osiris and the guardian on the spot.
But isn’t this made by Disney? We are aaaaall friends and super duper friendly riiight? Nimbus and Rohan talked on how they heard stories of the power hungry warlords that ruled over the mortals and has enough power to wipe any alien race off the galaxy. And you’re right… why didn’t they stay cautious?
One of the most blantently weird things I've seen from this story. To the people of Neomuna, The last city is *just now* barely functioning on the same level of civilization as them. For centuries earth was a wasteland where anyone that had a talking polyhedron on their side was a essentially an nigh unkillable god that could do anything they want with people who didn't. Then when a city was actually built, it was centered around some new agey cultist guy, his students, and a gaggle of batshit armed ideolouges that no modern, stable, democratic society of the golden age would ever have or even listen to (nihilist escapists, insane xenophobes hooked on unstable vex tech, and just monarchists). Plus they didn't touch any of the golden age leftovers (Mass defensive AI, weird magic people around a black hole in the asteroid belt, and the melagomanic corporatist freak known as Clovis). They had reason to, if they any helped or contacted anybody them, chances were they would've been wiped long ago by like Oryx or Ghaul. Nimbus could still be like the kid that wants to be friends with the new one that moves in, but Rohan should've shut down and question about what the veil is and only give what is nessecary to help Neomuna.
Everyone in the campaign: “You must reach the veil before it’s too late!” Players: “…what’s the veil?” Everyone in the campaign: “You know, the veil? The veil? Yeah, the veil.” Players: “No, what’s the veil?” Everyone in the campaign: “It’s the veil.” Players: “oh”
I agree, but, honestly, enemy shields have never made sense lol No one has the powers of light other than Guardians (and now Lighthive I guess), yet they have ALWAYS had Solar/Arc/Void shields? So I'm not surprised to see Strand shields tbh, as that's just been the norm. It just seems like a "gamey" mechanic that is handwaved for its combat use.
Lmao I literally Said the same thing when Osiris says we will surprise Calus wit strand then next enemy shield strand lmao I think calus know strand 😂😂🤦🏾♂️
Enemy Shields having a damage type is just video game mechanics. What Characters in game see: Enemy has a Shield. What Players see: Enemy has a shield we know means use that type of Weapon or Ability.
I think the worst part about Lightfall's story is that after the campaign and a few post-campaign quests, I learned more about The Black Heart then I did about The Veil, which was the SUBJECT OF THE ENTIRE STORY.
I was really hoping to get insights from the traveler's side, from the horses mouth, so to speak. Bungie for some reason, feels like it doesn't need to expand on the light (I think they said in Beyond Light) which is really aggravating, considering how much we've been seeing of the darkness. Maybe they changed their mind about it and want the light being silent as a narrative thing, but not getting ANYTHING about the Veil, or ANYTHING about the light really rubs me the wrong way, especially after it being so hyped up. We still have a raid that'll probably add more story, and the seasons ahead as well, but they really dropped the ball on the veil
@@peterjohnstone7867 NOT worth it so far. I would not buy the annual pass. If you want season of the defiance, strand and neomuna along with some exotics and other events and goodies then contemplate buying the 50 USD version. But by all means, we don’t know how this story and game will progress so hold off on the 100 USD version. In my opinion, strand feels fine and neomuna looks cool enough and has some verticality and cool events and aspects. The story is meh. The exotics are cool enough. They have some busy quests tied to them. You will need to play to get all your strand fragments. There is also a raid coming with some nice looking armor (the armor was leaked so don’t go searching for it if you don’t want to spoil it). But I’d recommend seeing how the sorry and game progresses before comitting 100 USD, unless you have money to spare of course. If Destiny 2 is the ONLY video game you play, then go ahead and spend that money. Hogwarts legacy is cool. I’d recommend that game if you like the idea of fighting foes with magic. You can split the DLC + season pass (50 USD) with Hogwarts Legacy (60 USD) and you’d have some good variation.
@@obscurit_y4536 I play league of legends, Fortnite, Surviving Mars and Destiny 2(for lore) I'm on a fixed income so $139.99 CAN is a very steep price ATM. Have 15-25 games I haven't played on Steam yet. I'll download one of those 👍🏾 Thanks for the reply
@@peterjohnstone7867 only way i would recommend it is if you can get it for less than 50 bucks as the deluxe edition, for only the expansion i would say max is 15 i would give
He goes from crisis of faith at learning of the Lucent Hive to optimistic acceptance. That is bullshit. Here is the thing that elevated and protected humanity, the thing that has been the closest thing to an actual God since Man first looked up at the Sun, that Zavala always rallied to, that gave him and countless others hope just by existing, and he's just OK with it being stolen and carved up like a jack-o-lantern. How many centuries has he lived beneath it? Zero grief. That it's not Zavala.
You hit the nail on the head! My biggest issue with the story is that we lost the most significant war ever and everyone is straight-faced "We'll get 'em next time".
It doesn't feel like we lost. It's so vague that Caitatl had to spell it out for us. We don't know the failure conditions. And we don't get a feeling that we lost. Hell, it feels so last minute that it feels like they forgot we were supposed to lose
When Zavala and ikora were both like "traveler dead rip" I felt like I missed a cutscene. How is my ghost still fine if the traveler is dead? When ghaul snuffed the light, our ghost dropped immediately.
That has to be the funniest way I’ve heard it described yet. Sav risked everything to save the traveler, and tricked the witness rhulk and countless others and had a big warning like you guys screwed up good luck. And all year it’s felt like we’re on borrowed time until light fall . Now rapustin is dead, Calus dies after becoming a disciple , nez is back, and according to our fearless leaders the traveler is gone. Yet it feels like we’re 12 year olds playing little league after striking out and being told “you’ll get ‘em next time slugger”. This should’ve been infinity war. We lose and we lose bad. It’s like if the snap went off and then thanos dips and nothing happens except cap going “yeah we lost”.
Honestly, mad respect for not pulling your punches and giving an honest take. It's not an easy thing to do when your livelihood depends on people engaging with this content.
Byf strikes me as someone who understands the power of community sentiment and knows that if the game doesn’t improve, community sentiment will fall and so will player numbers making his job infinitely harder.
I'm convinced that the main reason this felt so bad was cause it was so slow. The training montage with Osiris should've happened in the second or third mission, max. We could spend the rest of the time saving citizens physical forms, pushing cabal back, researching what the hell the veil is, and attempting to be proactive against calus instead of always on his heels.
Exactly - the campaign should have started with a cutscene or mission where you explore Neomuna - learn about striders and the veil - THEN the invasion should have started - the players would care about the city being destroyed - the stakes would be higher
The worst thing about Rohan's death in my playthrough, was that I fell off the platform just as the cutscene started, so I couldn't see what was happening and I just kinda hobbled around on the ground listening to it. Still not quite sure what exactly happened.
Lmao same. I was stuck watching it on the ground. But basically we were supposed to use strand to destroy the radial mast and we couldnt so he sacrificed himself to destroy it.
While simultaneously pulling the same lazy story telling tropes like you've failed me for the last time starscream level bullshit. Calus felt very disappointing.
Except it's FAR worse. Everyone shits on the Ishtar Academy cutscene, the Stranger didn't have time to explain why she didn't have time to explain, BUT she did explain, she gave us exposition and a direction in that cutscene as well as establishing herself as a mysterious character. In fact the entirety of the D1 campaign is literally a better version of the Lightfall campaign, even down to the mysterious unexplained MacGuffin of the Black Heart, which was actually properly pulled off. This? They just brought up the veil. What is the veil? Who the fuck knows, you don't get exposition or explanation.
Three main issues with the story. 1) What is the veil? Why is it important and what power did it grant the witness? Why can't the witness just go to the veil itself? 2) Strand was shoehorned in. We just sort of gain the power. Everybody goes, "Huh. That's neat. I guess that's a thing. Anyway, the veil..." Why couldn't we see more confusion from Osiris and the cloudstriders? Why weren't the strand nexuses explained more? Osiris kind of explains darkness subclasses, but fails to really complete the thought. Also; "Feel the ebb and flow" feels so cliche. It couldn't be that our guardian has to make an effort to envision the things they are materializing or pluck things out of a quantum web. Nope. Just be a surfer dude. And then we spend the majority of the campaign focused on strand instead of explaining the story. 3) There's too little going on with the witness and Calus. Witch Queen made the lucent hive and Savathun's possession of the light a major point of the plot. We saw characters shaken to their very cores seeing the hive wield what we thought was our gift, and there were stakes with us having to reveal the truth to Savathun and defeat her to bring the traveler back to Earth. With Lightfall, we barely get to see the main characters. What was going on back at Earth while we were in Neptune? How did Zavala, Holliday, Crow, and Ikora handle the arrival of the pyramid ships in orbit? How incredibly terrified was everybody? Why does the Traveler just sit there? Why do we get so much build up with no payoff? I think that's what really does it for me. There's no climax to the story. It just ends and we are left to ask, "What just happened and why did that matter?"
It was also backwards, like we didn't get any introduction or the city, culture or anything (not even the striders) until after you beat the campaign and start doing side missions for Quinn or whatever, and it really bothered me that all the people were just digital echos with barely any explanation
Just played the intro mission and upon arrival of the Pyramid Ships and the Witness, Zavala just sounds like he’s casually ordering you to go into a strike. Like, where is the fright in everyone? The Witness Almost destroyed humanity during the collapse, and they all be like when the Witness Arrives: ..”Ah shit, here we go again.” No emotion or fright whatsoever. Just another tuesday
Don't worry, I'm sure all your questions will be answered in the *next* dlc. Or at least you'll get new questions to keep you strung along and continuing to pay money to get the rest of the story.
There's a famous line from D1 that perfectly captures my feelings when I got to the end of the campaign, "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain"
The whole story was a cheap B movie....we even have the cliche hero sacrifice himself scene and the all so classic "Antagonist screams at his villain helper and then the villain throws something at the screen" scene. Like seriously. The strand discovery should have been a seperate storyline. A fully optional thing. First of all it was annoying to have and suddenly not have it during missions, over and over again. And secondly it felt out of place as well, with all the war(s) going on. It was a filler for missions because they ran out of ideas how to stretch the really boring story board going on.
“Oh man, Lightfall is dropping! This a major turning point in Destiny’s story and a bunch of major questions can be answered! We might even get some bombastic cutscenes that really drive points across and give insights into the existence of the Darkness, the Traveler, the Witness, and everything we’ve been dealing with for almost a decade!” Bungie: “kill Cabal, get Strand”
@@Shakenmike117 I actually think the *quality* of the encounters is better in Lightfall, for what they are. The problem is that Lightfall basically only has murder gauntlets, whereas nearly every encounter in Witch Queen felt incredibly unique, as you said.
@@Shakenmike117 The encounters in Lightfall were more fun from a kill everything standpoint, but is otherwise shallow in uniqueness. I wanted more Tormentor bosses, being that they should have been treated like actual bosses
@@Shakenmike117 I actually enjoyed the enemy encounters in Lightfall way better. They started giving vex spawns a standardized pattern like stormtroopers which supports them being, robots.
One of the things that really pissed me off was, why didn't the cloudstriders question us at all for our need for the veil, like they knew us as warlords, so warlords just show up and want access to the one thing that basically powers your whole city and you don't even bat an eye, like tf.
Yes also nobody in the last city even comments the fact that we have fucking discovered a new civilisation at the edge of the solar system that survived for centuries without us even knowing like if it were normal
I'm glad I'm not the only one who wondered that. When Osiris emerged from his drop pod, he should have been immediately slammed to the ground with a gun to his head. The cloud striders knew Earth during the collapse meaning the bloodbath, the desperation, and a true fight for survival. An Earth in turmoil, overrun but warlords, monsters, and death. They should have been terrified of our/Osiris's presence but they just accepted it.
@M J Yep, it is ridiculous. Like half the story is missing. First thing would be to speak to the uploaded citizens of the cloud ark.. "someone explain to me what this veil is that powers your entire city, so I can asses the threat level" nope. I mean someone must mantain this power source, must have harnessed it.... they must have some idea what it is. God, I honestly can't beleive how bad it is. I can take anti-climatic on the chin.. I mean I have seen my share of it on certain tv shows I will not mention. This was beyond anti-climatic.. I mean I didn't really know what the hell was going on.
my honest take during the campaign was that they figured between us and the literal invasion they were facing, we were probably the good guys since we didn't you know.... start blowing up the city.
It was honestly depressing to have the story fall so flat on its face. I LOVE the lore and story of Destiny. I was so excited for the culmination of YEARS of storytelling, and it just... It hurt.
What storytelling? I've been with destiny since first game (with breaks obviously) and i don't remember a single instance of good storytelling. The lore was good, true but the way they presented ALL of their stories was pathetic and unfocused with very minimal continuity. I am honestly suprised how people only now realize the storytelling of this series is bad
The absolute most freaking PAINFUL part for me personally is the story of Neomuna. When we set foot in the Ishtar Collective structure containing the Veil, I saw the potential of an awesome Sci Fi story of how Neomuna sprouted from this, and that we were walking in the halls of a long ancient heart of a beautiful civilization. The story that could've been told with Lightfall just from that experience alone! And it pains me soooo much that we didn't get anything like that.
They essentially lifted the Terminal Dogma/Lilith plotline and setting from Evangelion but capitalized on absolutely nothing that makes it so dramatically effective and urgent.
They focused way too much on showing off strand and not enough on neomuna itself or the veil. Unless i missed it, i dont even know why threads of strand are on neomuna.
Could you imagine to use deepsight to learn Savathuns secrets and discover strand? To realize the power behind her green magic? To learn another power of darkness over the witch queen seasons (with knowing that the third darkness power is the yellow energy of the disciples, awaiting us in "The Final Shape"). Sending out the green worms to attack or trapping enemies in the green net strands of Savathun...this would have given Strand a character and atmosphere. Cloudstriders and 80s neon are just a cheap and rushed stand in for the stuff that Bungie was not able to do because of Covid. I am pretty sure this was work of 3rd or 2nd division, because the first division was/is already at work at Final Shape.
@@Thund3rstone I’ve heard theories that even tho the Narrative Director of Lightfall was the same Narrative Director for Witch Queen, that Lightfall’s story was made by the Beyond Light team, which, no disrespect, but like said earlier, too many things just jumped over
I hate the fact that Neomuna has been a thriving civilization. It has advanced technology and probably a sizeable popularity. And we see 2 cloudstiders the only present military forces on the entire city, hell maybe planet! where is everyone? Their could have been destroyed Neomuna craft, we could have had moments where we rescue civilians. When could have found radios that have military chatter like in halo 3 and halo reach. But no we got the explication that everyone on is safe in the cloudark. I know it’s explained post campaign but still their was so much they could have done and I know it’s hard to do in a game like destiny. But I miss feeling like I’m in a losing war just barely pushing through. Instead my guardian is kicking everyone’s ass only for me to randomly be told we lost.
As a somewhat casual player when it came to lore, Witch Queen had me binge-watching Byf lore videos to fully grasp the full story. It turned me into a full fan and got me SO much more interested in the full lore of the game. Was LightFall fun? Sure. But it didn't deliver on story for me. I agree with so much of what you said!
I'm sorry for your loss. Not the best time to enter the franchise, apparently, story wise. Feels like it was cobbled together by a bunch of 8 year olds with fortune cookies.
@@gregbrown3082 Oh, I've been playing for a few years! I've played through all the campaigns, but the seasons leading up to Witch Queen and the Witch Queen campaign itself turned me from occassional player into full fan. Soooo yeah, this was a let down as a follow-up.
@@DiscoLiz my mistake! Some of the lore is just... So rich! It makes you wish the team writing weapon descriptions, and some of the Bray story... Had command of the flagship narrative for Lightfall.
@@gregbrown3082 absolutely! I feel like this was meant to just be a piece of The Final Shape and they forced it to work. Fingers crossed they reevaluate and take the constructive criticism for the final chapter of this saga!
I think my favorite part was when our ghost got possesed and was making the "link." Everyone wanted us to shoot our ghost like it was a huge issue to stop it, but then Nimbus just flies up there and grabs it AFTER it's made the link...
literally could've just grappled it with strand... the whole campaign was filled with our guardian conveniently getting disadvantaged so something interesting could happen, like Rohan sacrifice when strand conveniently stopped working, when before he had also said all known methods by the witness wont work in destroying it.
my clanmates missed Rohan due to how that encounter was structured, they died and came back out of the play area and didn't see it, but also, our gun wasn't a weapon of sorrow so we couldn't if we wanted
@@fishervt same here mumy friend was on top of the that wall in the middle while i was on the ground and he activated it thinking it would be fine then we go "exhausted" and since i was on the ground i couldnt see shit about rohans death
The end got me just like Byf, I was "ok, so, I can still use the light, what exactly happened? We lost? Lost what?" I can't believe Bungie dropped the ball like this just after Witch Queen, which was good and dealt with a great villain and a twist very well...
And everyone at the tower is like, “booohooo it’s gone.” I’m like, no it’s not. It’s literally right there. Nothing has changed that we can see. Have we tried flying into the opening? Are we going to look into that? What was earth doing while we were off learning new abilities that we found on the street?
@@jareddavulture58 That's definitely not the problem. Even in isolation, without comparing to WQ, there are sooo many problems with this expansion so far.
My favorite part of the campaign was the fight right before the last one where you and Caitl are defending the vault against waves of Calus’s cabal. In the final battle against Calus, my greatest enemy was the pit.
SERIOUSLY!!! whose idea was it to surround the arena with a pit, when the boss and all 3 mini bosses he summons has a knock back, AND the mini bosses can spam a suppress?
me and my friend watching caitl 1v1 a tormentor was the highlight of the campaign, the entire time we were also happy because finally an NPC actually helps us fight shit instead of just watching and being like "yeah we make a good team haha!"
Add to that you were not given a second of down time, so your health never really healed. I had to sit under the stairs and just light him and the tormentors up because of that.
@@urboi6307 after many failures dealing with the tormentors i decide the strat was to get in caluses face and only leave it to lure the tormentors away o they could be ignored. Wored super well till phase 2...
I'm so glad other people have the same questions. To add a few I've had: - How does Ghost just know what Tormentors are called? What even are they? - How does Neomuna seem to know about everything post-collapse? I get Maya Sundaresh knowing about Exo experiments, but they know about the Red War, the Hive, and were fully aware the Pyramids would return. BUT, they still think Guardians were Warlords? - Wtf was the Witness and the Vanguard doing whilst we were on Neptune? The start and ending cutscene could play 1 after the other and they are in the same place. How long were they all just standing there in the HELM? Like seriously, this is beyond suspension of disbelief
Your Ghost comment highlights something I mentioned to former Destiny buds asking me about the new content. Strand is just randomly named by Osiris at one point. With subtitles on, it's a Proper Noun that comes out of nowhere in one of his old man yells at cloud (striders) moments. Then a couple sentences later, "strands" is in quotation marks as though someone is struggling to describe the ability. The whole conversation seems like the order of everything was jumbled up after the initial writing.
another question ive had and one that realllyy shoulda been answered; if the witness needed to commune with the traveller and enter it, why did they want to destroy it at the end of seraph
Idk what you guys liked about twq, it was long and it was mechanically not fun (a game must be fun in the first place) and this one has a lot of flaws, but it's just destiny, it's just destiny and a big corporation funded game so it's sure to be shit, so I was impressed at how fun this campaign was compared to the previous ones (i don't think it saves the problems mentioned in the video though) I was expecting 10 other 3 immune phase minibosses before another unfun big boss, but not really, underleveled high diff campaign was fun and we killed fucking calus i was like damn
@@123deserted the story man. It was all coming together. As well as some refreshing gameplay. I played the whole season, only stopped when the pirate season came out. I can only handle so much redundancy.
I think the biggest props i can give the story is how well it sold the Witness as a threat in spite of the nebulous plot. Just like the fighters in the intro, our efforts mean literally nothing to it. It doesn't care that we're here, it doesn't care what we do. Whether Calus succeeds or we kill him, nothing changes and the Witness carries on. Hell, it cares so little that it uses our Ghost to chat with Calus about its plans simply because its convenient to do so, and nothing more. It does not care in the slightest.
That, I think, what makes the story so frustrating. Because there's some flashes of brilliance that tells us "yes! They can do this!" but the rest is just mediocre. We know they can do good writing, so it's honestly baffling that they'd fail in such a basic way.
And given it has the story trope of "handing the mcguffin to the enemy". Which isn't really a great one. It's too easy, and given the whole ghost possession chitchat with Calus. You coulda, shoulda, would have seen this coming from miles away. Who knows. Maybe Osiris, or the Queen find us a way to cut off the Veil, and force the witness out? Will wait and see.
@@That_One_Sunshine_Knight I’m thinking after the raid they’ll do something like they did with forsaken and open up some plot points? I doubt it but it’s hopeful. Lots of hype for a 6/10 story. Very average.
to be fair, i feel the opposite. the witch queen did a better job at making the witness a terrifying entity than lightfall did. yeah, in cutscenes, he himself is menacing, and obviously dangerous, but every other character just looks at him and acts like nothing. the see him and go “wow the witness, scary. go find veil and forget the witness, the literal reason guardians, and destiny the game even exists. forget him, go find veil.”
I think it’s very obvious that Strand was meant for the Witch Queen, it matches thematically and makes a lot more sense to find it within Savathûn’s memories rather than on the side of the road It also helps explain how lacklustre this campaign is. My opinion is that this expansion was never meant to be, but since they delayed Strand they needed another expansion to introduce all of the Darkness subclasses. Lightfall was planned to be the last expansion, but they moved all of its content to Final Shape and cobbled together this DLC out of a potential cyberpunk season. This explains why absolutely nothing happens this expansion, and it’s all basically a Strand tutorial. They said we’d learn more about the fate of Destiny during Lightfall and we got nothing If you splice together the opening and closing cutscenes in Lightfall, you’ll notice that they were originally the same scene and each character is in the exact same position in both. Nothing that happens in this expansion mattered at all, which explains how light in actual story and content this expansion was. That’s also why everything is a reskin, none of it was originally meant to be a full expansion
I agree completely, strand was supposed to be part of witch Queen. It makes sense even narratively. Savathun steals the light, we steal a power of the hive. Weaving, unraveling, tangling, these are hive terms. Constraints on needing to get content out vs the programing time to get it ready caused this. I don't feel it deserves all the hate it is getting, but it deserves a lot of it.
Late to the party, but I agree. I also think the "flash to Neptune" part of this cut scene was either A. Added in after they realized they needed another expansion to give the witness a reason to go to Neptune. B. Already there and was supposed to be a small part of the entire 'lightfall" (now final shape) campaign "The veil" feels tacked on as a "well, we need something to chase after in lightfall" and that's why we have no idea and never get an explanation as to what it is. They don't know and needed the seasons between lightfall and final shape to explain it.
I still find it crazy that they haven't learned anything from witch queen campaign. the way we were trying to figure out where savathuuns power both old and new came from, her history, the plot twist that she was tricked into working for the darkness and the witness through the worms, the way we use that to make her emotionally volatile, the fight to the final area and the final boss and her death which felt melancholic because she was trying to protect the traveller. like its crazy they do that last year then regress a year later. like they understood we liked learning about things in games not having it hidden from us.
witch queen was such a highlight for destiny. story and content-wise. we had so much to do. esp the end of season of the seraph, a very heart wrenching sacrifice by rasputin and the traveler leaving the city. and then this....
A lot of this did get explained and it's kinda much. Most open ended things will probably be a seasonal beat bc man there's so much shit going on. But tldr; she wanted light to break free from her worm, since that and Sword Logic is directly tied to Darkness. Witness spoke to her since siblings grew mad with Power. We've viewed Savathuun as a threat as all Hive Gods, yet she bode time for us til the Witness eventually would come in, causing another Collapse. Something she has already seen before. Her final trick was hiding the veil but her death made that possibility of discovery a reality. Tldr of tldr; she was the anti hero all along, some plot points will probs be expanded later on I hope, and we fucked ourselves but fighting against the current.
The story feels so much more about us discovering strand, rather than actually answering the big questions and further developing plots that have been building up for the past years
It's because destiny spent all resources explaining a new stupid power instead of making the original classes feel new again like with forsaken, would've been better to have new types of solar, arc and void classes like they did in forsaken than make up some bs power that makes no sense
@@tommyewen6344 exactly this! This was supposed to be part 1 of the end of the story we've been playing for almost a decade now and it failed miserably on that front. This story didn't even do any thing "Lightfall" related whatsoever. The Darkness/Pyramids/Witness have been an absolute joke ever since they showed up in season of Arrivals. How are we supposed to be afraid of an enemy that showed up 3 years ago and has done absolutely nothing since it arrived?
I was really sad when Rohan died. Not because I cared about him, but because he seemed like he could have been a really interesting character that I wish that I could have known and cared for.
I feel like Osiris could have become a Cloudstrider in Rohan's wake. He didn't have his Light, and being a protector again would allow for him to stop sitting there and complaining and start being active so he can have a sense of closure. I also feel like Cloudstriders should have had more beef with us for being immortal while they only live 10 years. It felt like a perfect setup for character tension, and it was all resolved in a few words in the beginning of the campaign, when Rohan said "Not all of us have lives to spare."
@@clayless8701 the entire plot felt rushed. We meet the cloudstriders and are immediately friends with them, no one seems to question how we can even see or use strand, we're expected to know about the entire city of neomuna and show it works, we're expected to really care about a place we've literally never heard of. Rohans death lacks impact because we don't even know the guy, not a single other memeber of the Vanguard is even consulted about strand or what it could be (no driftor no Eris etc) it's like the whole campaign is missing chunks or was rewritten or something
I think a small change that could have helped is having the other characters be just as confused as us. One reason I got so frustrated with the story is because I felt like I was the only one who didn't know what was going on. Plus, if Bungie is planning on slowly revealing information over the next year of seasonal content, it would be nice to feel like all the characters are learning together.
Don't worry, one of the seasons this year might just be another filler season about "time to be a pirate matey!" Oh wait.. that's not a good thing. Rip
@Oscar Sevilla nope that gonna be this season but instead of a pirate you get to be a queensguard ooooo how exciting. I just absolutely love doing battle ground activities non stop
@Oscar Sevilla ....I thought the next filler season was going to be Camalot: Knights & Knaves 😮 But honestly, the next 3 seasons will all be 99% filler just like last year.
@@wastedv8 i know, and them being killed off so effortlessly in the first cutscene makes you think there is no messing around here, things are serious, ppl are dying... And then the campaign fails to capture that tone they set with that first cutscene
You know, for an expansion called Lightfall I was expecting a bit of a, you know, FALL. Like some characters dying, or the city being lost or something other than "The witness has the veil thing, tune in next week for the next episode" Like imagine if we knew what would happen if the witness got the veil, then osiris sacrifices himself to stop calus only for us to lose anyway, that might have carried some weight.
@@Barrett1alright if they did that and say removed all the light subclasses cause the traveler is gone . Your kind would cry about it. At this point I would say fuck it and cancel the series . You people will never be satisfied
One thing I don't see coming up that often that needs to be said. Narratively, Calus deserved better. He's been around since D2 Year 1 and all we got from him is "Gah, I'm Calus, I like my gold stuff. Har Har Har. I do but don't like the Witness." And that was basically it. He did nothing until the very end. Meanwhile, Savathun actually got off her ass and did stuff while we were doing our thing. Calus just sat in a chair while his Legions did stuff and then he showed up in the final mission to take all the credit.
Of all things that was probably the most narratively accurate thing here. Calus is just like that, a selfish lazy brute who only did what he was told out of fear. He wants to be the last thing in all of existence and he disdains the witness because he knows that without the power he receives he can never achieve that goal.
That’s Calus’ personality and it’s been that since year 1. He’s lazy, greedy, weak and pitiful. He’s been overthrown and sought the witness for any sort of power he could possibly get. The witness granted it and used him as a pawn. The witness and Calus are alike in their selfish determination.
@@obscurit_y4536 I don’t understand why does everyone say calus is weak never made sense to for a weakling he sure has a lot of power even when he was overthrown it’s not like he was challenged to a 1v1 by ghaul or his daughter it was a bunch of people who ganged up on him
Here's a few particularly egregious moments that I'm able to recall off the top of my head: - Osiris calling the new element "strand" before anyone even knew what it was. He just casually calls it strand in a sentence about needing to learn more about it. It's the first time any of the characters gave it a name and it was even before anyone even said something that was like an analogy to strings or yarn or anything. He uses strand as a proper noun. - As we see the shadow legion moving the Radial Mast over to where the Veil is, Rohan says something along the lines of, "They're going to attempt a link." Prior to this, we had no idea what the Radial Mast was (granted we still don't and likely never will), we had no idea what the Veil was or how it was connected to the traveler (we still don't), and we had no idea what the Witness's plan was for the Veil other than getting to it and doing something. So for a character to claim that they were "attempting a link" implies either we were supposed to already know what that meant or that character had some insights that they are not sharing. - (this last one is extremely minor but still irksome to me for whatever reason) In the scene after finishing off Calus, our ghost is possessed by the Witness and flies up to the Veil. Caiatl insists we destroy our ghost and in response, our guardian raises a weapon to shoot the ghost. But that weapon isn't the current weapon in our equipped slot, it is the Khvostov. A weapon we haven't used since D1 and was only in D2 as an easter egg in the EDZ. Why was this choice made here? Trying to get some nostalgia?
Enemies already having Strand shields threw me off. And as for Khvostov, I honestly believe it's the ONLY gun model Bungie designed to be actually interactible in a cutscene (as in aiming down the sights) I get why it must have been limiting, because they could not use every single primary scopes on those few frames. Still, it felt weird, like a bad easter egg. It also show up on you character in the commendation screen, which is laughable.
You hit the nail on the head with the 'attempting a link' part. I felt like I missed something fundamental - I DID miss something but now I know that it wasn't me that screwed up.
@@Atypical_Typo think about the shields in another way: they have light supressing tech that is vulnerable to strand attacks. Similarly, their shields are also vulnerable to strand (if you shoot with a shield with the same element, you cause more damage and it explodes when destroyed), so it's not that they are using strand to power their shields, but their tech is weaker against it. The colors are just gameplay indicators. But besides that, all critics are valid, the story was just a filler
@@marciocruz4758 I thought the Strand element shields were also a bit off, they didn't have to throw them at us straight off the bat as we landed on Neomuna, they could have easily waited until we'd interacted with "those funny green thread thingies" even if it was as soon as we had touched the first bundle that would have been fine. It was a small touch but fed into removing my suspension of disbelief and reminded me I was playing a game - which makes it "not cool"
@@Atypical_Typo The reason why the Cabal had strand is because when they interacted with the Veil, they found a whole bunch of these reserves. They dont understand it, they dont know how to utilise it properly, nor do they know what else to do with it. They basically scavenged this piece of unknown technomagic and slapped it into their armour because they noticed it made them a bit more resilient to damage. The Guardian knows what it was used for and eventually through guidance and thought, almost complete mastered it though their journey inside Neomuna. Strand empowered the Guardian and gave them new pathways to decimate their opponents in every corner. The Guardians made strand their own power. Suprising even the Witness.
They marketed this expansion as having lots of pay off moments but instead it feels like we’ve gotten even more setup, there are so many threads and unanswered things that I’m worried for the final shape. I didn’t think at a normal campaign length the final shape will be Able to fully tie together all the threads without it feeling like every single scene is lore exposition that goes on forever
@@sombrashadow0013yeah cause the marketing team had to use the only two important cutscenes to show it off. Minus the purple door you can gather the whole story.
You know whats more strange? One of the sidequests we do to complete rohan's notes, we enter the black garden and the characters discuss the black heart and reveal that it was another veil. Like... are veils essentially things that affect the traveller cause the black heart was killing the traveller in D1, so what does this veil do exactly?!
the veil might have been holding back the witness's powers. in the end cutscene SPOILERS AHEAD the witness when its opening that portal. it looks like orange energy moving throughout its body. the link the veil made to the traveler probably enhanced the witness in some way. the veil was stopping the witness from opening that thing on the traveler.
I assume the veils are gateways to other planes of existence. I haven't done the quest you're talking about in specific but I assume it's a separate veil from the one in the campaign. The veil we were after was tied to the light most likely due to Ghosts' comments about it giving the same energy as the Traveler. Whereas the one in the quest you're talking about is likely tied to the darkness as it took you to the black garden, a plane of darkness.
Its the heart of the traveller. Witness literally says in witch queen (your pale heart holds the key) and now he is in the Traveller. The black heart was a failed attempt
Did anyone else feel like there should have been more of Calus' transformation scene? Like when he gets in the pyramid bath thing. I feel like there was probably more to that scene that got cut from the final release.
yes! I was anticipating seeing the part that had been in one of the trailers. where Calus looks like crap & is sitting inside his rectangular hot tub thingy while the Witness is watching him. the blocks start to close around him... what happened before & after that?!? so confusing 😒
So let me get this straight. The witness literally came to sol in season of arrivals (which was a dope ass season btw), gave us stasis in beyond light, parked it for 3 or so years witnessing sol while knocking back a cold one, then finally shows up at our doorstep, opens a transdimensional doorway using the veil, refuses to elaborate, then goes through and fracks off. This was supposed to be bungie’s infinity war, and all we got was infinity scuffle with an anemic discount Thanos. The witness was more intimidating and interesting back in shadowkeep when it transported us to the black garden and took our form to talk to us. My theories were so much better than what bungie delivered. Wow
One thing I gotta say is props to the person who did sound for that bit where calus is breaking in to the facility behind us. That felt actually really cool.
The fact that we didn’t even see the witness and the traveler leave in the end and we had to find out what happened through text with Zavala and Ikora is wild to me. Also, the big 4 sit in the helm with the curtains up during this whole things is even wilder to me. Old habits die hard I guess
That's because the cutscenes seem to have original been just one cutscene. The shutters go down, and maybe in a minute or so they come back up. Also the traveller didn't leave, it's still up there with the pyramid portal thing. You can see it on the map. The dialogue from zavala and ikora should probably be just completely discarded because it makes no sense at all. The traveller can still bless the "enemies of humanity" if a ghost happens to want to do that. We still have our light so it's clearly not dead, and zavalas whole "oh no we lost.. but there's a new hope now" is almost as bad as Nimbus just exclaiming the veil is safe now
@@HoneyDoll894 The dialogue seems to imply that whatever the Witness did it didn't exactly kill the Traveler, but it seems to be incapacitated and nonresponsive in some capacity. Though obviously not dead because we still have the Light.
I really cant get over how obvious it is that Strand was suppose to be the WQ subclass the color, the motif, the fact that there is an enemy in WQ called a threadweaver, the fact that Osiris got info about it from Sav's mind, the warlock subclass symbol looks alot like there WQ armor symbol. They legit took the subclass that was important to WQ and decided to smash it together with what is most likely the first act of OG lightfall. I also cant get over the fact that the beginning and ending cutscene are clearly the same cutscene but split in half
Bungie has claimed it was never meant for WQ but it's pretty hard to believe. Maybe a previous version of it that wasn't technically Strand was intended to be in WQ, and they're getting off on a technicality because three years ago it was in dev as 'Deepsight' or something rather than Strand despite sharing a lot of similarities.
Above all else, I’m terrified that I’m gonna leave The Final Shape feeling like I wasted hundreds of dollars and nearly a decade of my life being invested in this story
This though, I've been worried about this myself since Beyond Light. Since BL I've felt like there are obvious opportunities for plot points and answers and more mysteries but Bungie just bungles it time and time again. I've got 0 drive to play lightfall. I told my husband when the trailers came out, "it feels nothing like a destiny trailer, I feel like I'm watching something entirely different and I don't care for it" and it's remained true. I've spent YEARS and hundreds of dollars to follow a story I thought would be well rounded, full of secrets to discover and would coherent at the end. But it's really not shaping up that way 😐
If you were entertained, it wasnt a waste. Gaming is fun but you have to be able to walk away when you are tired of a specific game. Its the feeling of 'all the wasted time' the keeps you in it. But leaving doeant have to be permanent. Skip a season or two and if you dont miss, you'll aways have the memories.
@@QuietQuin with me I spent my middle school years and high school years playing this game, I’m a freshman in college now and I feel like I wasted so much of my childhood on this franchise after this
More like the difference between Curse of Osiris and Forsaken. I enjoy the combat and difficulty of the Legendary Campaign but holy snap the story was hyper shallow and the environments nowhere near as expansive as I expected.
The first mission of Witch Queen was filled with intrigue and mystery and "wtf" moments The first mission of Lightfall is "Remember the key card mechanic from Duality and the Leviathan raid? Do that"
@@jayla6499 Yes, however there was more to it than that. THe craziest part of it was a Tormentor coming in, and we know exactly why it's here, because the Witness gave them to buff up Calus' forces. Hive Guardians we didn't know other than Savathun had the Light and that it seemed impossible, then we got straight into the Throne World and see nothing Hive related at all. Nothing made sense considering our knowledge of everything before contradicting all of this entirely.
Two big missed opportunities for me was not actually showing Neptunian people aside from the cloudstriders (makes it hard to feel the weight of a city under siege) and the lack of any dynamic between characters, like there isn’t really a mentor and student vibe between Rohan and Nimbus or our character and Osiris even though that seems like what they wanted
What annoyed me is the radio says the citizens should take up arms like how cool would that be flying around the city as bullets fly from the citizens the cabal and the vex instead they all live in a “virtual world”
@@obscurit_y4536 ik thats why you make them invincible they dont have to be true enemies they could be like the robots from that one lost sector on europa
Was I supposed to feel bad about Rohans death like it was a war story? Because I physically cannot I only knew the guy for like 15mins I shed more tears listening to the audio clips at cayde’s memorial in the tower.
He also told us right before he died that he was about to die because he was approaching the end of his life-cycle.... so he kinda just died a few days earlier than he would have otherwise, with the benefit of dying a martyr.
I remember beating calus thinking I was 3/4 way done with the campaign only for that to be the end. Felt strange too bc I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what the hell the veil is bc all the characters just kept assuming you already knew
i’m saying. calus, in my opinion, got the xol treatment. a literal bringer of the 2nd collapse, a disciple of the witness, and darkness corrupted cabal emperor just randomly shows up, and we kill him, like it’s nothing. yes, it’s calus, but like.. HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE SIMILAR TO RHULK. AND WE KILL HIM IN ONE MISSION.
Calus literally popped up to fight us twice, and the first time he did nothing, just popped his astral head then Caiatl saved us then we ran. A throwback to the Leviathan raid floating skull mechanic would have been a great experience, probably on par with the ahamkara fight from WQ.
This was going to be my big return to Destiny after a 2 year hiatus. Prior to that break I had been playing daily and often since the Beta for D1. After hearing my friends and reading reviews online I immediately changed my mind on returning. This was supposed to be a big climax and turning point in the story of the Destiny world. Something along the lines of Luke finding out Vader is his father or anything that scale. But instead everyone is just saying the campaign is nothing more than a strand tutorial with very little narrative progression and half the time the important stuff is happening, you aren’t even there. You’re off on Neptune playing fuck fuck games with strings.
this really felt like beyond light 2.0, using the darkness was really the main focal point of that expansion and it worked well, it made sense that we had to claim stasis to defeat Eramis who already had stasis,fight fire with fire fight darkness with darkness, so much of this expansion was Osiris telling us that we NEED strand for… reasons? We should have fully unlocked strand half way through the campaign so they could have shifted the narrative focus to what was actually going on, but they didn’t.
Strand is new and paracausal disrupters don’t affect it. Honestly, the campaign is easy with strand once you got fragments going. Suspended the tormentors makes them a cake walk.
@@lil_question7449 Hell not only was it optional, I personally didn't use it because it simply wasn't as strong as the build I was using, so it isn't even like I "needed" to use it in the final fight.
Yeah it's a miss but i wouldnt give all my hopes up until after the raid. I mean it was the raid that showed us the first discipline of the witness, gave us an exotic quest that fleshed out the hive a lot more, and the raid itself explained a lot more as well.
“Cloudstrider Rohan sacrificed himself to prevent the Witness from using the Radial Mast to seize the Veil.” Is a sentence that means exactly the same thing to Destiny players and non-Destiny players.
this is actually so true. I loved the expansion from a gameplay perspective, but god damn. The story literally left me with more questions than answers.
I wanna say that the narrative teams are split. You have a seasonal team, and then a DLC team, and I wonder if there was a disconnect between those two teams in telling Destiny's story. I mean, just look at the first few cutscenes of Season of the Defiant. Completely different tone and feel
The fact that we saw what most of the campaign had to offer in the trailer and no major shock factors within the gameplay itself it's really something.
Honestly… yeah. Pretty much every cutscene was shown in a trailer and the biggest “reveals” of the campaign happened in the first two or three missions. The Witness has made connection with the Traveler, Calus is a Disciple (which means nothing because we have no idea what being a Disciple does or means) and that there’s this thing called “The Veil” that the Witness wants
I was at maximum copium levels that Calus was gonna expo dump info on the veil. This campaign really does remind me of the D1 vanilla campaign where we just kinda do whatever we're told and everyone knows what's up but us
I can imagine Rohan focusing on "I don't have much time left" everyone expecting him to die and in the end Nimbus dying. Now that would be a good twist.
@darmorel Think of their lifespan as a cellphone's battery (or any battery with a charge). You can leave it idle, no apps, nothing (equals to no augments on normal people) and it will last, but open an app (an augment for them), then another, then another, the battery drains up faster and faster until it dies. The more apps, the shorter the battery life, the more augments, the shorter a cloudstrider's lifespan.
Just imagine how dangerous a Risen Cloudstrider could be? Powers of the Light, immortality, and powers of advanced nanotech. But, of course, that would take away from what makes them a foil to the Guardians. What’d be really dangerous: a Guardian Warmind. But, if this were to occur, I’d hope it wouldn’t be too soon. Maybe three years later? Or maybe not at all, as it could take away from Rasputin’s sacrifice.
@@garrettviewegh677 I mean, the only reason why Rasputin was scary was because of the warsats, and those are gone now. They would just be a normal exo at this point.
Imagine if Nimbus was the rookie trying to live up to Rohan's legend especially because Rohan had little time left to live. But then it would be Nimbus who sacrifices himself, destroying Rohan, Osiris would help him dealing with loss etc. Instead, we got quirky dialogue...
The pacing felt like red war. Also this is the first campaign I’ve been halfway through and realized how I didn’t really care for it, hoping some crazy twist or reveal would happen. Instead I got Zavala telling me the traveler that was hanging in orbit was “gone”. Genuinely wonder what happened here considering the level of storytelling has been so stellar the last couple years.
Every line of dialog had me feeling like someone the finale of Lost without letting me see or know anything about the series, like was I supposed to know all of this ? We just discovered a new civilization and neither us or the neptuners cared, like oh hey dude what's up? You from earth? Cool" smh
You're right. Neither did we see The Witness standing over Calus during his transformation, which could've been really cool if Bungo had spent some time on it.
There's a lot of things from the reveal trailer that weren't in the expansion. I think big things happened behind the scenes very recently because this whole dlc is a massive mess
@@TeamGrimm07 yeah. I’m worried this new deal with Sony has massively fucked up Bungies plans because there is clearly something that went seriously wrong behind the scenes here.
Shots from reveal trailers often don’t end up in the game. We never saw Elsie meeting Drifter and Eris for the first time, never saw Savathun in the bath with the Ghosts etc.
A lot of people will have a lot of things to say about the campaign as a whole, so I just want to highlight something small and that was when Osiris tried to talk to Sagira, that was such an unexpected gut punch. More moments like that please
There were some great moments, but the over-arching story really didn't hit very hard. And anything with Nimbus in it felt very corny, especially for a story about the second coming of the apocalypse.
I think the campaign needed three more cutscenes (not ink blots): one to show more of the carnage and loss fighting the Witness so I can feel tension and stakes; one to show Calus himself commiting atrocities so I have a reason to hate him; and one to explain the new world building (i.e. Neomuna, The Veil, CloudArk, etc). Also, the moment at the end, when we sit with the idea of shooting our own ghost, if they made the decision to go through with it, it would have saved the campaign for me. Lightfall needed irreversible change to occur. It needed to make the entire Destiny experience feel different going forward. Bungie has one last chance to make this right with The Final Shape.
Killing Ghost is a step that I don't think Destiny can handle. I like this kind of story telling. There is mystery. There is a similarity to a book with the books already established. Knowing that each unanswered question will be further revealed in the next. Something to look forward to. The Veil is going to to be revealed. I hated the trend we've had. Each season leaving nothing to be desired. A hollow experience. Every season we were left with nothing. Rasputins story ended with 19. It was as if every event was in a bubble. My greatest enjoyment out of this story was that there are things that can still be answered. My job isnt done by the end of the campaign.
Exactly show the dark fleet arriving atleast taking out defenses we had set up A cutscene or atleast the vanguard checking in on us or us checking in with them sure saint and osiris talking was nice but more involvement would help and would've helped too instead of at the end telling zavala what happened
A smart explanation for the Veil would've been that it was actually a Darkness artifact Savathun stole from the Witness and hid on Neptune. The Neomuni would've found it and used it to create their city and CloudArk not knowing its importance. The Witness might need it because it can bolster them enough to crack open the Traveler, and we could use it instead to shield ourselves because the Darkness cannot fight itself. And it could explain Strand too, because they could've said the approach of the Pyramids has aggravated the Veil, causing its energy to manifest wildly throughout Neomuna as Strand.
I'm curious if the team didn't give the story enough time. This almost feels like a 30-40 hour story super shortened into a "playable" 4-8 hours. I would of loved chapters, like one with the cloud strides, got to know them. One about strand and learning it. And then finally the fight against calus.
Honestly i can tell exactly what happened, Bungie’s management didnt like the idea of having final shape be the final, so they split it and made light-fall, but the team wanted their own ideas, and management demanded that they have the story be about strand, and out of not wanting to be fired or anything, they did that. With what witch queen was, i can absolutely say that this is what happened. Management saw how witch queen was, and they were like “We want that before the final shape, so do that, oh and also, make sure its about that new subclass we made.”
@@thesoggynoodle4451 Witch queen was datamined and was supposed to contain strand but would have faced backlash after stasis balancing drama, i mean anyway think of deepsight resonance and the verticality in WQ, in the final bossfight the damage buff is called threadcutter. Lightfall was probably split for that reason like you say because they know they can sell a subclass dlc as a whole knew expansion. unless they add a third subclass which doesnt change the fact they released full price content that doesnt meet their own writing standards. Anyway im sure glad i didnt buy lightfall or the season pass, because despite bungies grooming in the twab the seasonal content will not reveal significant story because it never does and is removed at the end of the year and it will likely be fixed in lightfall
I had these exact same emotions by the ending, and my friends called me crazy. I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that it seems Bungie didn’t learn what we thought they did from Witch Queen. I argued the campaign death could have been far more impactful if they spent the campaign building up that Rohan is near expiration and it’s almost his time to die, setting expectations for him to die, and then flip the script entirely and kill off Nimbus. It would have been so much more impactful due to the implications of the protege dying before the master and what that means for the future of the Cloud Striders, and the emotional strain of watching a very innocent and naive character die far before their time. I think this could have been a much more impactful moment in general. Instead, it was obvious and predictable from the start. Also, seriously… where in the hell did that Khvostov come from? And more importantly, WHERE DID IT GO??? I am the most well read in terms of lore in my friend group, and I could not tell you what happened in this story or what the implications are. And that’s really upsetting.
The khovostov was solely a place holder weapon for us since got the cinematic, they needed to give us a rifle that we could aim down so we could look down the sight. Since they were going to restrict our weapon choice, they chose a weapon everyone has. The khovostov.
The answer to the khvostov is simple: it came from the Guardian's vault through the destiny 2 app, and went back there afterwards through the same means. Now, if you would kindly forget that in Forsaken, the cutscenes represented whatever weapon you were holding, I'd appreciate it.
I think Nimbus being switched for Rohan dying would be far more compelling like you said. But Bungie won’t do that because Nimbus was their golden boy for this campaign. They touted him since October as their first non-binary character; killing him off after promoting him like that would be counter-productive and not go over well within certain circles. I’d be much more invested in a student-master dynamic, but Bungo made Nimbus awesome right out of the box with no personal shortcomings, thus nixing any story beats about growth and development.
@@jackbrax7808 yeah I get the technological reason for it. But there’s literally no reason we should have it. They literally could have shown Nimbus pick it up off the floor and toss it to us or something. The shit just appears and disappears for no reason. It just screams unpolished. Besides, it’s not like Bungie hasn’t done cuts scenes with our actual rendered weapons before. And every weapon’s reticle exists. They could have just used those. Yeah it’s more work but it doesn’t look as stupid. It would have been far more impactful for us to see Nimbus toss us this old, dilapidated rifle, and us contemplate shooting, and pulling the trigger, only to find the gun is broken. And by the time we pull out our other gun, it’s too late. This would be a better scene emotionally, as we see our guardian willing to give up the light to save the system, and it would explain where the rifle came from and why we didn’t keep it.
Byf, I’ve been watching you since D1, and as a player of this franchise since beta, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Kudos to you for voicing our largely shared opinion
As an author, there were major problems with the storytelling in general: First and foremost, Rohan was not given enough attention AT ALL for us to care about his death. It was so ‘you are going to die’ that it’s like they didn’t even bother to give him any more personality than that. To quote what I said to my fireteam during Rohan’s sacrifice, when Rohan screamed ‘DO IT’ and Ghost replied ‘We can’t…’ “What do you mean we can’t?! We don’t have any emotional attachmen- oh you mean we physically can’t do it… alright then”. Secondly, like Byf said, the no one knows what the hell ‘The Veil’ is but everyone treats us as if we should know. I can only assume that Bungie’s writing staff forgot that they never explained it, maybe it was supposed to be the origin of Strand, but when they decided to make it its own entity, they scrapped it. Speaking of Strand, I absolutely love it. It’s fun and mobile, perfect for my Hunter builds. One thing that got me attached to it immediately was that it was what I called when everyone was guessing what the new element would be. Poison? Kinetic? Grass? No my guess was ‘Psychic’ with the reasoning that our Guardian has been so exposed to Light, Darkness, Awoken Magic, the Ascendent Plane, Psychic and Paracausal energy that our mind has been expanded. Osiris would learn it with us because his mind expanded via Savathun - that was all my theory before we even got a trailer for Lightfall. I was ultra-hyped when I saw the trailers and thought my theory was correct. But nope. Strand is the idea of being in tune with all of life, which is a similar and is still cool… but then the explanations stop and it becomes more of a ‘draw your own conclusions’ type of thing. Doesn’t explain how Calus has a device that surpresses Arc, Solar, Void AND Stasis but not Strand? “Calus would never see it coming?” That’s true but we have had no knowledge on how we can suppress Dark energy, now Calus can do it ‘just ‘cause’. And finally, out of all the things that pissed me off, the entire thing with Ghost! That was not foreshadowing, that was just a mess! When I write my books, spending days crafting foreshadowing moments and making it so their pay offs hit their marks, it annoys me to no end why they show the Ghost being under some kind of possession by the Witness for ONE SCENE then have him capture the Veil in the last scene. It would have been a clever idea if they had set it up correctly. Like, what if the Ghost was always facing the Veil? You would find it unnerving that the action you have used since D1 to go to orbit is suddenly different; not looking at you but looking elsewhere. It would be creepy and suggest that there wasn’t something quite right with him. Don’t have them act as if everything is completely normal and then pull that kinda crap at the end of the game =.=
I hated how we let Ghost move away from us during that scene when we know that the Witness has been able to possess and talk through him. I was willing to kill him as soon as he revealed himself and started to fly away.
That idea of the ghost subtly looking at the veil constantly is the kind of "show, don't tell" detailed storytelling that made me love Destiny in TTK. A shame to see what happened with lightfall.
OK the whole we can't was we were too tired. Osiris made fun of us for not having the conditioning to keep using strand. So in the moment he needed us we were too tired.
The Zavala/Ikora chats at the end use the same facial and body animations that they use all the time for all their conversation scenes. Considering the gravity of the situation and how important these two chats are supposed to be, they should have been custom animated. Its like they couldn't be bothered finishing this story
Yeah, i don’t think Bungie has done any actual motion capture for the game in years. Even custom animations are a rarity these days when it comes to the seasonal stories. Ana Bray couldn’t even look in the right direction when she was talking to Clovis in one of the weekly “story” bits last season. Part of why I’m so disappointed in Destiny storytelling overall is that most of the seasonal and even campaign storylines are told as podcasts as we re-grind the same activities over and over again.
This video makes me feel extremely validated. At the end of the story I was distraught, I was so deeply disappointed I felt like it was me being too critical. The fact is we're all emotionally attached to this story, and to see an almost Game of Thrones level of fumble is.... like you said "Heart Breaking" .
I think comparing this to Game of motherfucking Thrones is nothing short of hysterical. Are there flaws? Yes. Are they major? YES. Is this anything close to Game of Thrones' final two seasons? That's fucking insane.
@@possiblyarose1397 You're right at least the final 2 seasons of game of thrones had production value. Also strange calling someone's point hysterical when you weigh in by swearing, agreeing with the point, then back to swearing to decry insanity.
The thing that personally gets me the worst is how they treated the final fight with Calus. I remember being so wary when Witch Queen was coming out that they would waste our confrontation with Savathuun, one of the single greatest villains we've ever had in Destiny. I was pleasantly surprised after it came out because her fight had depth, good mechanics, and some of the best voice lines and lore moments I've heard from this game. On top of that, the post-fight cutscene set up quite a lot with warning us about the Witness. It all came together to make something truly amazing by today's standards and I was hoping we would get something similar this time around. And then we got Calus. He was a colossus who turned into a gladiator with some attacks borrowed from Rhulk. That's it. No mechanics, no story elements, nothing. Yeah, he had some lines during the fight, but they really didn't mean anything. Like I don't understand why the freaking taken hydra strike boss had a more interesting fight than the main villain of the campaign.
I thought the same thing! How is it possible that a generic strike boss is more engaging and memorable than Calus? All the build-up of lore and seasonal missions discussing Calus' visions and experiments with darkness to gain The Witness' favour and become a disciple, to end up in such an underwhelming fight is insulting. He has nothing unique to show for all that power he supposedly got. It's baffling.
@@nechoplex8654 most strikes just have better writing than destiny 2 plot. I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if more time went into their writing than dlc.
This might be a hot take, but I actually kinda like how they treated Calus in his final fight with us. Think about everything Calus is: he’s arrogant and narcissistic. He has this vision of himself that is beyond grandeur. He not only believed that he would be the final shape…he thought he it was his RIGHT. This is a guy so full of himself that he even (stupidly) dared to talk back to the Witness when it insulted him. In reality, Calus is a pathetic person who basically cried when he was exiled and wallowed in drunken despair on the Leviathan for ages. It wasn’t until he encountered the Witness at the edge of the universe that he saw a chance to become his image of himself. Calus built several robotic versions of himself that were more challenging to fight because it wasn’t really him but his VISION of himself. In the end, the Witness not only abandoned Calus, it actively worked against him by showing us conversations it had with him so we knew the plans. The Witness knew Calus would fail because Calus, for all his bluster, is weak and useless. Instead of getting his glorious end as the final shape, he died in a one on one fight against his “favorite” Guardian who he insisted he would devour at the end of Season of the Haunted. He wasn’t even important enough to be the raid boss. A fitting and kind of poetic ending to one so narcissistic:
The taken hydra strike boss sucked, it was just a big version of an enemy we already fight The calus boss fight was actually challenging (assuming you didn’t even play it on legendary) but yeah the mechanics could’ve been better
This honestly clarified a lot of my feelings around Lightfall. Gameplay wise, I had a blast! Neomuna is gorgeous, Strand is incredibly fun, the Tormentors are challenging and intimidating and frankly I lose my shit and run the moment I see one, and I'm all-around just having a great time. But narratively, I feel like I'm just along for the ride. Nimbus and Osiris know way more than me and are just telling me where to go and what to shoot, and I don't really understand any of it.
I’m not sure if we played the game game. Neomuna is basically a different color palette DSC. I mean the grass in the planter boxes is even embarrassing for 2023.
It’s confusing because the marketing heavily pushed that questions would be answered about the darkness, the light, the traveler, and specifically the witness. But I left the campaign having dozens of additional questions about each of those points…
THANK YOU! This is exactly how I felt, even halfway through the campaign I kept telling myself...there has to be more to this, please let the final mission blow me away...
The anticlimax of the expansion has actually made me question how much I'll play this year. After Witch Queen all I wanted to do for a month was uncover all the secrets in the Throne World. It's all I could, or wanted, to think about. I took the weekend off work for Lightfall, and I'm going to use it to finish exotic quests and farm some things. But this expansion has actually made me want to take a break from D2. I can't understand how anyone at Bungie played this and thought the narrative was good enough.
Exact same here. I am looking at a year of this as a chore. Once another game catches my interest (as always happens with gamers) what will inspire me to come back?
Same! Witch Queen got me back into Destiny after a long break. I clocked in nearly 300 hours and was really invested in the story. After this one I’ll play the raid and come back one last time for Final Shape. This really deflated my interest even though I think the campaigns gameplay was fun
I've had this feeling ever since Shadowkeep. I still played every now and again since then but this time i didn't purchase the new expansion. The price hike alone was enough reason for me to say no.
So all in all, pretty much the only narrative bits we got are : 1) Nezarec is in fact coming, this time for sure. He also seems to be the one directly responsible to nightmares. 2) The Light is the force of the physical realm, while the Darkness is one of the intangible. 3) The Strand is sort of the antitheses to Stasis, yet they still both originate from the Darkness. 4) The Witness, Veil and the Traveler seem to be a crucil triad (triangles/final cutscene portal somehow related? Illuminati confirmed? Idk). All of them appeared to manifest telepathic or otherwise mental links. Linking is one of the central themes. Otherwise, the story line doesn’t even deserve being called half-baked for launch, it’s fully raw. Strand feels very out of place and doesn’t tie into the overall story outside of gameplay, no pun intended. Witness just outright leaves the scene after successfully doing its thing with the Veil, Traveler, and portal, and beyond that, nothing visibly changes and we keep playing normally (lol). I mean during Red War, the Traveler being meddled with was a catastrophic event that forced us to immediately act to work out a solution, but this time, nothing happened. The ghosts’ possession was not explained either, despite the fact that it’s a crucial element present since Shadowkeep. Zavala’s and Ikora’s reactions labeling the Traveler as “gone” or “transformed” don’t make sense. It just has a triangle now, the light still works the same, duh. The way the Witness carried everything out now renders the first collapse not making any sense at all, rather than being unexplored lore-wise. The Witness could have literally done the same thing back then, it had no reason to leave the Traveler alone until the second arrival. The Dark Future timeline makes no sense either now, in it all the dark forces wanted was to simply destroy the Traveler and vanquish the Light. But it doesn’t seem this way now. And worst of all, the Witness ordered Calus to “destroy” the Veil, but it in fact only needed to link with it once to win. Why? The story doesn’t even make sense on its own, even without the lore background.
Giving the writing team waaaay more credit than it deserves:::: ghost didn't exist before the first collapse. Getting calus inches before the veil guarantees us getting to that same location. Which means or ghost gets there. IF ghost meets veil was the plan, this is the best way to do that. But there's no..... subtext. There's a reminder, but it's like having a TV show and having two scenes, one being "I have hands and they can punch." And then later that episode "hey I have a meeting with joe". None then makes the jump "I'm going to punch joe" because the logic jump makes no sense
The ending chat with Zavala and Ikora confused me so much because I was wondering what exactly the witness did to the traveler. So when I talked to them they kept saying it was dead and gone I honestly thought I missed something and even went online to look up all the cutscenes in case I missed something. I just dont get how we are supposed to just assume because a portal opened and the witness went inside how everyone just assumes the traveler is dead especially since we still have our powers.
Yeah, I didn't mind the story myself, I'll take it over Shadowkeep, but that and the ending just... Why? I knew we weren't gonna win cause of gotta save the big bad for the raid. But yeah, just a portal, the traveler is still there, still on our map, just with portal in front of it. Oh no.
The only thing I have seen/heard that backs up "the traveler being dead/gone" is that Ghost says it can't feel the traveler anymore. Other than that I was thinking "but it's there, but now with a colorful triangle on one side".
Yup. I mean, the Traveler is still there… you can see it from HELM. Still in the skybox. The Witness just opened the Travussy and went right inside right in front of everybody 😟
That was the biggest thing we were confused about when we did it. Zavalas first words to us are 'The Traveler is...gone" Um I'm pretty sure I flew past it on my way here Big Blue
yea a lof of the issues feel like they stem from just not enough time, maybe yearly expansions are to soon, personally hope Bungie learns that yearly release is to much and delays final shape, preferably a whole year
Strand in witchqueen makes so much more sense if you replace deepsight with it. Especially since it’s supposed to be about the connections between everything. Every deepsight investigation could have had grapple points instead of floating platforms. The mission where we fight the scorn boss with pools of infinite super regen should have been an opportunity to showcase strand. “Threadcutter” it all makes sense in retrospect
I love that you told your heartfelt opinion, not to defend, not to appease Bungie as a studio, but I can tell as a true fan. You are a real fan and like a lot of us, absolutely love the world and lore along with the experience of gameplay, and that lore was not given the love it deserves by this release.
yeah basically, my hopes were high for some loregasm moments like in WQ where we learned the hive were lied to. But here, our biggest "loregasm" was that nazarec is still around, which many already assumed.
One of my problems with lightfall was that there wasnt really any hard hitting dialog that gave me chills. Forsaken (when i started playing) had our guardian's "Uldren Sov is mine", Shadowkeep had Eris' "Youre all insufferable", Beyond Light had Variks; entire speech at the end to Eramis, and Witch Queen had Ghosts "Id rather die than fight for the Hive". The closest Lightfall came to matching any of those for me was when Osiris tried to have Sagira help him out.
Not sure about you but the best season for me that they did was Season of the Splicer. So much stuff every week about the Eliksni and FWC. Vex and Quira plans amd actually getting to battle Quria.
@@theREALp1kles that scene hit pretty hard not gonna lie. Seeing Calus get humbled by the Witness made the witness feel scary. But the rest was garbage.
Man, reading “Uldren Sov is mine”, just now, gave me goosebumps. That scene was beautiful in so many ways when we needed a hero. We were going to be “that guy”. Brilliant.
Rohan felt like such a wasted opportunity for Osiris’s character development, making peace with the fact that he “doesn’t have any lives to spare” and leaning really hard into his mentorship role. I know thats kind of what he did in the campaign, but it feels like we didn’t really see that happening much at all
I really thought Osiris was gonna take the place as the next cloud strider since he lost his ghost and struggles to find a use for himself. Would've been great to have a year long training and building up of Osiris to be a combination of strand power infused into a cloud strider and to have Rohan hand over his position before the final shape as his 10 years were up.
this would have actually made alot of sense as well. especially when caital kinda took on saladin and gave him a place of power it would have been nice to see osiris in a sort of rehab after being uinder savathuuns power
Yeah I expected the city to be much bigger and more fleshed out instead of being this small block with small feeling areas tbh… (but that’s just my opinion)
I hope, by the end of Final Shape, the old Tower is repaired, to act as a hub of unity where the council of the Coalition of Sol can meet and discuss. This new location of the rebuilt original Tower, would sybolize the unity and acceptable of each other as a united force after having won the war. The council of the Coalition, and its representatives, including one for the City’s human citizens, would be a great replacement for the now disbanded Consensus. The City on Earth could be renamed, and would be rebuilt and used by all races/allies of the Coalition. Heck, the first season after Final Shape could involve a second Golden Age, rebuilding Sol with the aid of our combined resources and Neomuna’s nanotech speeding up the process of creating and rebuilding colonies for our allies. Leading up to an expansion in which Guardians and some Coalition allies travel beyond Sol to reclaim Torobatal from Xivu Arath. Heck, Rasputin could even return as a Warlock after two years, and kill Xivu as retribution.
When destiny 2 launched and the D1 tower was destroyed it actually felt like we lost something. Our hub was replaced and we had to earn our powers back. This just feels like "oh we lost? Uh sure, back to business as usual."
no for real, how the fuck did base game d2 have better stakes and consequences and better convey us losing the Light for a bit than a DLC literally called Lightfall?
This video was something I needed. It's good to hear a notable public figure in the Destiny Lore say the exact same things I was complaining about with my group of friends. To see someone share my frustration and anger at all the missed opportunities that made up Lightfall. I came into this DLC excited for all the amazing, jaw-dropping revelations that would be revealed. My jaw did drop, but for all the wrong reasons. I was floored by how bad this story was. How almost nothing was explained. We almost get more information from post campaign PATROLS than we do from the cutscenes of the damn campaign itself!! What hurts the most for me is the end. The Traveler has been the centerpiece of this story for ages and ages now. And now, it's "gone". Dead? Maybe, but maybe not, who knows? But there was no set up for this other than it leaving the city in Seraph, which, while a big emotional moment, wasn't enough. This was the time where we needed the Traveler to act with a clear motive, to do something that wasn't left to ambiguity. Something to make us feel a connection with it. Kind of like when Cayde died. We went on one last mission with him. This is what we needed with the Traveler and it wasn't given to us. Now the Traveler is "gone" and we didn't get a chance to say goodbye. The biggest mystery of the entire story, the one voice in the room we have heard almost nothing from, and they just throw it to the side while giving us no time with it or explanation of its motives or plans. The only thing that gives me even a sliver of hope is that the Traveler is far too important for this to be the last time we hear from it. There are too many mysteries about this giant white ball that to leave it at that would be the most disappointing and absurd thing that Bungie could do, so I have to hope that they have plans in the future. But that means I have to have faith in the Devs, which, as was stated in this video, is now not something a lot of people are willing to do. It also means that I now, again, have to WAIT to get any of these answers while the Traveler yet again hovers somewhere and does absolutely nothing. But it's even WORSE now because now we don't even know if the damned thing is alive or not! It's just so frustrating.
After seeing the way the devs described strand and then the witness cutting people into pieces in the space battle, it seemed as if the strand could’ve been a way to counteract the witnesses power and “pull yourself back together” if he tried slicing you apart, hope they go that direction with it later in the story
@@whiteshadow2375 destiny was only ever given a pass because they made halo. They haven’t made a single good dlc/game since halo. I imagine it’s due to the employees of the time, are simply not the same ones who were working on destiny. Hell I bet the same people who made destiny weren’t even working for bungies during destiny 2s development.
With each passing mission, I was worried about the story, and my worries were accurate. It deeply saddened me to see the basics of storytelling fall. I can only hope that The Final Shape is a pristine 2nd half and final act to make up for it
When byf said “so we lost, and what” I didn’t realized how insignificant that means to us now. Nothing truly happened to the game or guardian; I’m playing as if nothing has changed (also aren’t we supposed to be in a war? Cause all I’ve seen is just ships flying around, nothing is damaged and people aren’t panicked), the mood and atmosphere is more happy then when cayde died
Yeah. The Traveler is “gone”, but is still in the skybox at the HELM and we still have the Light and we’re all still alive and well, so… what gives? Nothing happened. Nothing has changed. They gave us Strand and then neutered our power fantasy with the new armor charge system that benefits people that didn’t build craft in the first place 🤷♂️
Definitely agreed. For this to be the penultimate chapter of the sage, I’m so deeply disappointed and infuriated. Especially coming off of Witch Queen. When they announced these expansions like they did, I thought they had a clear vision of the story and how they’d wrap things up. The campaign also felt choppy like they cut out story bits for time, but they were like very important bits?
Yeah when Rohan died I didn't even blink, saw it coming a mile away which really sucked. I found myself sighing whenever anything happened. Like the scene with the witness getting angry at callus my only thought was "wow doesn't take much to make the god of darkness lash out like a child" dude portrays himself as this calm collected powerful being that you can't resist, then callus comes along and complains a little bit when the witness tells him he failed and the witness goes nuclear in a second. Idk I just thought he was more of a cold calculating never loses kind of guy and now I'm sad.
I was in Discord with a friend as he was playing the first mission. The second he saw Rohan, he said "That guy's gonna die". Literally the first time you see him on screen.
Are you kidding? The Witness only shouted "Enough", that's hardly a 'lashing out' or 'going nuclear'. Calus was treading on thin ice, displaying insubordination towards his leader and just about ready to outright insult one of the most powerful beings in the universe, OF COURSE he's going to get told! It was a moment which served to remind us that though the Witness presents itself as calm and collected, it has immense power. Heck, just its shout alone LITERALLY SHATTERED REALITY, caused Calus' head to bleed and broke time itself. This scene was awesome and not only was it a stark reminder of the power of our foe, but also showed us that Calus, despite having been given everything he ever wanted, was still not content, and that he never would be. It indicates that had we continued to foil his plans without direct intervention, he and the Witness would likely have had an internal power struggle.
"If you were trying to set up a big mystery, we need to know it was a mystery in the first place" - I think that's the best summary of the campaign. There are some legitimately cool, weird, mysterious moments - so why is no other character acting confused like I think they should be about the veil, etc.?
I feel like the expansion really could of been fixed with like two or three cutscenes just explaining wtf the veil is. One at the beginning, before the space battle, of the traveller attempting to contacting us in our dreams before we are startled awake as the battle begins. Then midway through the campaign as we deal with strand we meditate at the pouka pond and it tries to contact us again in our meditation, and a final cutscenes a couple missions later where the traveller explains the gardener/winnower story from it's POV, and how strand and the Vale both fit into that story.
This pretty well explains my experience. super fun to play, much like witch queen was. but this time i got no clue whats going on in the story sense, the veil reminds me of the black heart from vanilla d1. Osiris being all rushy has "No time to explain why i dont have time to explain" energy stretched through the whole campaign.
Zavala and Caitl felt more emotional in haunted than the entirety of lightfall
I think that’s because that’s when they were going through their emotions. If I’m honest I feel they were emotionally fine after.
Ikora in Seraph: Were fucked and this may be our last time together so I want you to know that it was an honor fighting with you
Ikora in Lightfall: Oh we lost, we'll get them next time!
The entirety? It's been a day.
caiatl was pretty good especially the part where she calls the shadow legion cowards i just feel that she needed a much more presence on neomuna, where are her ships? also she should have dealt the final blow on calus
Broh imma be real. I dont feel like we lost. Like at all. Sure Traveler has hole it. But why the fuck do I care ? Ghost still can rez me. Still have light. And besides over the last year we learned the Traveler is a cowardly bitch who only thinks for itself. Further more we just killed Calus a discple of the witness who was threatening the last vestiges of our golden age. On top of that Humanity for the very first time since before the collapse find's itself surrounded by allies it can trust. Then when I got to talk to Zavala he bassically echo's those thoughts. Barely mentions the hole in the traveler and instead focusses on our allies. Its dogshit writing.
When I watched infinity war when I came out of that theater I felt both gutted but elated. I had just watch super heros which had never failed before even in the darkest day fucking lose. And they lost super hard. The villain fucking won. What I watched with this campaign feels nothing like that.
Lightfall's Campaign left me with a "That's it?" feeling and its painfully sad. As you said Byf, this was THE moment for the story; and yet there were no satisfying revelations or answers, and all I was left with was more questions because they shoehorned the "need" to master Strand into the story that they left out the entire point of the expansion.
I liked the having to step back and struggle with a power, we’ve always just vacuumed up paracausal powers with no drawbacks so that was refreshing. Did it need to as large a part in the campaign? No I don’t think so
It's nothing new but still improvement over previous DLC.
Warmind DLC ending: Anna: Ok guys, this is it! *the end*
Shadowkeep DLC ending: Witness: We are your... Salvation... *In a minute, Guardian just stands in the tower without any explanation*
Great job copying peoples EXACT comment from the top comment kid.
Ur so original.
I think they should have made the strand thing a quest for the season pass and folded the seasonal story into the main campaign. We really can’t say definitively what this expansion is going to be like until 3 or 4 weeks before the final week of the last season of this years expansion is over and we sit back and go over all that has happened. Not ideal but it’s unfortunately Destiny’s design.
Yeah they did have a chance here to do something special and blew it and this story seems to be dry and empty but then again so was everything else we did except for witch queen and from an exterior perspective it was ONLY interesting because of TTK and how starved for lore we had been up to this point with how Forsaken never resolved the curse and Shadow Keep went in circles…so yeah I feel the pain, been a Halo fan since the beginning and look where it is today…I feel this, but we’ll need to see how this year plays out.
@@Genesiscoupe3000 Whar?
Could you imagine Rohan teaching us all year through the seasonal stuff and THEN dropping this on us at the end? "Yeah my decade is up"
Could have been so many feels...
imagine the last season before finale shape is just us with Rohan in his last moments. Would of been amazing. Instead he died destroying the Radial mast, which is another thing that is introduce in LF, all characters know (including ghosts) what it is, but yet the player has zero background on.
@@darmorel549 bungie has shitty writers
@@darmorel549 bro that whole mission they said radial mast like 20 times, and every time they said it is thought “are they gonna give us some context on what this is?”
@@darmorel549 I mean honestly just knowing that the Mast was a darkness imbued doohickey of sorts that was powering Calus' ship was enough explanation why destroying it was good imo but yeah expecting us to care about Rohan dying was laughable.
Bro even the end, like no one said a word once he drew the portal on the traveler, like no one cares
The Witch Queen integrated some amazing things into the campaign DURING the campaign... The Evidence Board. Alters of Reflection. Memory Fragments. All of this was INTEGRATED into the main campaign story. it wasn't a "campaign mission" but it was quests during that helped explain the story, the serious threat of savathun, why she was there, why she was such a threat. It even lead to amazing plot twists that answered a lot of questions. The campaign was SOLELY focused on Savathun and the threat of Savathun. That's why the Witch Queen campaign felt so much more complete.
Don’t worry lightfall is now integrating itself into seasonal content. Now for the low price of $40 you can enjoy the full story of a stand-alone expansion
The extra talk of savathuun was annoying we already knew everything they haven't stfu about her for years before the dlc by the time witch queen dropped I didn't even care I'm enjoying lightfall way more qnd can't wait to see what's next through seasons and the final dlc
the witch queen campaign also had alot more to it, it had more than just the 8 story missions, and the missions were longer. on top of that, all the things introduced throughout the campaign, like savathun's worm and the altars stayed relevant post campaign and set up more things as well as answering more things. Lightfall has done a great job of fleshing things out in the post campaign story, but not as much as witch queen. Lightfall suffered from having strand too focused on and Calus as a villain. while it's always great to see calus since he's such a well written character. his story and lore, as well as the cabal's didn't really have any room to add more context or huge plot twists like Savathun and the hive did.
It was well polished and it felt amazing very high replay value everything flowed
My biggest issue was the lack of consequence. We didn't lose a single character we cared about. Rohan's sacrifice meant literally nothing b/c it was telegraphed so hard
It also wasn't a character we cared about. We were literally just introduced to Rohan, so it meant nothing. If it was Zavala, Ikora, Caital, Osiris, Mara Sov, Elsie, or Mithrax, that would have hit harder.
Plus, it wasn't even a cutscene.
This comes down to fear of losing narrative mechanisms. The death of Cayde-6 will forever be the most brave they have been when it comes to moving the story forward. A critical error in storytelling, or writing in general, is to assume that the reader knows exactly what you're talking about. Instead, like our Guardian, we are in the dark.
Not only was it telegraphed, and a character we had exactly 0 attachment to, LITERALLY NOBODY CARED IN THE STORY
Immediately after the fact when you go to nimbus he has maybe 2 lines about it and then goes back to being a silly plucky unbelievably annoying dude
Yeah and we met him like half an hour before he dies lol. Dude was just a redshirt.
Rohan was the older cop who says 'I've only got two weeks before retirement', thereby damning himself.
"This was the worst time to rediscover mediocrity". This is exactly how I felt finishing the campaign. I don't understand how this wasn't caught in storyboarding
At this point I don't think bungie has Profesional writers on staff nor qa for the writing they really need some people that understand good storytelling and narrative structure to proofread their crap
@@quikain17 Iirc didn't the witch queen have a resident evil writer on the team? Might explain why the WQ was good.
@@quikain17 There's also a typo on a Solar fragment, lol
How in the world do you go from being one of the best gaming companies to a mediocre, lazy, woke company? It’s truly mind boggling
I think it is all part of the plan, you aren’t supposed to know everything yet. Think of the mysteries we’ve unraveled so far what we’re unraveling now. If we just knew everything about what was going on, and what exactly everything was there would be no mystery, no unwrapping no payoff for a conclusion 😊
The fact that Lightfall and The Final Shape were once a single expansion is really starting to show. Lightfall feels like the first act of the finale, not a story that could stand on its own
Gotta make that money
yearly releases really just dont work in gaming, it ALWAYS ends up failing, I honestly wish that lightfall and final shape never got split and we just had a 2 year gap from witch queen to final shape
but knowing this community they would complain equally as much because of "content drought" you know what has a lot of content? OTHER FUCKING GAMES
@@flamingscar5263 People would be complaining about a content drought and lack of updates
Honestly I hope bungie delay final shape to really nail the landing, there are simply too many threads and questions to need to be answered 10 years in and still waiting on further explanation of what any of this conflict really is
@@flamingscar5263 People complained about the content drought. Then those same people complain about the seasonal model. It happens. Its usually why I stay away from social media and form my own conclusions on things.
I was really really looking forward to a morally gray ground to interact with the Cloudstriders. But no, they were immediately friendly and teamed up ona whim. I wanted to see tension between us, Osiris, and the Cloudstriders. It could've been as easy as saying they don't trust us and will not reveal the secrets of the veil to us.
That would have made us not knowing what the Veil is make way more sense.
Would've been nice...it felt very off putting to me how we manage to track this place down that was once only a vision Osiris had and then we are like immediately allies and best buds with these dudes who just blind trust us.
We (complete strangers) rolled up in literally the same drop pods being used in the massive invasion of their city. Rohan even mentions how the Cloudstriders believed the immortal warlords of Earth would come to Neomuna as conquerors. It would have been more logical for them to try and ice Osiris and the guardian on the spot.
But isn’t this made by Disney? We are aaaaall friends and super duper friendly riiight?
Nimbus and Rohan talked on how they heard stories of the power hungry warlords that ruled over the mortals and has enough power to wipe any alien race off the galaxy. And you’re right… why didn’t they stay cautious?
One of the most blantently weird things I've seen from this story. To the people of Neomuna, The last city is *just now* barely functioning on the same level of civilization as them. For centuries earth was a wasteland where anyone that had a talking polyhedron on their side was a essentially an nigh unkillable god that could do anything they want with people who didn't. Then when a city was actually built, it was centered around some new agey cultist guy, his students, and a gaggle of batshit armed ideolouges that no modern, stable, democratic society of the golden age would ever have or even listen to (nihilist escapists, insane xenophobes hooked on unstable vex tech, and just monarchists). Plus they didn't touch any of the golden age leftovers (Mass defensive AI, weird magic people around a black hole in the asteroid belt, and the melagomanic corporatist freak known as Clovis). They had reason to, if they any helped or contacted anybody them, chances were they would've been wiped long ago by like Oryx or Ghaul. Nimbus could still be like the kid that wants to be friends with the new one that moves in, but Rohan should've shut down and question about what the veil is and only give what is nessecary to help Neomuna.
Everyone in the campaign: “You must reach the veil before it’s too late!”
Players: “…what’s the veil?”
Everyone in the campaign: “You know, the veil? The veil? Yeah, the veil.”
Players: “No, what’s the veil?”
Everyone in the campaign: “It’s the veil.”
Players: “oh”
Knowing Bungie, the Veil is probably explained in the flavour text of a random blue sidearm that can drop.
Reminds me of The Hole by tomska lmao
@@epsilon2843 "where'd the story go, bungie?" "It's in the hole" "what hole?" "that hole" *Shoves you into the hole*
They literally say what the veil is in the campaign… it’s the virtual space
Did calus pierce the veil?
A hilarious moment in the campaign was when Osiris said we need to use strand to surprise Calus’ forces and the very next enemy had a strand shield??
RIGHT???
I agree, but, honestly, enemy shields have never made sense lol No one has the powers of light other than Guardians (and now Lighthive I guess), yet they have ALWAYS had Solar/Arc/Void shields? So I'm not surprised to see Strand shields tbh, as that's just been the norm. It just seems like a "gamey" mechanic that is handwaved for its combat use.
Lmao I literally Said the same thing when Osiris says we will surprise Calus wit strand then next enemy shield strand lmao I think calus know strand 😂😂🤦🏾♂️
Enemy Shields having a damage type is just video game mechanics.
What Characters in game see: Enemy has a Shield.
What Players see: Enemy has a shield we know means use that type of Weapon or Ability.
Yeah this campaign sucked massive caballs
I think the worst part about Lightfall's story is that after the campaign and a few post-campaign quests, I learned more about The Black Heart then I did about The Veil, which was the SUBJECT OF THE ENTIRE STORY.
I was really hoping to get insights from the traveler's side, from the horses mouth, so to speak. Bungie for some reason, feels like it doesn't need to expand on the light (I think they said in Beyond Light) which is really aggravating, considering how much we've been seeing of the darkness. Maybe they changed their mind about it and want the light being silent as a narrative thing, but not getting ANYTHING about the Veil, or ANYTHING about the light really rubs me the wrong way, especially after it being so hyped up. We still have a raid that'll probably add more story, and the seasons ahead as well, but they really dropped the ball on the veil
How would you suggest for somebody who's on a fix low income to wait for the expansion to go on sale?
Or worth the $139.99CAN ???
@@peterjohnstone7867 NOT worth it so far. I would not buy the annual pass. If you want season of the defiance, strand and neomuna along with some exotics and other events and goodies then contemplate buying the 50 USD version. But by all means, we don’t know how this story and game will progress so hold off on the 100 USD version. In my opinion, strand feels fine and neomuna looks cool enough and has some verticality and cool events and aspects. The story is meh. The exotics are cool enough. They have some busy quests tied to them. You will need to play to get all your strand fragments. There is also a raid coming with some nice looking armor (the armor was leaked so don’t go searching for it if you don’t want to spoil it). But I’d recommend seeing how the sorry and game progresses before comitting 100 USD, unless you have money to spare of course. If Destiny 2 is the ONLY video game you play, then go ahead and spend that money. Hogwarts legacy is cool. I’d recommend that game if you like the idea of fighting foes with magic. You can split the DLC + season pass (50 USD) with Hogwarts Legacy (60 USD) and you’d have some good variation.
@@obscurit_y4536 I play league of legends, Fortnite, Surviving Mars and Destiny 2(for lore)
I'm on a fixed income so $139.99 CAN is a very steep price ATM.
Have 15-25 games I haven't played on Steam yet.
I'll download one of those 👍🏾
Thanks for the reply
@@peterjohnstone7867 only way i would recommend it is if you can get it for less than 50 bucks as the deluxe edition, for only the expansion i would say max is 15 i would give
Can we talk about how this campaign ends with Zavala giving us the "The real Traveler was the friends we made along the way" speech?
We called it as a community x)
"Zavala, the Traveler is how we're even here standing in the first place or even stand a chance fighting. Shut it"
He goes from crisis of faith at learning of the Lucent Hive to optimistic acceptance. That is bullshit. Here is the thing that elevated and protected humanity, the thing that has been the closest thing to an actual God since Man first looked up at the Sun, that Zavala always rallied to, that gave him and countless others hope just by existing, and he's just OK with it being stolen and carved up like a jack-o-lantern. How many centuries has he lived beneath it? Zero grief. That it's not Zavala.
You hit the nail on the head! My biggest issue with the story is that we lost the most significant war ever and everyone is straight-faced "We'll get 'em next time".
It doesn't feel like we lost. It's so vague that Caitatl had to spell it out for us. We don't know the failure conditions. And we don't get a feeling that we lost. Hell, it feels so last minute that it feels like they forgot we were supposed to lose
When Zavala and ikora were both like "traveler dead rip" I felt like I missed a cutscene. How is my ghost still fine if the traveler is dead? When ghaul snuffed the light, our ghost dropped immediately.
Right? Like, Zavala isn't sure how to feel but hey atleast we got some friends.
That has to be the funniest way I’ve heard it described yet. Sav risked everything to save the traveler, and tricked the witness rhulk and countless others and had a big warning like you guys screwed up good luck. And all year it’s felt like we’re on borrowed time until light fall . Now rapustin is dead, Calus dies after becoming a disciple , nez is back, and according to our fearless leaders the traveler is gone.
Yet it feels like we’re 12 year olds playing little league after striking out and being told “you’ll get ‘em next time slugger”. This should’ve been infinity war. We lose and we lose bad. It’s like if the snap went off and then thanos dips and nothing happens except cap going “yeah we lost”.
@@iponce2 Right? I half expected us to lose Ghost and have to befriend a Neomunian fish.
Honestly, mad respect for not pulling your punches and giving an honest take. It's not an easy thing to do when your livelihood depends on people engaging with this content.
Very respectable
Byf strikes me as someone who understands the power of community sentiment and knows that if the game doesn’t improve, community sentiment will fall and so will player numbers making his job infinitely harder.
He’s brilliant, I hope he succeeds far beyond Bungies rotten greed
Grants to Bungie for shoveling the same sh*t down our throats for nearly a decade.
For real i usually dont comment or like videos on yt but this man deserved it good job, bungie needs to do better or maybe they just dont give a damn…
I'm convinced that the main reason this felt so bad was cause it was so slow. The training montage with Osiris should've happened in the second or third mission, max. We could spend the rest of the time saving citizens physical forms, pushing cabal back, researching what the hell the veil is, and attempting to be proactive against calus instead of always on his heels.
Exactly - the campaign should have started with a cutscene or mission where you explore Neomuna - learn about striders and the veil - THEN the invasion should have started - the players would care about the city being destroyed - the stakes would be higher
Could've just left it alone at "the training montages shouldn't have happened" lol.
@@zealobiron as well as those times we had to interact with strand to grapple up and get a stun animation. Definitely not filler.
@@zealobiron no the training montage was good, it just took much too long
The worst thing about Rohan's death in my playthrough, was that I fell off the platform just as the cutscene started, so I couldn't see what was happening and I just kinda hobbled around on the ground listening to it. Still not quite sure what exactly happened.
Lmao same. I was stuck watching it on the ground. But basically we were supposed to use strand to destroy the radial mast and we couldnt so he sacrificed himself to destroy it.
He self destructed and blew up the radial mcguffin
You didn't miss anything.
SAME I WAS SO FRUSTRATED!!
i didn't see a body!
It felt like a complete regression to the type of storytelling we had in D1Y1 “we know what’s going on but we won’t tell you”
"I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain."
I think AngryJoe summed it up best in his D1 review.
“I could tell you…but I won’t!(Evil laughter”
While simultaneously pulling the same lazy story telling tropes like you've failed me for the last time starscream level bullshit. Calus felt very disappointing.
@@0uttaS1TE that's it! Cayde is the final shape! We solved it everyone. We can go home now
Except it's FAR worse. Everyone shits on the Ishtar Academy cutscene, the Stranger didn't have time to explain why she didn't have time to explain, BUT she did explain, she gave us exposition and a direction in that cutscene as well as establishing herself as a mysterious character. In fact the entirety of the D1 campaign is literally a better version of the Lightfall campaign, even down to the mysterious unexplained MacGuffin of the Black Heart, which was actually properly pulled off.
This? They just brought up the veil. What is the veil? Who the fuck knows, you don't get exposition or explanation.
Three main issues with the story.
1) What is the veil? Why is it important and what power did it grant the witness? Why can't the witness just go to the veil itself?
2) Strand was shoehorned in. We just sort of gain the power. Everybody goes, "Huh. That's neat. I guess that's a thing. Anyway, the veil..." Why couldn't we see more confusion from Osiris and the cloudstriders? Why weren't the strand nexuses explained more? Osiris kind of explains darkness subclasses, but fails to really complete the thought. Also; "Feel the ebb and flow" feels so cliche. It couldn't be that our guardian has to make an effort to envision the things they are materializing or pluck things out of a quantum web. Nope. Just be a surfer dude. And then we spend the majority of the campaign focused on strand instead of explaining the story.
3) There's too little going on with the witness and Calus. Witch Queen made the lucent hive and Savathun's possession of the light a major point of the plot. We saw characters shaken to their very cores seeing the hive wield what we thought was our gift, and there were stakes with us having to reveal the truth to Savathun and defeat her to bring the traveler back to Earth. With Lightfall, we barely get to see the main characters. What was going on back at Earth while we were in Neptune? How did Zavala, Holliday, Crow, and Ikora handle the arrival of the pyramid ships in orbit? How incredibly terrified was everybody? Why does the Traveler just sit there? Why do we get so much build up with no payoff?
I think that's what really does it for me. There's no climax to the story. It just ends and we are left to ask, "What just happened and why did that matter?"
It was also backwards, like we didn't get any introduction or the city, culture or anything (not even the striders) until after you beat the campaign and start doing side missions for Quinn or whatever, and it really bothered me that all the people were just digital echos with barely any explanation
Just played the intro mission and upon arrival of the Pyramid Ships and the Witness, Zavala just sounds like he’s casually ordering you to go into a strike.
Like, where is the fright in everyone?
The Witness Almost destroyed humanity during the collapse, and they all be like when the Witness Arrives: ..”Ah shit, here we go again.” No emotion or fright whatsoever. Just another tuesday
Wow just like shadow keep
Don't worry, I'm sure all your questions will be answered in the *next* dlc. Or at least you'll get new questions to keep you strung along and continuing to pay money to get the rest of the story.
how did calus get in so quick lol and wtf hive doing
There's a famous line from D1 that perfectly captures my feelings when I got to the end of the campaign, "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain"
best part? that line was used many times in arguments for why vanilla d1 story was lackluster
@@creamyusbport4647 Destiny 1 was still infinite times better than 2 though.
😂
Sadly just completed the campaign spoke to Osiris and he referred to it as the convergence of primordial light and dark, he just said it to late
The whole story was a cheap B movie....we even have the cliche hero sacrifice himself scene and the all so classic "Antagonist screams at his villain helper and then the villain throws something at the screen" scene. Like seriously.
The strand discovery should have been a seperate storyline. A fully optional thing. First of all it was annoying to have and suddenly not have it during missions, over and over again. And secondly it felt out of place as well, with all the war(s) going on. It was a filler for missions because they ran out of ideas how to stretch the really boring story board going on.
“Oh man, Lightfall is dropping! This a major turning point in Destiny’s story and a bunch of major questions can be answered! We might even get some bombastic cutscenes that really drive points across and give insights into the existence of the Darkness, the Traveler, the Witness, and everything we’ve been dealing with for almost a decade!”
Bungie: “kill Cabal, get Strand”
💀💀💀
The main reason that Witch Queen was so good was because it answered previous questions we had and ones we didn’t have.
And had much better more interesting and unique enemy encounters
@@Shakenmike117 I actually think the *quality* of the encounters is better in Lightfall, for what they are. The problem is that Lightfall basically only has murder gauntlets, whereas nearly every encounter in Witch Queen felt incredibly unique, as you said.
@@Shakenmike117 The encounters in Lightfall were more fun from a kill everything standpoint, but is otherwise shallow in uniqueness. I wanted more Tormentor bosses, being that they should have been treated like actual bosses
@@Shakenmike117 I actually enjoyed the enemy encounters in Lightfall way better. They started giving vex spawns a standardized pattern like stormtroopers which supports them being, robots.
the reveal that the entire hive has been lied to and their entire existence is built on that lie… was crazy imo! it changed everything
One of the things that really pissed me off was, why didn't the cloudstriders question us at all for our need for the veil, like they knew us as warlords, so warlords just show up and want access to the one thing that basically powers your whole city and you don't even bat an eye, like tf.
Yes also nobody in the last city even comments the fact that we have fucking discovered a new civilisation at the edge of the solar system that survived for centuries without us even knowing like if it were normal
I'm glad I'm not the only one who wondered that. When Osiris emerged from his drop pod, he should have been immediately slammed to the ground with a gun to his head. The cloud striders knew Earth during the collapse meaning the bloodbath, the desperation, and a true fight for survival. An Earth in turmoil, overrun but warlords, monsters, and death. They should have been terrified of our/Osiris's presence but they just accepted it.
Shit bothered me too like Osiris had already group chat with the whole planet of Neptune or something
@M J Yep, it is ridiculous. Like half the story is missing. First thing would be to speak to the uploaded citizens of the cloud ark.. "someone explain to me what this veil is that powers your entire city, so I can asses the threat level" nope. I mean someone must mantain this power source, must have harnessed it.... they must have some idea what it is. God, I honestly can't beleive how bad it is. I can take anti-climatic on the chin.. I mean I have seen my share of it on certain tv shows I will not mention. This was beyond anti-climatic.. I mean I didn't really know what the hell was going on.
my honest take during the campaign was that they figured between us and the literal invasion they were facing, we were probably the good guys since we didn't you know.... start blowing up the city.
It was honestly depressing to have the story fall so flat on its face. I LOVE the lore and story of Destiny. I was so excited for the culmination of YEARS of storytelling, and it just... It hurt.
Game of thrones season 8 all over again
@@CBRN-115 pls no
Where's Jason Jones, maybe he can fix the lore😉
What storytelling? I've been with destiny since first game (with breaks obviously) and i don't remember a single instance of good storytelling. The lore was good, true but the way they presented ALL of their stories was pathetic and unfocused with very minimal continuity.
I am honestly suprised how people only now realize the storytelling of this series is bad
@@mactiger98 Witch Queen was quite good.
The absolute most freaking PAINFUL part for me personally is the story of Neomuna. When we set foot in the Ishtar Collective structure containing the Veil, I saw the potential of an awesome Sci Fi story of how Neomuna sprouted from this, and that we were walking in the halls of a long ancient heart of a beautiful civilization. The story that could've been told with Lightfall just from that experience alone! And it pains me soooo much that we didn't get anything like that.
They essentially lifted the Terminal Dogma/Lilith plotline and setting from Evangelion but capitalized on absolutely nothing that makes it so dramatically effective and urgent.
They focused way too much on showing off strand and not enough on neomuna itself or the veil. Unless i missed it, i dont even know why threads of strand are on neomuna.
Could you imagine to use deepsight to learn Savathuns secrets and discover strand? To realize the power behind her green magic? To learn another power of darkness over the witch queen seasons (with knowing that the third darkness power is the yellow energy of the disciples, awaiting us in "The Final Shape").
Sending out the green worms to attack or trapping enemies in the green net strands of Savathun...this would have given Strand a character and atmosphere.
Cloudstriders and 80s neon are just a cheap and rushed stand in for the stuff that Bungie was not able to do because of Covid. I am pretty sure this was work of 3rd or 2nd division, because the first division was/is already at work at Final Shape.
@@Thund3rstone I’ve heard theories that even tho the Narrative Director of Lightfall was the same Narrative Director for Witch Queen, that Lightfall’s story was made by the Beyond Light team, which, no disrespect, but like said earlier, too many things just jumped over
I hate the fact that Neomuna has been a thriving civilization. It has advanced technology and probably a sizeable popularity. And we see 2 cloudstiders the only present military forces on the entire city, hell maybe planet! where is everyone? Their could have been destroyed Neomuna craft, we could have had moments where we rescue civilians. When could have found radios that have military chatter like in halo 3 and halo reach. But no we got the explication that everyone on is safe in the cloudark. I know it’s explained post campaign but still their was so much they could have done and I know it’s hard to do in a game like destiny. But I miss feeling like I’m in a losing war just barely pushing through. Instead my guardian is kicking everyone’s ass only for me to randomly be told we lost.
As a somewhat casual player when it came to lore, Witch Queen had me binge-watching Byf lore videos to fully grasp the full story. It turned me into a full fan and got me SO much more interested in the full lore of the game. Was LightFall fun? Sure. But it didn't deliver on story for me. I agree with so much of what you said!
I'm sorry for your loss. Not the best time to enter the franchise, apparently, story wise. Feels like it was cobbled together by a bunch of 8 year olds with fortune cookies.
@@gregbrown3082 Oh, I've been playing for a few years! I've played through all the campaigns, but the seasons leading up to Witch Queen and the Witch Queen campaign itself turned me from occassional player into full fan. Soooo yeah, this was a let down as a follow-up.
@@DiscoLiz my mistake! Some of the lore is just... So rich! It makes you wish the team writing weapon descriptions, and some of the Bray story... Had command of the flagship narrative for Lightfall.
I feel so bummed for everyone that had your experience. It's like discovering Game of Thrones after Season six only to be hit with 7 😔
@@gregbrown3082 absolutely! I feel like this was meant to just be a piece of The Final Shape and they forced it to work. Fingers crossed they reevaluate and take the constructive criticism for the final chapter of this saga!
I think my favorite part was when our ghost got possesed and was making the "link." Everyone wanted us to shoot our ghost like it was a huge issue to stop it, but then Nimbus just flies up there and grabs it AFTER it's made the link...
literally could've just grappled it with strand... the whole campaign was filled with our guardian conveniently getting disadvantaged so something interesting could happen, like Rohan sacrifice when strand conveniently stopped working, when before he had also said all known methods by the witness wont work in destroying it.
my clanmates missed Rohan due to how that encounter was structured, they died and came back out of the play area and didn't see it, but also, our gun wasn't a weapon of sorrow so we couldn't if we wanted
@@fishervt same here mumy friend was on top of the that wall in the middle while i was on the ground and he activated it thinking it would be fine then we go "exhausted" and since i was on the ground i couldnt see shit about rohans death
It was kind of ridiculous how Nimbus crashed into the ground like he'd been hit by a missile to.
@@fishervt you don’t need a weapon of sorrow to kill a Ghost btw
The end got me just like Byf, I was "ok, so, I can still use the light, what exactly happened? We lost? Lost what?"
I can't believe Bungie dropped the ball like this just after Witch Queen, which was good and dealt with a great villain and a twist very well...
And everyone at the tower is like, “booohooo it’s gone.”
I’m like, no it’s not. It’s literally right there. Nothing has changed that we can see. Have we tried flying into the opening? Are we going to look into that? What was earth doing while we were off learning new abilities that we found on the street?
Think that’s the problem. This dlc was up against witch queen. Don’t think anything can touch that at this point.
@@jareddavulture58 That's definitely not the problem. Even in isolation, without comparing to WQ, there are sooo many problems with this expansion so far.
My favorite part of the campaign was the fight right before the last one where you and Caitl are defending the vault against waves of Calus’s cabal. In the final battle against Calus, my greatest enemy was the pit.
SERIOUSLY!!! whose idea was it to surround the arena with a pit, when the boss and all 3 mini bosses he summons has a knock back, AND the mini bosses can spam a suppress?
me and my friend watching caitl 1v1 a tormentor was the highlight of the campaign, the entire time we were also happy because finally an NPC actually helps us fight shit instead of just watching and being like "yeah we make a good team haha!"
I just screamed FACTS in my car after reading this. My goodness what a point!
Add to that you were not given a second of down time, so your health never really healed.
I had to sit under the stairs and just light him and the tormentors up because of that.
@@urboi6307 after many failures dealing with the tormentors i decide the strat was to get in caluses face and only leave it to lure the tormentors away o they could be ignored. Wored super well till phase 2...
I'm so glad other people have the same questions. To add a few I've had:
- How does Ghost just know what Tormentors are called? What even are they?
- How does Neomuna seem to know about everything post-collapse? I get Maya Sundaresh knowing about Exo experiments, but they know about the Red War, the Hive, and were fully aware the Pyramids would return. BUT, they still think Guardians were Warlords?
- Wtf was the Witness and the Vanguard doing whilst we were on Neptune? The start and ending cutscene could play 1 after the other and they are in the same place. How long were they all just standing there in the HELM?
Like seriously, this is beyond suspension of disbelief
Your Ghost comment highlights something I mentioned to former Destiny buds asking me about the new content.
Strand is just randomly named by Osiris at one point. With subtitles on, it's a Proper Noun that comes out of nowhere in one of his old man yells at cloud (striders) moments. Then a couple sentences later, "strands" is in quotation marks as though someone is struggling to describe the ability. The whole conversation seems like the order of everything was jumbled up after the initial writing.
Doin what all politicians do, just standing around talking what to do about the problem hahaha
another question ive had and one that realllyy shoulda been answered; if the witness needed to commune with the traveller and enter it, why did they want to destroy it at the end of seraph
The Vangard, their allies, and The Witness all probably just sat down for Poker until the Player and Osiris were done bumbling around on Neptune.
The people of neomuna knowing about everything I guess could be explained that they kept an eye on earth
I cannot fathom how they went from The Witch Queen being such a good point in the story to Lightfall in just a year.
Idk what you guys liked about twq, it was long and it was mechanically not fun (a game must be fun in the first place) and this one has a lot of flaws, but it's just destiny, it's just destiny and a big corporation funded game so it's sure to be shit, so I was impressed at how fun this campaign was compared to the previous ones (i don't think it saves the problems mentioned in the video though) I was expecting 10 other 3 immune phase minibosses before another unfun big boss, but not really, underleveled high diff campaign was fun and we killed fucking calus i was like damn
I’m telling you. The beginning and ending cutscenes are one cutscene. They were split apart in order to craft a story between it.
Witch Queen felt so good, and it brought me back after 3 years for a reason. Now I’m like……
@@TaylorONEism93 what exactly did you love about twq dlc? i'm just curious I hated that one and I'm having fun with this dlc
@@123deserted the story man. It was all coming together. As well as some refreshing gameplay. I played the whole season, only stopped when the pirate season came out. I can only handle so much redundancy.
I think the biggest props i can give the story is how well it sold the Witness as a threat in spite of the nebulous plot. Just like the fighters in the intro, our efforts mean literally nothing to it. It doesn't care that we're here, it doesn't care what we do. Whether Calus succeeds or we kill him, nothing changes and the Witness carries on. Hell, it cares so little that it uses our Ghost to chat with Calus about its plans simply because its convenient to do so, and nothing more. It does not care in the slightest.
That, I think, what makes the story so frustrating. Because there's some flashes of brilliance that tells us "yes! They can do this!" but the rest is just mediocre. We know they can do good writing, so it's honestly baffling that they'd fail in such a basic way.
And given it has the story trope of "handing the mcguffin to the enemy". Which isn't really a great one. It's too easy, and given the whole ghost possession chitchat with Calus. You coulda, shoulda, would have seen this coming from miles away.
Who knows. Maybe Osiris, or the Queen find us a way to cut off the Veil, and force the witness out? Will wait and see.
@@Rogue2316 thats because it wasnt planned out this far and the games life was only extended for money.
@@That_One_Sunshine_Knight I’m thinking after the raid they’ll do something like they did with forsaken and open up some plot points? I doubt it but it’s hopeful. Lots of hype for a 6/10 story. Very average.
to be fair, i feel the opposite. the witch queen did a better job at making the witness a terrifying entity than lightfall did. yeah, in cutscenes, he himself is menacing, and obviously dangerous, but every other character just looks at him and acts like nothing. the see him and go “wow the witness, scary. go find veil and forget the witness, the literal reason guardians, and destiny the game even exists. forget him, go find veil.”
I think it’s very obvious that Strand was meant for the Witch Queen, it matches thematically and makes a lot more sense to find it within Savathûn’s memories rather than on the side of the road
It also helps explain how lacklustre this campaign is. My opinion is that this expansion was never meant to be, but since they delayed Strand they needed another expansion to introduce all of the Darkness subclasses. Lightfall was planned to be the last expansion, but they moved all of its content to Final Shape and cobbled together this DLC out of a potential cyberpunk season. This explains why absolutely nothing happens this expansion, and it’s all basically a Strand tutorial. They said we’d learn more about the fate of Destiny during Lightfall and we got nothing
If you splice together the opening and closing cutscenes in Lightfall, you’ll notice that they were originally the same scene and each character is in the exact same position in both. Nothing that happens in this expansion mattered at all, which explains how light in actual story and content this expansion was. That’s also why everything is a reskin, none of it was originally meant to be a full expansion
Couldn't explain it better. Especially since lightfall was originally supposed to be the last expansion.
this is a very fun theory that i like a lot
I agree completely, strand was supposed to be part of witch Queen. It makes sense even narratively. Savathun steals the light, we steal a power of the hive. Weaving, unraveling, tangling, these are hive terms. Constraints on needing to get content out vs the programing time to get it ready caused this.
I don't feel it deserves all the hate it is getting, but it deserves a lot of it.
Late to the party, but I agree. I also think the "flash to Neptune" part of this cut scene was either
A. Added in after they realized they needed another expansion to give the witness a reason to go to Neptune.
B. Already there and was supposed to be a small part of the entire 'lightfall" (now final shape) campaign
"The veil" feels tacked on as a "well, we need something to chase after in lightfall" and that's why we have no idea and never get an explanation as to what it is. They don't know and needed the seasons between lightfall and final shape to explain it.
Essentially, Bungie gave us half a burger for 40 to 50 dollars, and they said the other half will be available in a year.
I still find it crazy that they haven't learned anything from witch queen campaign. the way we were trying to figure out where savathuuns power both old and new came from, her history, the plot twist that she was tricked into working for the darkness and the witness through the worms, the way we use that to make her emotionally volatile, the fight to the final area and the final boss and her death which felt melancholic because she was trying to protect the traveller. like its crazy they do that last year then regress a year later. like they understood we liked learning about things in games not having it hidden from us.
witch queen was such a highlight for destiny. story and content-wise. we had so much to do. esp the end of season of the seraph, a very heart wrenching sacrifice by rasputin and the traveler leaving the city. and then this....
Lmaoo they haven’t learned anything since ttk
A lot of this did get explained and it's kinda much. Most open ended things will probably be a seasonal beat bc man there's so much shit going on.
But tldr; she wanted light to break free from her worm, since that and Sword Logic is directly tied to Darkness. Witness spoke to her since siblings grew mad with Power.
We've viewed Savathuun as a threat as all Hive Gods, yet she bode time for us til the Witness eventually would come in, causing another Collapse. Something she has already seen before. Her final trick was hiding the veil but her death made that possibility of discovery a reality.
Tldr of tldr; she was the anti hero all along, some plot points will probs be expanded later on I hope, and we fucked ourselves but fighting against the current.
What I find crazy is that people are still surprised by the constant let down by bungie. Like, bruh its been this way since 2014. When will you learn?
Yup.
The story feels so much more about us discovering strand, rather than actually answering the big questions and further developing plots that have been building up for the past years
Oh and the traveler is dead? but who cares lets kill some more cabals
As a story about discovering a new power, it's great! As a "beginning of the end" of the 10 year saga, it's a pile of dog mess
It's because destiny spent all resources explaining a new stupid power instead of making the original classes feel new again like with forsaken, would've been better to have new types of solar, arc and void classes like they did in forsaken than make up some bs power that makes no sense
@@tommyewen6344 exactly this! This was supposed to be part 1 of the end of the story we've been playing for almost a decade now and it failed miserably on that front. This story didn't even do any thing "Lightfall" related whatsoever.
The Darkness/Pyramids/Witness have been an absolute joke ever since they showed up in season of Arrivals. How are we supposed to be afraid of an enemy that showed up 3 years ago and has done absolutely nothing since it arrived?
@@gamerguru2924 they literally revamped all 3 of those subclasses last over the last year, the only subclass needing some change is stasis
I was really sad when Rohan died. Not because I cared about him, but because he seemed like he could have been a really interesting character that I wish that I could have known and cared for.
I wish they killed nimbus instead
@@Lntrn.x I think that that would only work if they got rid of the 10 year expiration thing, which I think is stupid to begin with.
I feel like Osiris could have become a Cloudstrider in Rohan's wake. He didn't have his Light, and being a protector again would allow for him to stop sitting there and complaining and start being active so he can have a sense of closure.
I also feel like Cloudstriders should have had more beef with us for being immortal while they only live 10 years. It felt like a perfect setup for character tension, and it was all resolved in a few words in the beginning of the campaign, when Rohan said "Not all of us have lives to spare."
@@clayless8701 the entire plot felt rushed. We meet the cloudstriders and are immediately friends with them, no one seems to question how we can even see or use strand, we're expected to know about the entire city of neomuna and show it works, we're expected to really care about a place we've literally never heard of. Rohans death lacks impact because we don't even know the guy, not a single other memeber of the Vanguard is even consulted about strand or what it could be (no driftor no Eris etc) it's like the whole campaign is missing chunks or was rewritten or something
I felt the same. He coulda been, shoulda been, woulda been and instead they cut his throat before he had a chance.
I think a small change that could have helped is having the other characters be just as confused as us. One reason I got so frustrated with the story is because I felt like I was the only one who didn't know what was going on. Plus, if Bungie is planning on slowly revealing information over the next year of seasonal content, it would be nice to feel like all the characters are learning together.
Don't worry, one of the seasons this year might just be another filler season about "time to be a pirate matey!" Oh wait.. that's not a good thing. Rip
Yep. That would have done it.
@Oscar Sevilla nope that gonna be this season but instead of a pirate you get to be a queensguard ooooo how exciting. I just absolutely love doing battle ground activities non stop
@Oscar Sevilla ....I thought the next filler season was going to be Camalot: Knights & Knaves 😮
But honestly, the next 3 seasons will all be 99% filler just like last year.
Even that one random guardian being sliced up with his ghost was more impactful then Rohan's death
Its not even a random guardian its the og fireteam who is there since beginning of D1.. Look up on youtube: Rip og Destiny fireteam
Doesn't really help either that almost everyone was already expecting this guy to die. Was hoping Bungie wouldnt take this route but oh well
@@wastedv8 i know, and them being killed off so effortlessly in the first cutscene makes you think there is no messing around here, things are serious, ppl are dying... And then the campaign fails to capture that tone they set with that first cutscene
seriously, watching that sent shivers down my spine, watching Rohan die made me mad cause we just.. sat there
One hundred percent this 2 hours in you don't even know Rohan and bam dead like I didn't even care
You know, for an expansion called Lightfall I was expecting a bit of a, you know, FALL. Like some characters dying, or the city being lost or something other than "The witness has the veil thing, tune in next week for the next episode"
Like imagine if we knew what would happen if the witness got the veil, then osiris sacrifices himself to stop calus only for us to lose anyway, that might have carried some weight.
Yea catial said we lost and then we just went back to acting like everything is fine
Kinda like how in Halo Reach. The one Spartan dies destroying the Convenient ship only for the whole fleet to show up right after.
@@Barrett1alright if they did that and say removed all the light subclasses cause the traveler is gone . Your kind would cry about it. At this point I would say fuck it and cancel the series . You people will never be satisfied
@@JoshuaSigloch His name was Jorge, give the man the respect he deserves.
That hulk hogan in tinfoil died , remember we knew him for 5 minutes
One thing I don't see coming up that often that needs to be said.
Narratively, Calus deserved better. He's been around since D2 Year 1 and all we got from him is "Gah, I'm Calus, I like my gold stuff. Har Har Har. I do but don't like the Witness." And that was basically it. He did nothing until the very end. Meanwhile, Savathun actually got off her ass and did stuff while we were doing our thing. Calus just sat in a chair while his Legions did stuff and then he showed up in the final mission to take all the credit.
Of all things that was probably the most narratively accurate thing here. Calus is just like that, a selfish lazy brute who only did what he was told out of fear. He wants to be the last thing in all of existence and he disdains the witness because he knows that without the power he receives he can never achieve that goal.
That’s Calus’ personality and it’s been that since year 1. He’s lazy, greedy, weak and pitiful. He’s been overthrown and sought the witness for any sort of power he could possibly get. The witness granted it and used him as a pawn. The witness and Calus are alike in their selfish determination.
@@obscurit_y4536 I don’t understand why does everyone say calus is weak never made sense to for a weakling he sure has a lot of power even when he was overthrown it’s not like he was challenged to a 1v1 by ghaul or his daughter it was a bunch of people who ganged up on him
@@ivory867 Yep. He was a Tyrant that had a lot of loyalty.
Someone hit the chronicon(chronomican?) sauce a bit hard lol
Here's a few particularly egregious moments that I'm able to recall off the top of my head:
- Osiris calling the new element "strand" before anyone even knew what it was. He just casually calls it strand in a sentence about needing to learn more about it. It's the first time any of the characters gave it a name and it was even before anyone even said something that was like an analogy to strings or yarn or anything. He uses strand as a proper noun.
- As we see the shadow legion moving the Radial Mast over to where the Veil is, Rohan says something along the lines of, "They're going to attempt a link." Prior to this, we had no idea what the Radial Mast was (granted we still don't and likely never will), we had no idea what the Veil was or how it was connected to the traveler (we still don't), and we had no idea what the Witness's plan was for the Veil other than getting to it and doing something. So for a character to claim that they were "attempting a link" implies either we were supposed to already know what that meant or that character had some insights that they are not sharing.
- (this last one is extremely minor but still irksome to me for whatever reason) In the scene after finishing off Calus, our ghost is possessed by the Witness and flies up to the Veil. Caiatl insists we destroy our ghost and in response, our guardian raises a weapon to shoot the ghost. But that weapon isn't the current weapon in our equipped slot, it is the Khvostov. A weapon we haven't used since D1 and was only in D2 as an easter egg in the EDZ. Why was this choice made here? Trying to get some nostalgia?
Enemies already having Strand shields threw me off. And as for Khvostov, I honestly believe it's the ONLY gun model Bungie designed to be actually interactible in a cutscene (as in aiming down the sights) I get why it must have been limiting, because they could not use every single primary scopes on those few frames. Still, it felt weird, like a bad easter egg. It also show up on you character in the commendation screen, which is laughable.
You hit the nail on the head with the 'attempting a link' part. I felt like I missed something fundamental - I DID miss something but now I know that it wasn't me that screwed up.
@@Atypical_Typo think about the shields in another way: they have light supressing tech that is vulnerable to strand attacks. Similarly, their shields are also vulnerable to strand (if you shoot with a shield with the same element, you cause more damage and it explodes when destroyed), so it's not that they are using strand to power their shields, but their tech is weaker against it. The colors are just gameplay indicators. But besides that, all critics are valid, the story was just a filler
@@marciocruz4758 I thought the Strand element shields were also a bit off, they didn't have to throw them at us straight off the bat as we landed on Neomuna, they could have easily waited until we'd interacted with "those funny green thread thingies" even if it was as soon as we had touched the first bundle that would have been fine.
It was a small touch but fed into removing my suspension of disbelief and reminded me I was playing a game - which makes it "not cool"
@@Atypical_Typo The reason why the Cabal had strand is because when they interacted with the Veil, they found a whole bunch of these reserves. They dont understand it, they dont know how to utilise it properly, nor do they know what else to do with it. They basically scavenged this piece of unknown technomagic and slapped it into their armour because they noticed it made them a bit more resilient to damage.
The Guardian knows what it was used for and eventually through guidance and thought, almost complete mastered it though their journey inside Neomuna. Strand empowered the Guardian and gave them new pathways to decimate their opponents in every corner. The Guardians made strand their own power. Suprising even the Witness.
I'm just deeply disappointed that I ended up more worried about Caiatl dying in the last mission than I was for Rohan.
Because we had years with her, but like 2h with him, so who cares about it if you dont even know why, how and when
bro same
Rohan’s death seemed unnecessary when he only had 10 years to live as a cloud strider.
@@imarubronzen all of em only got 10. it was implied he was near his end. 2 years away iirc
@@ADIMIS Yeah, but his death would’ve meant more if he died trying to keep Calus from physically getting to the veil at the end.
They marketed this expansion as having lots of pay off moments but instead it feels like we’ve gotten even more setup, there are so many threads and unanswered things that I’m worried for the final shape. I didn’t think at a normal campaign length the final shape will be Able to fully tie together all the threads without it feeling like every single scene is lore exposition that goes on forever
Nice 360 profile icon,.
Haha...*THREADS*
@@boom-jr8vi looks like we need to use strand irl to figure this out
The marketing team deserves a raise because they made this turd of a story look like a delicious piece of chocolate
@@sombrashadow0013yeah cause the marketing team had to use the only two important cutscenes to show it off. Minus the purple door you can gather the whole story.
You know whats more strange?
One of the sidequests we do to complete rohan's notes, we enter the black garden and the characters discuss the black heart and reveal that it was another veil.
Like... are veils essentially things that affect the traveller cause the black heart was killing the traveller in D1, so what does this veil do exactly?!
Imagine that after 8 years the black garden is finally revealed to just be a thing that does something and that's all you'll ever know ✌️
the veil might have been holding back the witness's powers. in the end cutscene SPOILERS AHEAD
the witness when its opening that portal. it looks like orange energy moving throughout its body. the link the veil made to the traveler probably enhanced the witness in some way. the veil was stopping the witness from opening that thing on the traveler.
I assume the veils are gateways to other planes of existence. I haven't done the quest you're talking about in specific but I assume it's a separate veil from the one in the campaign. The veil we were after was tied to the light most likely due to Ghosts' comments about it giving the same energy as the Traveler. Whereas the one in the quest you're talking about is likely tied to the darkness as it took you to the black garden, a plane of darkness.
No, it's not another veil ..it was an attempt to make a copy of the veil
Its the heart of the traveller. Witness literally says in witch queen (your pale heart holds the key) and now he is in the Traveller. The black heart was a failed attempt
Did anyone else feel like there should have been more of Calus' transformation scene? Like when he gets in the pyramid bath thing. I feel like there was probably more to that scene that got cut from the final release.
yes! I was anticipating seeing the part that had been in one of the trailers. where Calus looks like crap & is sitting inside his rectangular hot tub thingy while the Witness is watching him. the blocks start to close around him... what happened before & after that?!? so confusing 😒
I feel like it's just a Dune visual reference and nothing more, really.
Thats because all of these expansions were cut from the Destiny 1 campaign and then sold to us every year as new content. You didn't know that?
So let me get this straight. The witness literally came to sol in season of arrivals (which was a dope ass season btw), gave us stasis in beyond light, parked it for 3 or so years witnessing sol while knocking back a cold one, then finally shows up at our doorstep, opens a transdimensional doorway using the veil, refuses to elaborate, then goes through and fracks off.
This was supposed to be bungie’s infinity war, and all we got was infinity scuffle with an anemic discount Thanos. The witness was more intimidating and interesting back in shadowkeep when it transported us to the black garden and took our form to talk to us. My theories were so much better than what bungie delivered. Wow
Oh we def got the ol MCU treatment of "goofy ass dialogue while the world is ending".
Witness wasn't in sol till now. He was off in deep space till lightfall.
@@Mechimmortal diD wE jUsT lOoSe?!
“Well, that just happened!” - Nimbus (probably)
They wanted to make an Infinity War, but we got a Multiverse of Madness and Quantumania.
One thing I gotta say is props to the person who did sound for that bit where calus is breaking in to the facility behind us. That felt actually really cool.
Really cool, as soon I heard it while going down the only thing in my mind was "BRO WE GOTTA GO NOW"
If you listen closely you can hear him growling
The music when you finally get to the veil was incredible, it reminded me of the music from Flamerock Refuge from tiny Tina’s dlc
Which mission was this and what part did it happen cause I can’t remember?
The fact that we didn’t even see the witness and the traveler leave in the end and we had to find out what happened through text with Zavala and Ikora is wild to me. Also, the big 4 sit in the helm with the curtains up during this whole things is even wilder to me. Old habits die hard I guess
That's because the cutscenes seem to have original been just one cutscene. The shutters go down, and maybe in a minute or so they come back up.
Also the traveller didn't leave, it's still up there with the pyramid portal thing. You can see it on the map. The dialogue from zavala and ikora should probably be just completely discarded because it makes no sense at all. The traveller can still bless the "enemies of humanity" if a ghost happens to want to do that. We still have our light so it's clearly not dead, and zavalas whole "oh no we lost.. but there's a new hope now" is almost as bad as Nimbus just exclaiming the veil is safe now
@@HoneyDoll894 Thinking back on it now, I wonder if the dialogue was meant to be the closing of The Final Shape? It makes zero sense otherwise.
@@patchworkcat6932 yeah honestly I almost think thats the case
@@HoneyDoll894 The dialogue seems to imply that whatever the Witness did it didn't exactly kill the Traveler, but it seems to be incapacitated and nonresponsive in some capacity. Though obviously not dead because we still have the Light.
Where is the text?
I really cant get over how obvious it is that Strand was suppose to be the WQ subclass the color, the motif, the fact that there is an enemy in WQ called a threadweaver, the fact that Osiris got info about it from Sav's mind, the warlock subclass symbol looks alot like there WQ armor symbol. They legit took the subclass that was important to WQ and decided to smash it together with what is most likely the first act of OG lightfall. I also cant get over the fact that the beginning and ending cutscene are clearly the same cutscene but split in half
Bungie has claimed it was never meant for WQ but it's pretty hard to believe. Maybe a previous version of it that wasn't technically Strand was intended to be in WQ, and they're getting off on a technicality because three years ago it was in dev as 'Deepsight' or something rather than Strand despite sharing a lot of similarities.
@@atomic_wait I don't believe those mfs a WORD lmao
Above all else, I’m terrified that I’m gonna leave The Final Shape feeling like I wasted hundreds of dollars and nearly a decade of my life being invested in this story
This though, I've been worried about this myself since Beyond Light. Since BL I've felt like there are obvious opportunities for plot points and answers and more mysteries but Bungie just bungles it time and time again. I've got 0 drive to play lightfall. I told my husband when the trailers came out, "it feels nothing like a destiny trailer, I feel like I'm watching something entirely different and I don't care for it" and it's remained true. I've spent YEARS and hundreds of dollars to follow a story I thought would be well rounded, full of secrets to discover and would coherent at the end. But it's really not shaping up that way 😐
Its like the game of thrones feeling
@@IXONERU yeah! In a way! All build up and hype and lore....for the most disappointing ending in existence.
If you were entertained, it wasnt a waste.
Gaming is fun but you have to be able to walk away when you are tired of a specific game. Its the feeling of 'all the wasted time' the keeps you in it. But leaving doeant have to be permanent. Skip a season or two and if you dont miss, you'll aways have the memories.
@@QuietQuin with me I spent my middle school years and high school years playing this game, I’m a freshman in college now and I feel like I wasted so much of my childhood on this franchise after this
The difference in quality between Witch Queen and Lightfall is bigger than the difference between the Traveler and the Witness.
More like the difference between Curse of Osiris and Forsaken. I enjoy the combat and difficulty of the Legendary Campaign but holy snap the story was hyper shallow and the environments nowhere near as expansive as I expected.
This expansion was absolutely rushed. There's no way this was finished, even the cinematics looked half finished.
Can you explain the comparison? Oh, wait, no one fkn does! Speculation is the cocaine of lore gaps
The writers wanted to add a blm mural and some “hay guize” into the game
I liked it but I k8nda agree
The first mission of Witch Queen was filled with intrigue and mystery and "wtf" moments
The first mission of Lightfall is "Remember the key card mechanic from Duality and the Leviathan raid? Do that"
????
Witch queen first mission is “Remember Wrath of the Machine where you carry heavy mechanical parts? Do that”
@@jayla6499 Yes, however there was more to it than that. THe craziest part of it was a Tormentor coming in, and we know exactly why it's here, because the Witness gave them to buff up Calus' forces. Hive Guardians we didn't know other than Savathun had the Light and that it seemed impossible, then we got straight into the Throne World and see nothing Hive related at all. Nothing made sense considering our knowledge of everything before contradicting all of this entirely.
Guardian: “What’s the Veil?”
Nimbus: “I don’t have time to explain to-“
Guardian: “Don’t you f$&@ing dare!”
Two big missed opportunities for me was not actually showing Neptunian people aside from the cloudstriders (makes it hard to feel the weight of a city under siege) and the lack of any dynamic between characters, like there isn’t really a mentor and student vibe between Rohan and Nimbus or our character and Osiris even though that seems like what they wanted
It was pretty lame, but also wholly explained.
What annoyed me is the radio says the citizens should take up arms like how cool would that be flying around the city as bullets fly from the citizens the cabal and the vex instead they all live in a “virtual world”
@@bigboss425 they’d get psion sniped to shit💀
@@obscurit_y4536 ik thats why you make them invincible they dont have to be true enemies they could be like the robots from that one lost sector on europa
Should have shown people dying, the cities buildings being destroyed.
Was I supposed to feel bad about Rohans death like it was a war story? Because I physically cannot I only knew the guy for like 15mins I shed more tears listening to the audio clips at cayde’s memorial in the tower.
He also told us right before he died that he was about to die because he was approaching the end of his life-cycle.... so he kinda just died a few days earlier than he would have otherwise, with the benefit of dying a martyr.
Nimbus gay ass didn’t feel bad either oddly enough.
I remember beating calus thinking I was 3/4 way done with the campaign only for that to be the end. Felt strange too bc I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what the hell the veil is bc all the characters just kept assuming you already knew
Nice pfp
nice ecco pfp.
i’m saying. calus, in my opinion, got the xol treatment. a literal bringer of the 2nd collapse, a disciple of the witness, and darkness corrupted cabal emperor just randomly shows up, and we kill him, like it’s nothing. yes, it’s calus, but like.. HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE SIMILAR TO RHULK. AND WE KILL HIM IN ONE MISSION.
@@bobbybruh2623 yeah but warmind was a good dlc kinda sorta
Calus literally popped up to fight us twice, and the first time he did nothing, just popped his astral head then Caiatl saved us then we ran. A throwback to the Leviathan raid floating skull mechanic would have been a great experience, probably on par with the ahamkara fight from WQ.
This was going to be my big return to Destiny after a 2 year hiatus. Prior to that break I had been playing daily and often since the Beta for D1. After hearing my friends and reading reviews online I immediately changed my mind on returning. This was supposed to be a big climax and turning point in the story of the Destiny world. Something along the lines of Luke finding out Vader is his father or anything that scale. But instead everyone is just saying the campaign is nothing more than a strand tutorial with very little narrative progression and half the time the important stuff is happening, you aren’t even there. You’re off on Neptune playing fuck fuck games with strings.
this really felt like beyond light 2.0, using the darkness was really the main focal point of that expansion and it worked well, it made sense that we had to claim stasis to defeat Eramis who already had stasis,fight fire with fire fight darkness with darkness, so much of this expansion was Osiris telling us that we NEED strand for… reasons? We should have fully unlocked strand half way through the campaign so they could have shifted the narrative focus to what was actually going on, but they didn’t.
strand was even optional in the final fight
The only reason we needed strand was because of the paracausal supressors and they don't even appear in the final mission omegalul
Yes
Strand is new and paracausal disrupters don’t affect it. Honestly, the campaign is easy with strand once you got fragments going. Suspended the tormentors makes them a cake walk.
@@lil_question7449 Hell not only was it optional, I personally didn't use it because it simply wasn't as strong as the build I was using, so it isn't even like I "needed" to use it in the final fight.
Oh boy I sure can't wait to learn exactly what the veil is
sorry bro, you gotta wait until the next saga for that answer
the veil the the mast!!
You wanna know? You're gonna have to pay.
Yeah it's a miss but i wouldnt give all my hopes up until after the raid. I mean it was the raid that showed us the first discipline of the witness, gave us an exotic quest that fleshed out the hive a lot more, and the raid itself explained a lot more as well.
@@Downwiththatdeee3451 that's what I'm hoping for
“Cloudstrider Rohan sacrificed himself to prevent the Witness from using the Radial Mast to seize the Veil.”
Is a sentence that means exactly the same thing to Destiny players and non-Destiny players.
this is actually so true. I loved the expansion from a gameplay perspective, but god damn. The story literally left me with more questions than answers.
Fucking facts!
@@Psyshimmer yes yes exactly and not in a good interesting mysterious way either. Just in a dumb poorly done way.
I wanna say that the narrative teams are split. You have a seasonal team, and then a DLC team, and I wonder if there was a disconnect between those two teams in telling Destiny's story.
I mean, just look at the first few cutscenes of Season of the Defiant. Completely different tone and feel
The fact that we saw what most of the campaign had to offer in the trailer and no major shock factors within the gameplay itself it's really something.
Honestly… yeah. Pretty much every cutscene was shown in a trailer and the biggest “reveals” of the campaign happened in the first two or three missions. The Witness has made connection with the Traveler, Calus is a Disciple (which means nothing because we have no idea what being a Disciple does or means) and that there’s this thing called “The Veil” that the Witness wants
@@Asheslit Witness wants a veil to be able to marry the Traveler. Simple! /s
Literally didn’t see a cutscene they didn’t use in the trailer. Even the final cutscene was in the trailers.
Didnt watch the trailers, they didnt have that much of a wow factor anyway.
I love bungie trailers but stopped watching them 2 weeks ago because I was worried they were giving too much away… seems I was right…
I was at maximum copium levels that Calus was gonna expo dump info on the veil. This campaign really does remind me of the D1 vanilla campaign where we just kinda do whatever we're told and everyone knows what's up but us
that's a funny thought, Calus does seem like the kind of character to start fucking over his teammate after he loses by revealing info.
that minus d1 feeling of Mistery and hope for the future of the game :(
I can imagine Rohan focusing on "I don't have much time left" everyone expecting him to die and in the end Nimbus dying. Now that would be a good twist.
shoot, is it even explain why they serve for ten years? Is that just the norm? Does it age them faster? I want answers
@@darmorel549 they said it lmao, their bodies cant handle all the augmentations they get
@darmorel Think of their lifespan as a cellphone's battery (or any battery with a charge). You can leave it idle, no apps, nothing (equals to no augments on normal people) and it will last, but open an app (an augment for them), then another, then another, the battery drains up faster and faster until it dies. The more apps, the shorter the battery life, the more augments, the shorter a cloudstrider's lifespan.
Just imagine how dangerous a Risen Cloudstrider could be? Powers of the Light, immortality, and powers of advanced nanotech. But, of course, that would take away from what makes them a foil to the Guardians. What’d be really dangerous: a Guardian Warmind. But, if this were to occur, I’d hope it wouldn’t be too soon. Maybe three years later? Or maybe not at all, as it could take away from Rasputin’s sacrifice.
@@garrettviewegh677 I mean, the only reason why Rasputin was scary was because of the warsats, and those are gone now. They would just be a normal exo at this point.
Imagine if Nimbus was the rookie trying to live up to Rohan's legend especially because Rohan had little time left to live.
But then it would be Nimbus who sacrifices himself, destroying Rohan, Osiris would help him dealing with loss etc.
Instead, we got quirky dialogue...
The pacing felt like red war. Also this is the first campaign I’ve been halfway through and realized how I didn’t really care for it, hoping some crazy twist or reveal would happen. Instead I got Zavala telling me the traveler that was hanging in orbit was “gone”. Genuinely wonder what happened here considering the level of storytelling has been so stellar the last couple years.
Every line of dialog had me feeling like someone the finale of Lost without letting me see or know anything about the series, like was I supposed to know all of this ? We just discovered a new civilization and neither us or the neptuners cared, like oh hey dude what's up? You from earth? Cool" smh
Did anyone else notice that there was no moment where the cloud striders shot a Pyramid like they showed in the reveal trailer a while back?
Ohhh yeah hmmmmm
You're right. Neither did we see The Witness standing over Calus during his transformation, which could've been really cool if Bungo had spent some time on it.
There's a lot of things from the reveal trailer that weren't in the expansion. I think big things happened behind the scenes very recently because this whole dlc is a massive mess
@@TeamGrimm07 yeah. I’m worried this new deal with Sony has massively fucked up Bungies plans because there is clearly something that went seriously wrong behind the scenes here.
Shots from reveal trailers often don’t end up in the game. We never saw Elsie meeting Drifter and Eris for the first time, never saw Savathun in the bath with the Ghosts etc.
A lot of people will have a lot of things to say about the campaign as a whole, so I just want to highlight something small and that was when Osiris tried to talk to Sagira, that was such an unexpected gut punch. More moments like that please
There were some great moments, but the over-arching story really didn't hit very hard. And anything with Nimbus in it felt very corny, especially for a story about the second coming of the apocalypse.
This was the only Osiris moment that was actually played by Osiris. The rest was just played by angry old man.
@@benamende5897 I don't know how many times I muttered STFU to Osiris whenever he opened his mouth during the campaign.
I think the campaign needed three more cutscenes (not ink blots): one to show more of the carnage and loss fighting the Witness so I can feel tension and stakes; one to show Calus himself commiting atrocities so I have a reason to hate him; and one to explain the new world building (i.e. Neomuna, The Veil, CloudArk, etc).
Also, the moment at the end, when we sit with the idea of shooting our own ghost, if they made the decision to go through with it, it would have saved the campaign for me. Lightfall needed irreversible change to occur. It needed to make the entire Destiny experience feel different going forward. Bungie has one last chance to make this right with The Final Shape.
Killing Ghost is a step that I don't think Destiny can handle.
I like this kind of story telling. There is mystery. There is a similarity to a book with the books already established. Knowing that each unanswered question will be further revealed in the next. Something to look forward to. The Veil is going to to be revealed.
I hated the trend we've had. Each season leaving nothing to be desired. A hollow experience. Every season we were left with nothing. Rasputins story ended with 19. It was as if every event was in a bubble. My greatest enjoyment out of this story was that there are things that can still be answered. My job isnt done by the end of the campaign.
But yeah I like those suggestions.
Exactly show the dark fleet arriving atleast taking out defenses we had set up
A cutscene or atleast the vanguard checking in on us or us checking in with them sure saint and osiris talking was nice but more involvement would help and would've helped too instead of at the end telling zavala what happened
A smart explanation for the Veil would've been that it was actually a Darkness artifact Savathun stole from the Witness and hid on Neptune. The Neomuni would've found it and used it to create their city and CloudArk not knowing its importance. The Witness might need it because it can bolster them enough to crack open the Traveler, and we could use it instead to shield ourselves because the Darkness cannot fight itself. And it could explain Strand too, because they could've said the approach of the Pyramids has aggravated the Veil, causing its energy to manifest wildly throughout Neomuna as Strand.
Bro just made a campaign better than bungie
@@Johnny-zp5dm yep lol
This one paragraph is narratively superior to the roughly 6 hours it took me to finish this expansion lol
this is beautiful
You’re hired!
I'm curious if the team didn't give the story enough time. This almost feels like a 30-40 hour story super shortened into a "playable" 4-8 hours. I would of loved chapters, like one with the cloud strides, got to know them. One about strand and learning it. And then finally the fight against calus.
They probably did, but bungie stoped them cause ''overdelivery''
Why make a 40h story for 60 bucks when you can make five 8h stories for 60 bucks each.
Honestly i can tell exactly what happened,
Bungie’s management didnt like the idea of having final shape be the final, so they split it and made light-fall, but the team wanted their own ideas, and management demanded that they have the story be about strand, and out of not wanting to be fired or anything, they did that.
With what witch queen was, i can absolutely say that this is what happened. Management saw how witch queen was, and they were like
“We want that before the final shape, so do that, oh and also, make sure its about that new subclass we made.”
Why would they give you anything you would want, bungie doesn't care about you. Just your money
@@thesoggynoodle4451 Witch queen was datamined and was supposed to contain strand but would have faced backlash after stasis balancing drama, i mean anyway think of deepsight resonance and the verticality in WQ, in the final bossfight the damage buff is called threadcutter. Lightfall was probably split for that reason like you say because they know they can sell a subclass dlc as a whole knew expansion. unless they add a third subclass which doesnt change the fact they released full price content that doesnt meet their own writing standards. Anyway im sure glad i didnt buy lightfall or the season pass, because despite bungies grooming in the twab the seasonal content will not reveal significant story because it never does and is removed at the end of the year and it will likely be fixed in lightfall
I had these exact same emotions by the ending, and my friends called me crazy. I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that it seems Bungie didn’t learn what we thought they did from Witch Queen.
I argued the campaign death could have been far more impactful if they spent the campaign building up that Rohan is near expiration and it’s almost his time to die, setting expectations for him to die, and then flip the script entirely and kill off Nimbus. It would have been so much more impactful due to the implications of the protege dying before the master and what that means for the future of the Cloud Striders, and the emotional strain of watching a very innocent and naive character die far before their time. I think this could have been a much more impactful moment in general. Instead, it was obvious and predictable from the start.
Also, seriously… where in the hell did that Khvostov come from? And more importantly, WHERE DID IT GO???
I am the most well read in terms of lore in my friend group, and I could not tell you what happened in this story or what the implications are. And that’s really upsetting.
The khovostov was solely a place holder weapon for us since got the cinematic, they needed to give us a rifle that we could aim down so we could look down the sight. Since they were going to restrict our weapon choice, they chose a weapon everyone has. The khovostov.
The answer to the khvostov is simple: it came from the Guardian's vault through the destiny 2 app, and went back there afterwards through the same means. Now, if you would kindly forget that in Forsaken, the cutscenes represented whatever weapon you were holding, I'd appreciate it.
Its in the pocket dimension we keep our speeders in.
I think Nimbus being switched for Rohan dying would be far more compelling like you said. But Bungie won’t do that because Nimbus was their golden boy for this campaign. They touted him since October as their first non-binary character; killing him off after promoting him like that would be counter-productive and not go over well within certain circles. I’d be much more invested in a student-master dynamic, but Bungo made Nimbus awesome right out of the box with no personal shortcomings, thus nixing any story beats about growth and development.
@@jackbrax7808 yeah I get the technological reason for it. But there’s literally no reason we should have it. They literally could have shown Nimbus pick it up off the floor and toss it to us or something. The shit just appears and disappears for no reason. It just screams unpolished. Besides, it’s not like Bungie hasn’t done cuts scenes with our actual rendered weapons before. And every weapon’s reticle exists. They could have just used those. Yeah it’s more work but it doesn’t look as stupid.
It would have been far more impactful for us to see Nimbus toss us this old, dilapidated rifle, and us contemplate shooting, and pulling the trigger, only to find the gun is broken. And by the time we pull out our other gun, it’s too late. This would be a better scene emotionally, as we see our guardian willing to give up the light to save the system, and it would explain where the rifle came from and why we didn’t keep it.
Byf, I’ve been watching you since D1, and as a player of this franchise since beta, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Kudos to you for voicing our largely shared opinion
As an author, there were major problems with the storytelling in general:
First and foremost, Rohan was not given enough attention AT ALL for us to care about his death. It was so ‘you are going to die’ that it’s like they didn’t even bother to give him any more personality than that. To quote what I said to my fireteam during Rohan’s sacrifice, when Rohan screamed ‘DO IT’ and Ghost replied ‘We can’t…’
“What do you mean we can’t?! We don’t have any emotional attachmen- oh you mean we physically can’t do it… alright then”.
Secondly, like Byf said, the no one knows what the hell ‘The Veil’ is but everyone treats us as if we should know. I can only assume that Bungie’s writing staff forgot that they never explained it, maybe it was supposed to be the origin of Strand, but when they decided to make it its own entity, they scrapped it.
Speaking of Strand, I absolutely love it. It’s fun and mobile, perfect for my Hunter builds. One thing that got me attached to it immediately was that it was what I called when everyone was guessing what the new element would be. Poison? Kinetic? Grass? No my guess was ‘Psychic’ with the reasoning that our Guardian has been so exposed to Light, Darkness, Awoken Magic, the Ascendent Plane, Psychic and Paracausal energy that our mind has been expanded. Osiris would learn it with us because his mind expanded via Savathun - that was all my theory before we even got a trailer for Lightfall. I was ultra-hyped when I saw the trailers and thought my theory was correct. But nope. Strand is the idea of being in tune with all of life, which is a similar and is still cool… but then the explanations stop and it becomes more of a ‘draw your own conclusions’ type of thing. Doesn’t explain how Calus has a device that surpresses Arc, Solar, Void AND Stasis but not Strand? “Calus would never see it coming?” That’s true but we have had no knowledge on how we can suppress Dark energy, now Calus can do it ‘just ‘cause’.
And finally, out of all the things that pissed me off, the entire thing with Ghost! That was not foreshadowing, that was just a mess! When I write my books, spending days crafting foreshadowing moments and making it so their pay offs hit their marks, it annoys me to no end why they show the Ghost being under some kind of possession by the Witness for ONE SCENE then have him capture the Veil in the last scene. It would have been a clever idea if they had set it up correctly. Like, what if the Ghost was always facing the Veil? You would find it unnerving that the action you have used since D1 to go to orbit is suddenly different; not looking at you but looking elsewhere. It would be creepy and suggest that there wasn’t something quite right with him. Don’t have them act as if everything is completely normal and then pull that kinda crap at the end of the game =.=
And the dialoguw for nimbus feels like a whole differjwt studio made it bungie cha do dialogue well bit ninmbus ong
I hated how we let Ghost move away from us during that scene when we know that the Witness has been able to possess and talk through him. I was willing to kill him as soon as he revealed himself and started to fly away.
That idea of the ghost subtly looking at the veil constantly is the kind of "show, don't tell" detailed storytelling that made me love Destiny in TTK. A shame to see what happened with lightfall.
OK the whole we can't was we were too tired. Osiris made fun of us for not having the conditioning to keep using strand. So in the moment he needed us we were too tired.
Oh the chrome man bun having Tom of Finland dies? Tight. Worst character evar.
The Zavala/Ikora chats at the end use the same facial and body animations that they use all the time for all their conversation scenes. Considering the gravity of the situation and how important these two chats are supposed to be, they should have been custom animated. Its like they couldn't be bothered finishing this story
It should have been an actual cutscene.
Really? Ikora's especially seemed so bad. I must not have noticed before
Yeah, i don’t think Bungie has done any actual motion capture for the game in years. Even custom animations are a rarity these days when it comes to the seasonal stories. Ana Bray couldn’t even look in the right direction when she was talking to Clovis in one of the weekly “story” bits last season. Part of why I’m so disappointed in Destiny storytelling overall is that most of the seasonal and even campaign storylines are told as podcasts as we re-grind the same activities over and over again.
@Vincent Fiestada don't worry. Bungo will drop this shitcan for another once 2024 nears it's end
it's always like that. they haven't done new mocap for the tower idles in years
This video makes me feel extremely validated. At the end of the story I was distraught, I was so deeply disappointed I felt like it was me being too critical. The fact is we're all emotionally attached to this story, and to see an almost Game of Thrones level of fumble is.... like you said "Heart Breaking" .
They fumbled worse than game of thrones. A complete and utter failure.
@@danperkins4781 True and they fumbled it years ago, just took a while for it to sink in to the rabid fanbase.
I think comparing this to Game of motherfucking Thrones is nothing short of hysterical. Are there flaws? Yes. Are they major? YES. Is this anything close to Game of Thrones' final two seasons? That's fucking insane.
@@possiblyarose1397 You're right at least the final 2 seasons of game of thrones had production value. Also strange calling someone's point hysterical when you weigh in by swearing, agreeing with the point, then back to swearing to decry insanity.
@@Mermiam bro did not swear 😱 (this fully invalidates their point)
The thing that personally gets me the worst is how they treated the final fight with Calus. I remember being so wary when Witch Queen was coming out that they would waste our confrontation with Savathuun, one of the single greatest villains we've ever had in Destiny. I was pleasantly surprised after it came out because her fight had depth, good mechanics, and some of the best voice lines and lore moments I've heard from this game. On top of that, the post-fight cutscene set up quite a lot with warning us about the Witness. It all came together to make something truly amazing by today's standards and I was hoping we would get something similar this time around.
And then we got Calus. He was a colossus who turned into a gladiator with some attacks borrowed from Rhulk. That's it. No mechanics, no story elements, nothing. Yeah, he had some lines during the fight, but they really didn't mean anything. Like I don't understand why the freaking taken hydra strike boss had a more interesting fight than the main villain of the campaign.
I thought the same thing! How is it possible that a generic strike boss is more engaging and memorable than Calus? All the build-up of lore and seasonal missions discussing Calus' visions and experiments with darkness to gain The Witness' favour and become a disciple, to end up in such an underwhelming fight is insulting. He has nothing unique to show for all that power he supposedly got. It's baffling.
@@nechoplex8654 most strikes just have better writing than destiny 2 plot. I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if more time went into their writing than dlc.
@@nechoplex8654 sounds like typical post-halo bungie
This might be a hot take, but I actually kinda like how they treated Calus in his final fight with us.
Think about everything Calus is: he’s arrogant and narcissistic. He has this vision of himself that is beyond grandeur. He not only believed that he would be the final shape…he thought he it was his RIGHT. This is a guy so full of himself that he even (stupidly) dared to talk back to the Witness when it insulted him.
In reality, Calus is a pathetic person who basically cried when he was exiled and wallowed in drunken despair on the Leviathan for ages. It wasn’t until he encountered the Witness at the edge of the universe that he saw a chance to become his image of himself.
Calus built several robotic versions of himself that were more challenging to fight because it wasn’t really him but his VISION of himself.
In the end, the Witness not only abandoned Calus, it actively worked against him by showing us conversations it had with him so we knew the plans. The Witness knew Calus would fail because Calus, for all his bluster, is weak and useless.
Instead of getting his glorious end as the final shape, he died in a one on one fight against his “favorite” Guardian who he insisted he would devour at the end of Season of the Haunted. He wasn’t even important enough to be the raid boss.
A fitting and kind of poetic ending to one so narcissistic:
The taken hydra strike boss sucked, it was just a big version of an enemy we already fight
The calus boss fight was actually challenging (assuming you didn’t even play it on legendary) but yeah the mechanics could’ve been better
This honestly clarified a lot of my feelings around Lightfall. Gameplay wise, I had a blast! Neomuna is gorgeous, Strand is incredibly fun, the Tormentors are challenging and intimidating and frankly I lose my shit and run the moment I see one, and I'm all-around just having a great time. But narratively, I feel like I'm just along for the ride. Nimbus and Osiris know way more than me and are just telling me where to go and what to shoot, and I don't really understand any of it.
The honeymoon phase will be over soon enough and you’ll realize how shit it is
I’m not sure if we played the game game. Neomuna is basically a different color palette DSC. I mean the grass in the planter boxes is even embarrassing for 2023.
I died 16 times to the damn tormentors!!! On legendary mode of course 🤦
@@thelostcompass1320 They're vulnerable to blinding grenades. They're a bad joke.
@@JohnDoe-ji5cr I thought you could only hit arm and chest points? I remember using chill clip typhon and then being immune to the “chill” part.
It’s confusing because the marketing heavily pushed that questions would be answered about the darkness, the light, the traveler, and specifically the witness. But I left the campaign having dozens of additional questions about each of those points…
Honestly this felt like a seasonal story without the weekly lockouts and that really hurts
That is actually how I felt.
bullseye
THANK YOU! This is exactly how I felt, even halfway through the campaign I kept telling myself...there has to be more to this, please let the final mission blow me away...
The anticlimax of the expansion has actually made me question how much I'll play this year. After Witch Queen all I wanted to do for a month was uncover all the secrets in the Throne World. It's all I could, or wanted, to think about. I took the weekend off work for Lightfall, and I'm going to use it to finish exotic quests and farm some things. But this expansion has actually made me want to take a break from D2. I can't understand how anyone at Bungie played this and thought the narrative was good enough.
Exact same here. I am looking at a year of this as a chore. Once another game catches my interest (as always happens with gamers) what will inspire me to come back?
Same here. Also, I don't care about the story anymore.
Exactly I'm getting the same feelings I had from the warmind DLC
Same! Witch Queen got me back into Destiny after a long break. I clocked in nearly 300 hours and was really invested in the story. After this one I’ll play the raid and come back one last time for Final Shape. This really deflated my interest even though I think the campaigns gameplay was fun
I've had this feeling ever since Shadowkeep. I still played every now and again since then but this time i didn't purchase the new expansion. The price hike alone was enough reason for me to say no.
So all in all, pretty much the only narrative bits we got are :
1) Nezarec is in fact coming, this time for sure. He also seems to be the one directly responsible to nightmares.
2) The Light is the force of the physical realm, while the Darkness is one of the intangible.
3) The Strand is sort of the antitheses to Stasis, yet they still both originate from the Darkness.
4) The Witness, Veil and the Traveler seem to be a crucil triad (triangles/final cutscene portal somehow related? Illuminati confirmed? Idk). All of them appeared to manifest telepathic or otherwise mental links. Linking is one of the central themes.
Otherwise, the story line doesn’t even deserve being called half-baked for launch, it’s fully raw. Strand feels very out of place and doesn’t tie into the overall story outside of gameplay, no pun intended. Witness just outright leaves the scene after successfully doing its thing with the Veil, Traveler, and portal, and beyond that, nothing visibly changes and we keep playing normally (lol). I mean during Red War, the Traveler being meddled with was a catastrophic event that forced us to immediately act to work out a solution, but this time, nothing happened. The ghosts’ possession was not explained either, despite the fact that it’s a crucial element present since Shadowkeep. Zavala’s and Ikora’s reactions labeling the Traveler as “gone” or “transformed” don’t make sense. It just has a triangle now, the light still works the same, duh. The way the Witness carried everything out now renders the first collapse not making any sense at all, rather than being unexplored lore-wise. The Witness could have literally done the same thing back then, it had no reason to leave the Traveler alone until the second arrival.
The Dark Future timeline makes no sense either now, in it all the dark forces wanted was to simply destroy the Traveler and vanquish the Light. But it doesn’t seem this way now.
And worst of all, the Witness ordered Calus to “destroy” the Veil, but it in fact only needed to link with it once to win. Why? The story doesn’t even make sense on its own, even without the lore background.
Giving the writing team waaaay more credit than it deserves:::: ghost didn't exist before the first collapse. Getting calus inches before the veil guarantees us getting to that same location. Which means or ghost gets there. IF ghost meets veil was the plan, this is the best way to do that. But there's no..... subtext. There's a reminder, but it's like having a TV show and having two scenes, one being "I have hands and they can punch." And then later that episode "hey I have a meeting with joe". None then makes the jump "I'm going to punch joe" because the logic jump makes no sense
The ending chat with Zavala and Ikora confused me so much because I was wondering what exactly the witness did to the traveler. So when I talked to them they kept saying it was dead and gone I honestly thought I missed something and even went online to look up all the cutscenes in case I missed something. I just dont get how we are supposed to just assume because a portal opened and the witness went inside how everyone just assumes the traveler is dead especially since we still have our powers.
Yeah, I didn't mind the story myself, I'll take it over Shadowkeep, but that and the ending just... Why?
I knew we weren't gonna win cause of gotta save the big bad for the raid. But yeah, just a portal, the traveler is still there, still on our map, just with portal in front of it. Oh no.
The only thing I have seen/heard that backs up "the traveler being dead/gone" is that Ghost says it can't feel the traveler anymore.
Other than that I was thinking "but it's there, but now with a colorful triangle on one side".
Yup. I mean, the Traveler is still there… you can see it from HELM. Still in the skybox.
The Witness just opened the Travussy and went right inside right in front of everybody 😟
That was the biggest thing we were confused about when we did it. Zavalas first words to us are 'The Traveler is...gone" Um I'm pretty sure I flew past it on my way here Big Blue
Literally same thing I thought
REMINDER: Strand was supposed to be released in WQ, not Lightfall. The kitbashed feeling you all noticed with the lore is real.
It was?
@@cyd_hunter99 yeah, bungie mentioned it sometime ago, but they wanted to flesh it out more
yea a lof of the issues feel like they stem from just not enough time, maybe yearly expansions are to soon, personally hope Bungie learns that yearly release is to much and delays final shape, preferably a whole year
Yet it feels more integrated than stasis
Strand in witchqueen makes so much more sense if you replace deepsight with it. Especially since it’s supposed to be about the connections between everything. Every deepsight investigation could have had grapple points instead of floating platforms. The mission where we fight the scorn boss with pools of infinite super regen should have been an opportunity to showcase strand. “Threadcutter” it all makes sense in retrospect
I love that you told your heartfelt opinion, not to defend, not to appease Bungie as a studio, but I can tell as a true fan. You are a real fan and like a lot of us, absolutely love the world and lore along with the experience of gameplay, and that lore was not given the love it deserves by this release.
The best part of the campaign was the Strike where Nezarec shows up on comms.
My favourite part was Nezarec revealing he's a Batman fanboy.
yeah basically, my hopes were high for some loregasm moments like in WQ where we learned the hive were lied to.
But here, our biggest "loregasm" was that nazarec is still around, which many already assumed.
One of my problems with lightfall was that there wasnt really any hard hitting dialog that gave me chills. Forsaken (when i started playing) had our guardian's "Uldren Sov is mine", Shadowkeep had Eris' "Youre all insufferable", Beyond Light had Variks; entire speech at the end to Eramis, and Witch Queen had Ghosts "Id rather die than fight for the Hive". The closest Lightfall came to matching any of those for me was when Osiris tried to have Sagira help him out.
Not sure about you but the best season for me that they did was Season of the Splicer. So much stuff every week about the Eliksni and FWC. Vex and Quira plans amd actually getting to battle Quria.
"Infinite apologies" hit so hard. I got goosebumps just typing it. However, that was it.
@@theREALp1kles that scene hit pretty hard not gonna lie. Seeing Calus get humbled by the Witness made the witness feel scary.
But the rest was garbage.
Man, reading “Uldren Sov is mine”, just now, gave me goosebumps. That scene was beautiful in so many ways when we needed a hero. We were going to be “that guy”. Brilliant.
that part for me was Calus asking Caitl if she was "there to disappoint him again" during the third mission when she arrives to save you
Rohan felt like such a wasted opportunity for Osiris’s character development, making peace with the fact that he “doesn’t have any lives to spare” and leaning really hard into his mentorship role. I know thats kind of what he did in the campaign, but it feels like we didn’t really see that happening much at all
"What did the Witness just do? Did it destroy the Traveler?"
"No sir... but it certainly did something. "
I really thought Osiris was gonna take the place as the next cloud strider since he lost his ghost and struggles to find a use for himself. Would've been great to have a year long training and building up of Osiris to be a combination of strand power infused into a cloud strider and to have Rohan hand over his position before the final shape as his 10 years were up.
Thank god you don’t write the story that sounds like ass
Tall buff Osiris when?
My biggest problem with the training montage is how long does this take place? I got no sense of time from this...
this would have actually made alot of sense as well. especially when caital kinda took on saladin and gave him a place of power it would have been nice to see osiris in a sort of rehab after being uinder savathuuns power
i think Osiris' place is gonna remain The Strand Guy for now. like how Elsie is The Stasis Guy
Yeah I expected the city to be much bigger and more fleshed out instead of being this small block with small feeling areas tbh… (but that’s just my opinion)
we paid 60 dollars for a dlc that’s basically just beyond light, we got scammed
Same
@@CoC_Lord yup
They decided to introduce 2 cloud striders, no citizens instead they are digitized but why the need for a city then
I hope, by the end of Final Shape, the old Tower is repaired, to act as a hub of unity where the council of the Coalition of Sol can meet and discuss. This new location of the rebuilt original Tower, would sybolize the unity and acceptable of each other as a united force after having won the war. The council of the Coalition, and its representatives, including one for the City’s human citizens, would be a great replacement for the now disbanded Consensus. The City on Earth could be renamed, and would be rebuilt and used by all races/allies of the Coalition. Heck, the first season after Final Shape could involve a second Golden Age, rebuilding Sol with the aid of our combined resources and Neomuna’s nanotech speeding up the process of creating and rebuilding colonies for our allies. Leading up to an expansion in which Guardians and some Coalition allies travel beyond Sol to reclaim Torobatal from Xivu Arath. Heck, Rasputin could even return as a Warlock after two years, and kill Xivu as retribution.
When destiny 2 launched and the D1 tower was destroyed it actually felt like we lost something. Our hub was replaced and we had to earn our powers back. This just feels like "oh we lost? Uh sure, back to business as usual."
no for real, how the fuck did base game d2 have better stakes and consequences and better convey us losing the Light for a bit than a DLC literally called Lightfall?
This video was something I needed.
It's good to hear a notable public figure in the Destiny Lore say the exact same things I was complaining about with my group of friends. To see someone share my frustration and anger at all the missed opportunities that made up Lightfall. I came into this DLC excited for all the amazing, jaw-dropping revelations that would be revealed. My jaw did drop, but for all the wrong reasons. I was floored by how bad this story was. How almost nothing was explained. We almost get more information from post campaign PATROLS than we do from the cutscenes of the damn campaign itself!!
What hurts the most for me is the end. The Traveler has been the centerpiece of this story for ages and ages now. And now, it's "gone". Dead? Maybe, but maybe not, who knows? But there was no set up for this other than it leaving the city in Seraph, which, while a big emotional moment, wasn't enough. This was the time where we needed the Traveler to act with a clear motive, to do something that wasn't left to ambiguity. Something to make us feel a connection with it. Kind of like when Cayde died. We went on one last mission with him. This is what we needed with the Traveler and it wasn't given to us. Now the Traveler is "gone" and we didn't get a chance to say goodbye. The biggest mystery of the entire story, the one voice in the room we have heard almost nothing from, and they just throw it to the side while giving us no time with it or explanation of its motives or plans.
The only thing that gives me even a sliver of hope is that the Traveler is far too important for this to be the last time we hear from it. There are too many mysteries about this giant white ball that to leave it at that would be the most disappointing and absurd thing that Bungie could do, so I have to hope that they have plans in the future. But that means I have to have faith in the Devs, which, as was stated in this video, is now not something a lot of people are willing to do. It also means that I now, again, have to WAIT to get any of these answers while the Traveler yet again hovers somewhere and does absolutely nothing. But it's even WORSE now because now we don't even know if the damned thing is alive or not!
It's just so frustrating.
After seeing the way the devs described strand and then the witness cutting people into pieces in the space battle, it seemed as if the strand could’ve been a way to counteract the witnesses power and “pull yourself back together” if he tried slicing you apart, hope they go that direction with it later in the story
Its bungie bro tbh I'm getting tired of there inconsistent bs
That would make sense honestly, Good insight. With all these people losing their light, strand could keep you alive.
Oooooh I like that theory/idea! Wonder if it can still play out
@@whiteshadow2375 destiny was only ever given a pass because they made halo. They haven’t made a single good dlc/game since halo. I imagine it’s due to the employees of the time, are simply not the same ones who were working on destiny. Hell I bet the same people who made destiny weren’t even working for bungies during destiny 2s development.
With each passing mission, I was worried about the story, and my worries were accurate. It deeply saddened me to see the basics of storytelling fall. I can only hope that The Final Shape is a pristine 2nd half and final act to make up for it
When byf said “so we lost, and what” I didn’t realized how insignificant that means to us now. Nothing truly happened to the game or guardian; I’m playing as if nothing has changed (also aren’t we supposed to be in a war? Cause all I’ve seen is just ships flying around, nothing is damaged and people aren’t panicked), the mood and atmosphere is more happy then when cayde died
Yeah. The Traveler is “gone”, but is still in the skybox at the HELM and we still have the Light and we’re all still alive and well, so… what gives? Nothing happened. Nothing has changed. They gave us Strand and then neutered our power fantasy with the new armor charge system that benefits people that didn’t build craft in the first place 🤷♂️
Definitely agreed. For this to be the penultimate chapter of the sage, I’m so deeply disappointed and infuriated. Especially coming off of Witch Queen. When they announced these expansions like they did, I thought they had a clear vision of the story and how they’d wrap things up. The campaign also felt choppy like they cut out story bits for time, but they were like very important bits?
Yeah when Rohan died I didn't even blink, saw it coming a mile away which really sucked. I found myself sighing whenever anything happened. Like the scene with the witness getting angry at callus my only thought was "wow doesn't take much to make the god of darkness lash out like a child" dude portrays himself as this calm collected powerful being that you can't resist, then callus comes along and complains a little bit when the witness tells him he failed and the witness goes nuclear in a second. Idk I just thought he was more of a cold calculating never loses kind of guy and now I'm sad.
100% the "alien" aspect of him is completely gone. Now all I see is a reverse emo with a massive ocd issue
When I saw Rohan die, I just busted out in laughter, like was I supposed to care about him? I literally just met him a couple hours ago
@@nicktator222 lmao same especially when the sad music started playing
I was in Discord with a friend as he was playing the first mission. The second he saw Rohan, he said "That guy's gonna die". Literally the first time you see him on screen.
Are you kidding? The Witness only shouted "Enough", that's hardly a 'lashing out' or 'going nuclear'. Calus was treading on thin ice, displaying insubordination towards his leader and just about ready to outright insult one of the most powerful beings in the universe, OF COURSE he's going to get told! It was a moment which served to remind us that though the Witness presents itself as calm and collected, it has immense power. Heck, just its shout alone LITERALLY SHATTERED REALITY, caused Calus' head to bleed and broke time itself. This scene was awesome and not only was it a stark reminder of the power of our foe, but also showed us that Calus, despite having been given everything he ever wanted, was still not content, and that he never would be. It indicates that had we continued to foil his plans without direct intervention, he and the Witness would likely have had an internal power struggle.
"If you were trying to set up a big mystery, we need to know it was a mystery in the first place" - I think that's the best summary of the campaign. There are some legitimately cool, weird, mysterious moments - so why is no other character acting confused like I think they should be about the veil, etc.?
I feel like the expansion really could of been fixed with like two or three cutscenes just explaining wtf the veil is. One at the beginning, before the space battle, of the traveller attempting to contacting us in our dreams before we are startled awake as the battle begins. Then midway through the campaign as we deal with strand we meditate at the pouka pond and it tries to contact us again in our meditation, and a final cutscenes a couple missions later where the traveller explains the gardener/winnower story from it's POV, and how strand and the Vale both fit into that story.
I absolutely agree!
Bungie bunch of old heads with no imgagination
They already have too many cutscenes, its like 3x that of witch queen
This pretty well explains my experience. super fun to play, much like witch queen was. but this time i got no clue whats going on in the story sense, the veil reminds me of the black heart from vanilla d1. Osiris being all rushy has "No time to explain why i dont have time to explain" energy stretched through the whole campaign.