Played on PS5
Playtime: 30 Hours
No Spoilers

Another Destiny 2 Expansion
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is the latest expansion of Destiny 2, a live service FPS game that is also free to play. It's being developed by Bungie and published by Bungie as well, though Sony bought them so not sure if that's changed.

Witch Queen got pretty good reviews and became the favourite expansion of many people. Unfortunately, i think it's not that good. It's good, don't get me wrong. But almost all of Destiny 2's expansions are good. Anyway, let's start with the story.

The God of Deception, The Witch Queen herself, Savathûn is back. The interesting thing is that she has light powers. As well as some of her Hive. In order to understand how she got the Light, our guardians will have to work with Ikora Rey and her Hidden.

The story, is the best thing about the Expansion. It has 8 main missions.(and a strike which is required to finish the main story) The problem is that all the story developments happens at the last 2 missions.

The developments that happen are interesting. Especially about Savathûn. One of the mottos for the expansion was "Survive the Truth". It definitely delivers on that motto. When you learn the truth, it's really really hard to survive it.

Unfortunately while Savathûn has some plot twists about her, she is still not a good villain. I know her story, i know about the Osmium Dynasty and the Fundament and all that stuff. I follow the lore. But that does not mean that she is a good villain.

She shows up for like 20 minutes in the campaign and because of that, we don't get to see any character depth or growth or development. It's just some plot twists that are shocking for sure, but they are just that. Shocking.

Other characters also doesn't have much development. Ikora Rey, Eris Morn and Zavala has an interesting dynamic, again towards the end of the campaign. But the story never focuses on that. Just like all Destiny 2 campaigns. Good ideas, bad execution.

So the story is good with some shocking plot twists but characters are not that good. Let's talk about the gameplay. Destiny expansions always has 2 gameplay styles. Shooting and exploration/platforming.

Let's talk about the more important thing first. Shooting. Destiny 2 always had great gunplay. And it's still great. There are some nice new exotics, i really liked the exotic SMG that you can craft.

Speaking of crafting, yes. Witch Queen adds weapon crafting. It works fine though it's a little weird. When you first create a new weapon, it is Level 1. You need to play with it to level up the weapon and unlock more perks. Once you unlock more perks, you can reshape the weapon to add those newly unlocked better perks.

But in order to put on those perks, you need a new currency. And you can earn these currencies by killing enemies with other weapons. They have a red square around them so that you know these will give you that currency.

This is ridiculous. You need to play with the weapon you want to upgrade, that is fine. But you also need to play with other random weapons so that you can add those upgrades to the weapon. Weapon crafting will get a rework, but we don't know when.

There is also a new weapon type. Glaives. These will shoot projections for ranged damage but they can also do a strong melee attack even if you don't have any ammo on the weapon. Glaive is a very good weapon type that i go back to regularly. It's a great addition to the game.

The story has 8 main missions like i said, they are all good but we need to talk about the Legendary Campaign. In Witch Queen, for the first time in Destiny 2, i know difficulty was a thing in Destiny 1 but it's new for Destiny 2. Yes, you can select a difficulty this time and you have 2 options.

Classic and Legendary. There are lots of praise for the Legendary campaign. As a solo player who completed the campaign on Legendary, i hated it. In Destiny, i am a guardian and i want to feel like one. I'm not saying the game should be easy and everything should die in one shot, no. But i shouldn't die in one shot either.

Legendary Solo experience was painful. I was mostly sitting in cover, trying to pick and choose targets and it was like, i was shooting for 5 seconds, waiting in the cover for health regen for 15 minutes. It was ridiculous.

I don't know the Co-Op experience, but as a solo player, i don't recommend it to any other solo player. It was difficult in a bad way. It was frustrating. It took away from my experience, for sure. Let's talk a bit about the exploration/platforming.

There are some puzzles in the campaign. Nothing too interesting or hard. But it adds a nice variety to the gameplay. Platforming too. It's not hard but it adds a nice variety.

We have a new open world area. Savathûn's Throne World. It's nothing mind blowing. It looks good, has some interesting architecture. I really liked the new lightbearer hive enemies. They are really cool and smashing their ghost is a fantastic addition.

Music is great as always and on PS5, the game runs beautifully. To be honest, the graphics starts to feel a bit dated but it still doesn't look bad.

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen isn't a bad Expansion. It has a good story, a new nice location, fantastic new enemies, great music and i forgot to mention but there are things to do after the main story ends. I spend around 30 hours before starting Season of the Risen. Doing the main mission chain as well as some of the side ones.

But just like all other expansions, it has some problems too. Mainly about the characters, especially the villain. I still recommend it of course because i liked it. But it's not amazing. And it's definitely not "The Best Expansion of Destiny".

Too much to write about so I'll have to come back later, but damn was this expansion great! Easily my favorite one of the series. A campaign worthy enough to pick up this DLC alone. Bungie's narrative is working in full force, really loving how this game has almost turned into a television series where each week I can log in to discover interesting and engaging narrative story arcs. Fun seasonal activities, a spectacular raid, 2 moody and immersive dungeons, the return of the King, and some stellar loot!

Also damn did that season finale hit HARD. Stoked for Lightfall!

perhaps the best destiny expansion to date. bungie absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one, and i fully expect them to do it again with lightfall. a compelling story (albeit a little predictable), and a fanTASTIC campaign (which is finally replayable!!!). the raid and exotics that came with it were fun, and all of the side content was fun to chase (save the exotic glaives). only gripe would be that the throne world, as a patrol zone, is a little boring, but i imagine changes might come to patrol zones soon.

as for the following seasons, two of them were good and two of them were.... less than good. a lot of 'seasonal fatigue' came about this year of destiny, with a lot of the content being extremely predictable in terms of gameplay and systems. still far from destiny's worst, as the story was still fantastic through the seasons (except maybe haunted), but gameplay wise it definitely got a bit older than previous years of destiny. the light subclass upgrades were easily the highlight of the seasonal content drops, as well as the two dungeons.

bungie seems to be taking feedback as far as seasonal stuff goes, so i imagine lightfall and the following seasons will be just as good, if not better than what witch queen brought to the table.

This game gets WAY too much hate, maybe more hate than League of Legends. This game taught me that shooting things till they explode makes left clicking for 30 minutes fun! This game also taught me that i hate myself and am kinda a masochist for going through the same grind for 1 little level every week. PvP is ass and i hate it. Thats why i play it everyday. I have to make sure everyone hates it as much as me. I shoot the fire gun. The gun is made of pure fire. Shoots a solar flare. SO COOL. I am a space wizard. This DLC had some jawdropping set pieces and introduce legitimate magic for our characters to pull objects out of time into our own. Thats cool to me. The new difficulty actually makes it fun instead of killing everything in one second and running for the remaining minute.