[MW]: Well, let’s look at the Fallen. In our Age of Triumph Grimoire Cards, we’ve taken the time to advance their story and key into the current state of the faction. The Fallen have completely lose their house structure. The idea of the Kells and the different houses are gone now, and they’re just a broken people. Some of them have gathered together in the EDZ, and others are roaming the solar system. We’re able to really progress their story following the events of the previous games and expansions. Then we have the contextualized dialogue system to hint back to what you’ve done to them in the past.
Curse of Osiris begins after the events of Destiny 2 Void Hunter 2. The mysterious Warlock Osiris has vanished, and a new Vex threat has surfaced on Mercury. Pushed by Ikora Rey to investigate, you and your Ghost set your sights on the planet closest to the Sun in the hopes of saving Osiris and defeating this new threat. The Vex have always been the most interesting of Destiny’s five alien species. Unlike the others, we don’t know what motivates them to convert planets and who their allegiance belongs too. Likewise, the character of Osiris has been hyped up over the past three years through the Grimoire and Brother Vance, which means that there should be an interesting story here. Unfortunately, there isn’t. In fact, Curse of Osiris’ storytelling is a regression back to Vanilla Destiny.
There are a total of eight maps (nine if you’re playing on PS4), and five game modes. Supremacy, Clash, and Control are part of the Quickplay option, and new modes Countdown and Survival are part of Competitive. Unfortunately, there is no option to select the game mode you want once you select Quickplay or Competitive. If you really want to play Control, you have to hope that the game’s matchmaking doesn’t randomly throw you into Supremacy or Clash.
On paper, The Infinite Forest sounds like a fascinating concept. Bringing in procedurally-generated dungeons would be an exciting way to invigorate the endgame like with Bloodborne’s Chalice dungeons. Sadly, even this concept is ruined thanks to asinine levels of repetition. All the Infinite Forest is is just a linear set of platforms populated with generic enemies players have been fighting for the past three years. The sad thing is, there’s not much of a challenge here. It’s possible just to skip the enemies and head towards the door. On occasion you do need to kill an enemy to unlock the door, you can accomplish it by just hanging near the last platform and shooting them from afar.
It’s still too early to say Destiny 2 is going to be the dream game we all wanted when it was first announced in 2013, but based on what we played, Bungie is on the right track. We’re finally getting that cinematic, set piece filled campaign that was mysteriously missing. Strikes are going to put players in big environments and have them do more than just shoot bullet sponge enemies. There are new modes to play, worlds to see and characters to interact with. Destiny 2 may just be the game Destiny was always meant to be.
[JH]: Like any good story, it’s going to live or die based off the depth and reliability of your villain. We put a lot of hours into developing Ghaul. At first, yeah, he seems like a guy who just wants to kick us in the balls and move on down the road after taking Earth.
For all that can be said about Curse of Osiris’ disappointing content, it can’t be denied that Mercury is a beautiful place to visit. The Vex architecture that litters the landscape is as fascinating to take in as ever, and the brief glimpses at Mercury before its transformation are astounding. If only we had more space and time to play around in these fascinating playgrounds.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the content Curse of Osiris provides isn’t top quality. Mercury doesn’t offer the space or sense of wonder other areas provide to make it a worthwhile social space or area to explore. The Lighthouse, the new social space, is way smaller than it was in the original Destiny, and it only contains one vendor to interact with. Meanwhile, the open area of Mercury is just a tiny circle, so tiny in fact that Sparrows are disabled to give the illusion it’s bigger than it really is. On Mercury, you’ll find one public event, three adventures, and one Lost Sector. For a planet that has been teased since the initial release of Destiny, it’s appearance in Destiny 2 is underwhelming.
Destiny 2 looks substantially better than the original game. Models and textures are more detailed, the worlds are bigger and more varied and the cinematics are top notch CG. It’s shaping up to be a stunning package on PS4 and PC. While the PS4 build we played was running on PS4 Pro, it wasn’t easy to discern any upgrades due to the size of the screen we played on. PC players, on the other hand, are in for a real treat. On PC, we did notice that pop-in was far less severe and it was nice finally getting to play Destiny at 60 frames-per-second. Unfortunately, the console version still runs at 30 frames-per-second.
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