Destiny 2: Shadowkeep

Hopes to fill Bungie’s shooter with life.

You’ll fight your way to an arena and kill a big Wizard and then run away very fast..

It was a mistake to refer to Destiny 2 and its ilk as ‘games-as-a-service’. ‘Service’ implies consistency and a smooth user experience. Destiny 2 is something else. Destiny 2 is games-asan-infrastructure – a subway system that gradually builds into something bigger and more sprawling; that needs to be constantly maintained; that will sometimes keep you waiting because such projects are complicated and the people running them can’t do everything at once.

With Shadowkeep, Bungie is redrawing the map. The expansion adds a revitalised tourist destination – the Moon, returning from the first Destiny with a handful of new attractions and a fresh coat of paint – but also spearheads a more fundamental shift in purpose.

Players return to the Moon in search of series regular Eris Morn, the Destiny character voted most likely to keep a LiveJournal. Shadowkeep’s campaign manages to highlight both the best and worst of Bungie’s storytelling. The specific objectives are tiresomely monologued by Eris before you head out; the mystical technobabble ensuring I rarely ever know what I’m actually doing. The broad strokes are that you need to forge a new, special armour set, but the delivery is rendered obtuse thanks to the density of arcane Hive rituals and mystical MacGuffins.

And yet! On a wider level it’s a triumph, thanks to an overarching threat that feels grand in both its menace and in the way Bungie has seeded it throughout the last two years of the game. As someone who’s read my fair share of Destiny lore collectibles, coming face to face with the thing that hides beneath the Moon felt dramatic and shocking. “Oh shit, I have to deal with one of those?” I felt unprepared, which speaks to how successfully Bungie has teased the Destiny universe’s larger antagonist.

As a collection of missions, Shadowkeep’s campaign is largely business as usual. You’ll fight your way to an arena and kill a big Ogre. You’ll fight your way to an arena and kill a big Captain. You’ll fight your way to an arena and kill a big Wizard and then run away very fast.

The campaign’s ending may be abrupt, but, as always, the expansion’s story is more of a tease of things to come – some of it through the next year of seasonal releases, the rest likely further out still. In the meantime the familiar and steady rhythm of Destiny 2 resumes after players have hit the relatively easyto-reach soft power cap of 900. The slower journey to the hard cap of 950 may have been remixed, but the notes are largely the same – relying on the weekly drops of powerful gear from three-player Strike missions, Crucible PvP matches, the still-brilliant competitive PvE of Gambit, and the new raid, which challenges players with a series of puzzle-like encounters among the Vex-infested greenery of the Black Garden.

POWER UP

There’s a renewed focus on bounties now, with each vendor offering a powerful reward if you complete a set number within a week. Thanks to the XP awards now granted by bounties, which award progress along a season pass full of goodies as well as powering up the new seasonal artefact, the steady tick of treats keeps things moving at a nice pace. That said, I’d love a central bounty board that collected them all up for easy access.

As for specific additions and changes, yes, there’s a new Nightfall variant – The Ordeal, which has curated modifiers that increase in number as you up the difficulty. Yes, the Crucible playlists have been retooled, giving players more control over what mode they play (and letting you earn Glory score without ever having to suffer through a round of Countdown). And yes there are new Strikes and a couple of Crucible maps from the first game that make their PC debut. But there’s also a lot of repeating the same things that we’ve been doing for over a year. You will run the Pyramidion strike and earn a Ten Paces. You will play a Control match on Vostok and be rewarded with a Does Not Compute.

The lack of new world or vendor loot isn’t a surprise – if Destiny 2 game director Luke Smith’s essay on the state of the game pre-Shadowkeep had a single throughline, it was the limitations of what a development team can reasonably produce. Nevertheless I was surprised how much being awarded the same old guns hurt my excitement for the year ahead.

GENEROUS

Where Shadowkeep was billed as a bold new template for the third year, the reality is messier. Nowhere is this more clear than for ‘New Light’, the new user experience that puts the emphasis on repeatable activities and playing with friends. It’s great in theory: certainly the amount of stuff you get for the newly free-to-play base game is incredibly generous. But it also does a bad job of onboarding new players. After a short introductory mission, you arrive at the Tower only to be inundated with quests. It’s confusing and unhelpful, to the point where I’ve had a couple of friends who are trying out the game ask me how you even find the campaigns.

To be clear, Destiny 2 is still an engaging shooter that – when you step back and take stock of all that it has to offer – is absolutely packed full of stuff to do. Shadowkeep is both an entertaining assortment of new activities and a solid base from which the game at large can build and improve. But Shadowkeep also doesn’t feel like Destiny 2’s final form, and there’s a real sense that there’s still much left to be tweaked and tightened. PHIL SAVAGE