Destiny 2: Lightfall

I've put enough Tuesday nights into Destiny 2 raids to know exactly what a filler expansion feels like, and Lightfall is one of the most textbook examples the franchise has produced. The story that was supposed to mark the beginning of the end, the Witness arriving, the Traveller under siege, the weight of a decade of lore finally pressing down, instead retreats to Neptune's neon-soaked city of Neomuna and gets distracted by a MacGuffin called the Veil that nobody bothers to explain. Characters talk at you to deliver plot points rather than having actual conversations. The two new Cloud Striders introduced to carry the narrative feel like they were designed for a lighter-stakes spin-off, not the penultimate chapter of a saga. For a franchise that spent The Witch Queen proving it could write a genuinely compelling villain with Savathun, Lightfall's campaign is a painful regression. The new Strand subclass is the one place where Lightfall earns real goodwill, and even there the delivery is bungled before it gets good. During the campaign itself, Strand is drip-fed in brief, neutered bursts, you grapple around for a few minutes, then get your power stripped away. Full access to Aspects and Fragments only unlocks post-campaign, and even then the initial two-Aspect limit felt stifling at launch compared to the three or four Aspects other subclasses enjoy. Bungie took so much heat that they released all Strand Fragments ahead of schedule within the first week, which tells you everything about how the launch landed. Stick with it long enough to fully kit out a build, though, and the grapple mechanic genuinely opens up Destiny's verticality in ways the game hasn't felt in years. Warlocks running Threadlings, Hunters suspending entire rooms of enemies, when Strand finally clicks, it clicks hard. On the systems side, Lightfall does deliver. The new loadout slots are a genuinely overdue quality-of-life addition: swapping between a boss-DPS build and a champion-clearing setup mid-activity no longer requires three minutes of menu archaeology. The simplified armor mod system and the single-page mod view make buildcrafting approachable without gutting depth. Guardian Ranks replace the old Triumph system and give newer players a clearer progression path. These are the kinds of structural repairs that keep a live-service game from collapsing under its own weight, and they matter. The Root of Nightmares raid, set aboard a Pyramid ship, teaches its light-and-dark mechanics patiently and rewards coordinated fireteams, though critics and raiders broadly agreed it skews easier than Destiny's best raid work, which may disappoint your Tuesday night hardcore crew. Here is the core tension for anyone deciding whether to spend on Lightfall right now: if you are a long-term Destiny 2 player, the seasonal cadence, starting with Season of Defiance, carries more of the actual story weight than the expansion campaign itself. Bungie essentially admitted as much, promising that the questions raised by Lightfall's campaign would be answered across the year's seasonal drops. That is a seasonal model used as a substitute for a complete narrative, not a supplement to one. I have seen live-service games do this and never deliver on the promise. Anthem. Anthem Legacy Edition. The model is not new and the track record is not encouraging. If you are a returning or new player, the campaign will leave you more confused than invested. Veteran Guardians with an active guild and a raid team to carry them into endgame will find Strand buildcrafting and the post-launch seasonal content genuinely worthwhile, but the expansion itself is better understood as a QoL patch with a Strand tutorial stapled to a shaky story. Yuki, Scout Team