[Matthew Ward]: We had the opportunity to spend time building him up in that he’s not just a bad guy. In his world, he’s the good guy with a purpose. There’s something that’s deeper to him. We wanted to make sure our antagonist wasn’t just a cliché.
[JH]: So, that’s kind of outside the scope of where we have our involvement. We’re super dedicated to story, and the high-level development decisions based on classes or specializations happen amongst other teams. We try our best to have a good narrative wrapper around that decision-making. Our involvement in the PvP is to develop a strong character in Lord Shaxx.
All activities in Destiny 2 can be played cooperatively, but the real test of a Fireteam’s comradery comes in Strikes, which Destiny 2 provides plenty of. There are five Strikes in Destiny 2, and each is meticulously crafted to test a Fireteam. They’re far more exciting than the Strikes in vanilla Destiny and dole out some quality loot. Those looking for a challenge and some of the top-of-the-line loot will want to try the Nightfall, however, which is unlocked later in the game.
The Last City isn’t the only thing out there. One of my first memories of Destiny is one of the story missions, the name of which escapes me at the moment. In this particular mission, after activating some beacons, your Ghost makes the comment of things deeper out in the universe, things unseen and ancient. While this may have been a reference to Crota at the time or even Oryx, it still felt as if Bungie was hinting at a lot up its sleeve. When really digging into the Destiny Grimoire or even just playing the game, it’s obvious humans expanded across the stars at rapid pace. Destiny 2 is following in suit, with the three new locations Titan, Nessas and Io they couldn’t be digging the heels more into lore. These are spaces that will show off how humanity took control of their…Destiny 2 news. The Traveler brought with it the Golden Age and Destiny 2 seems to want to show just what that means.
Seeing as so many Destiny players invested time and money into The Taken King and Rise of Iron, it’s understandable that they’d want to see some of that content return. Luckily, The Taken King is well represented in Destiny 2. Rise of Iron? Not so much.
[JH]: We have lots of contextualized moments in target locations where there are moments that, when you go back and play with your returning character, you get a series of lines that will acknowledge the experiences you’ve had. When we tackle the story, one of the challenges we had was about how serialized we wanted to be. We want to bring new fans into this franchise, but in doing so we need to make it accessible. So, the experience of a new player in this sequence is to introduce the Taken as if you’d never heard of them before. We wanted to make sure a new player got who they were without being bogged down with too much lore. For a returning player, however, you’re going to see it’s pretty different.It’s great that open areas finally have a good reason to explore, but finding Lost Sectors can be a bit too easy to find. They’re clearly marked in the world and are even marked on the in-game map. Once the marker is found, the entrance is, typically, right around the corner. Light exploration is a step-up from Destiny’s lack of exploration, but there should be more challenging Lost Sectors that require some sleuthing to find.
The European Dead Zone is the most impressive open area Destiny has ever had. It’s expansive, beautiful to travel through, and filled with entertaining activities like Public Events and Adventures. Unfortunately, Patrols remain basic, and Devrim Kay doesn’t entirely solve the traveling back and forth between open areas and social space problem. Still, the EDZ is a massive improvement over what came before, and hopefully, the rest of the open areas can deliver a similar experience to the EDZ.
In Destiny, players would drop into the world and be the sole occupants in the world, asides from the infinitely respawning enemies. Destiny 2 changes this by adding NPCs to the open areas. In the EDZ that character is Devrim Kay, a suave sniper who resides in an abandoned church.
The most exciting thing by far is the fact that all the Raids are back. Updated Raids matching appropriately the light level of Guardians and its fair because it’s not even the max light level of 400, it’s 390. This ensures that more people will get to experience the Raids, instead of just the top tier level players. Besides having free reign on all Raids and smashing in some old baddies’ faces, the updated Raids come with something even more worthwhile: the coolest armor to ever come out of Destiny. While I haven’t been the biggest fan of some of the armor choices made by Bungie, whoever thought of this totally revamped package of all armor was a genius. Seeing the new Raid armor was enough to sell me on Age of Triumph — Vault of Glass aside. It just looks so space-magic, and isn’t that what it’s all about?