I Got An Early Look At ‘Destiny 2: Lightfall,’ Here’s What I Saw

A week ago, I was invited by Bungie to take an early look at Lightfall, Destiny 2’s newest expansion launching in two weeks, along with some other journalists and creators. This had a few different parts, a hands-off preview of the opening Lightfall campaign mission, an early look at the Vidoc, which just released todayand then a short Q and A session about lingering questions we had. Bungie made available a host of team members to answer questions, including Destiny 2 director Joe Blackburn.

To start with the Vidoc that was just released, everyone can now see that while well-produced, it didn’t feature very much new information. New footage, perhaps, but not all that much to make news. However, it’s pretty obvious why that is, because Bungie dumped loads of Lightfall information out months ago, including its biggest features like Loadouts, a Guardian Rank system and Commendations. We already know details about Strand, new exotics, sandbox changes, crafting changes, and at this point no stone is unturned except the things Bungie wants to keep ultra-secret like campaign story spoilers and the raid. The biggest reveals were probably about Season of Defiance, where in addition to Mara, we know that Crow, Amanda Holliday and even Devrim Kay are part of that storyline.

In the past, a Vidoc may have been the thing to reveal the stuff they’ve already talked about this time around. Though Bungie also does not appear to be ready to reveal anything after The Final Shape, as they’ve done with multi-expansion Vidoc reveals in the past.

The hands-off demo of Lightfall was…a little strange. This isn’t to say that I don’t think Lightfall itself won’t prove to be good based on everything we know, but the way this demo was conducted was kind of odd. The player starts without Strand as the campaign begins, obviously, but in the demo the tester was running a dual primary loadout of old weapons and no exotics. Eventually, you reach a point where you do in fact get “early access” to Strand and its powers as a temporary unlock, but the bulk of this part was mostly the Hunter supering over and over again to clear enemies. The sound design was cool! But yeah, it was strange. It seems like this would have been a good chance to show off something like a full Strand build in action in tougher content with new gear and all the mods in the new loadout system, but it wasn’t anything like that.

As for Neomuna itself, we got to see it both in the mission and in patrol mode. Both times it felt a little bit…empty, though that may have been situational. The first zone is a non-combat area like the Exo Stranger’s base camp, so there weren’t enemies there at baseline. Then another area there was some sort of big public event going on that seems to be this zone’s Escalation Protocol or Altars of Sorrow. That may well be very cool, but we didn’t see that mode actually played, and as such, it seemed to siphon away enemies from the rest of the zone making it pretty empty. Simply put, all of this just didn’t seem like the best way to show off Neomuna, Strand, all of it, even if those things will likely be engaging in the live game, if I had to bet.

Some positives outside of the above include the Cloudstriders who are freaking enormouslike ten feet tall, towering over Osiris in cutscenes and eye-to-eye with Tormentors. Nimbus has a hoverboard and seems like a lot of fun. There are other citizens of Neomuna still living in the city but they appear as holograms floating around? This wasn’t fully explained. You could hear a wartime news broadcast playing sometimes during patrol. Getting a “London being bombed during WWII but make it Cyberpunk” vibe to the whole situation. The campaign segment ended with a cutscene between The Witness and Calus that Bungie actually stopped midway through to avoid revealing…something.

A couple new things about Neomuna were revealed in the Q and A session. Neomuna is supposed to be on par in size with Europa or the Throne World. It has three main enemy hub areas like both of those two, and only a single fast travel point I could see. But it was hard to get a sense of the true size as obviously there are lots of places you can go outside of the open patrol map spaces in all these zones. But expect it to be on par with the last two expansions. No word on how many strikes Neomuna might contain.

I got Joe Blackburn to talk a little bit about why the Vex were there, as I noted that they really had not come up in any explanation about the storyline of Lightfall at all. It turns out they are not just support troops for the Witness invasion that arrived with the Cabal, but the Vex actually discovered Neomuna ages ago, and the colony has been fighting them ever since. It’s why the Cloudstriders were created in the first place, to lead the fight against the Vex. We will be doing stuff in the Vex Network to learn more about that, as that space has been shown in previews.

Finally, Joe said that there are different tiers of Tormentors. Without going into too much detail, he gave an example of one that you may be able to freeze with Stasis, but another that would be more powerful that would shrug something like that off. It seemed to be a bit more involved than just orange bar-yellow bar-boss progression, but we didn’t get to see any of them in action outside of a cutscene. Guessing Bungie wants to save the first Tormentor showdown as a big campaign moment.

So, in the end, I did come away from all this a touch underwhelmed. But I can also explain away why that is in the same breath. The Vidoc wasn’t mindblowing because Bungie has been pretty great about communication for months now about the expansion, and there just isn’t that much left to say before it’s in hand. And though the demo was weird and made Neomuna look kind of empty and didn’t really showcase Strand very well, I still believe it’s going to be an interesting zone and Strand will be fun to play. I just don’t think this was the right sort of demo to prove that.

My excitement has not waned for Lightfall, especially after this week’s season finale now, but at this point, yeah, I don’t think there’s a ton left to say, and we really just need to play it.

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