 Hey everyone, it's been a bit since my last videos I've been unwinding from the news and playing a ton of games at once for the first time in a while I actually want to do a video on all of these games I'm gonna do one video that talked about both AC Valhalla and Watch Dogs Legion I'm gonna do a video on Godfall and why it's actually a pretty good game That's probably overpriced and I'll do a video on the really excellent Miles Morales game on ps4 because we're living through an insane example of a manufactured scare city for the ps5 that's being bought by bots Sucks I'll probably do a really quick five-minute rant on that too But first I want to talk about destiny 2's expansion beyond light I finished the campaign on two characters and got almost everything else done on my hunter I got some things to say about this expansion. There's some good stuff, of course, but mostly what I'm feeling is disappointed beyond light after the logo Beyond Shadowkeep Bungie has had a consistent schedule to its content release Every year we get a significant expansion These have alternated in size from the huge and great Taken King and Forsaken to the smaller Rise of Iron and Shadowkeep Even accounting for Bungie now being self-published I think most players expected beyond light to be closer to Taken King and Forsaken Bungie's other comic-sized expansions Even when Luke Smith said that beyond light was smaller than Forsaken I wasn't too worried because Forsaken was a tremendous value that was full of great stuff including two new zones new subclasses an entirely new enemy type and a surprisingly beefy campaign as well as Continuing post-campaign rotation of missions and activities. It was great man. Last year my review of the fall expansion was titled something like Shadowkeep meh Now Shadowkeep had a bunch of good things in it But it ended up being underwhelming because the story was just garbage and the campaign was very short It ended up feeling worse than Rise of Iron because the raid wasn't as good The new zone was just an old zone and the weapons were underwhelming The seasonal activity was too easy and boring. The Ultras of Sorrow was kind of fun But not as good as the Iron Forge and once again was just plopped into the patrol zone So usually had to sit there waiting to get it done Still when it came to value The expansion at least felt like the bare minimum that was required to not make you feel like you'd wasted your money I didn't love it, but I didn't think it was terrible. It was fine. That's not how I feel with beyond light Far from being similar to taking King or Forsaken beyond light is a lesser value than Rise of Iron or even Shadowkeep For a variety of reasons. Let's start with the most important I Paid to Lose Every DLC or expansion in Destiny's history has seen the game grow larger Whether the expansion was great or curse of Osiris at the very least when you logged in on launch Tuesday You knew that there was now more stuff in the game than there was on Monday We're now in a brave new world where you get to pay bungee for the right to have stuff You've already bought deleted or made useless So cool beyond light deletes planets strikes maps raids raid layers Modes and makes the vast majority of our weapons and armor useless everywhere except patrol and Regular crucible which is currently unplayable But we'll get to that later and what we get in return is less content than we got with our purchase of Shadowkeep a Huge part of this is the fact that the first season of year three was included in the cost of Shadowkeep But is not with beyond light. So the seasonal activity costs extra this time But it goes beyond that we lost seven strikes and got one back plus a higher resolution version of Omnigul We lost four planets and got back Europa and part but strangely not all of the Cosmodrome We lost some of the game's best strikes in this deal We lost five raids Including one that's actually on earth. So had no actual reason to be deleted and we're getting back one I literally paid for a net loss of content. There's no way to feel good about that When it comes to the sunsetting of weapons It is now clear that bungee's plan was fucking terrible as anyone who's been playing since day one would have expected Instead of just making all weapons either useful or not You now have to look at each of your drops and figure out how long it will be useful Strangely the game is still dropping shit that will be pointless in like two months Half the shit I'm getting won't be usable by February. That feels bad Three-quarters of the armor drops are pointless now and to replace that mountain of shit that is now useless We got like five weapons all of which are bad Three-quarters of the armor drops are pointless now in exchange There's one Vendor set that is shared across all of the vendors but has a different shader on it Vanguard and crucible armor is basically the exact same set This is shockingly lazy and it feels shitty Even if the campaign was amazing the subclass Incredible the weapons fantastic and the new strike the best ever It would still be a fact that I paid $50 for the right to have less game today than I did before I paid $50 and unfortunately none of the new stuff is incredible the campaign Destiny's campaigns have been a mixed bag Generally the encounters have been pretty good and the stories pretty bad Taken King and Forsaken are considered good, but in reality, they were both minimally competent stories They only look good in comparison because many of the others were barely comprehensible gibberish Beyond lights campaign is not gibberish, but it is very far from good Normally this doesn't really bother me because I had kind of given up hope on Destiny's in-game story But this time it did annoy me because the elements for a great story are all actually present this time It's just totally botched in writing and cutscene direction I was commenting in some reddit threads about this earlier in the week because I saw a bunch of people saying the campaign story was great That is insane. It's not great. In fact, it's downright bad Let's talk about the issues with the story of the campaign before talking about the more complicated issues around the encounter and mission design For four years Destiny has been sitting on a really cool universe With amazing lore but has never been able to get any of the most interesting aspects into the actual in-game story It's been just a never-ending series of bad guys who appear Do bad guy things for some reason and then get killed by us with ridiculous ease It's very hard to tell an interesting story if we need to kill the main antagonist within four hours of gameplay every single time Worse the actual roster of big bads has ranged from terrible to decent In the first campaign the big bad ends up being a couple of huge faceless minotaurs protecting a blob Then we had Crota who was a decent villain but barely appeared in the campaign at all Skolas was a huge step up because he existed in the actual campaign His motives made sense and we actually beat him in the end game not in some piss easy campaign mission Oryx was good Rise of Irons big bad was Nanobots and then a raid boss who came out of nowhere with no explanation at all outside of the grimoire cards Destiny 2 had gall who was just hilariously stupid And Then a nameless Vex Hydra Then a big worm god which had been amazingly built up in the lore for a couple of years But has no reason whatsoever to be on Mars It appears in a mission and is instantly blown up by us a mission later Kind of ruining the whole thing retroactively that was worse than a bad story It was a bad story that went backwards and made the lore bad Forsaken was good because we had got at least some description of the barons Aldrin was someone who didn't appear out of nowhere and the story had quite a bit going on It wasn't great, but it was good Shadowkeep had no villain at all and literally nothing happens. The campaign can be summarized as Aris does something on the moon Ghosts appear you kill them a pyramid shows up So in all these years you've gotten stuff that was amongst the very worst storytelling that is humanly possible at the worst And a below-average WB show at the best that low-end story in the campaigns of destiny haven't just been bad They've been so shockingly incompetent that I eventually arrived at the conclusion. They had to be this bad on purpose They're so terrible It would be impossible for any professional writer to fail to realize just what absolute garbage they had just written My theory was that Bungie had no respect for the audience and assumes They were all too stupid to follow anything other than a villain of the weak tale This was seemingly confirmed by how uniformly excellent the lore always is I mean the lore is like top-notch sci-fi and the in-game stories are poorly directed Roland Emmerich films One would assume if Bungie was paying writers to make that lore it couldn't be an accident that the stories were so bad It's the same company doing both so any theory on the quality has to deal with that Bungie was writing these stories to be purposefully simple so the dumbest person in the world could follow along Even when they took their eyes off the screen to wipe drool from their lips Then comes Beyond Light and finally it seems the game is going to have some depth to the story The entire marketing is about exploring both light and dark The main villain is a fallen who in despair turns to the darkness and the player is supposed to explore darkness and what that means This is precisely the stuff that's most interesting in the lore Dredgen Yor and Mara Saab and the Awoken, the Traveler and the Hive Book of Sorrow, the Leviathan All of this stuff is the foundation of a high quality sci-fi tale One that is more than just another villain of the weak easily taken out in five missions Perhaps things had changed and it turns out the purposefully bad stories were Activision's influence But it turns out that Beyond Light might be the very worst of the Destiny campaign stories Not because it is literally as terrible as vanilla D1's total nonsense But rather because every element a writer needs to create a compelling narrative is on the table All the ambiguity, lore and complexity of the fallen The light, the dark, the collapse, the story is now all about the things that most fans of destiny lore find cool So it's even more frustrating when it actually ends up being exactly the same It's the same garbage villain of the weak. It's the same good versus bad crap Aramis is bad because she's bad. You're able to deal with the darkness without any problem because uh, you're good, I guess What are the pyramids? Who knows? What's the darkness? Who knows? Beyond Light is basically forsaken story Exactly except without the cool alternate reality stuff and wish dragons and the murder of your friend Now it's easy to blast a story as terrible. Some people are going to say in the comments So let me in like two paragraphs explain how you could have made this story actually good First of all characters in good stories need to be explained by more than someone telling us they were once good Aramis is a total Failure because the only thing we see of her is absurd mustache twirling villainy Only thing we have to break here is you Come then Pawn Show me what freedom has given you Variks says she was good once but we don't see it or hear it Instead she does nothing but act like a murderous monster the entire time This is easily solved by even a barely confident writer Leave audio logs around the map that show Aramis beginning as a noble fallen trying to rally her people to regain their lost glory Have her fight against her desire to use the darkness give the player glimpses into the things that finally turned her bitter Aramis starts the story angry and violent and ends it angry and violent and frozen And the cutscenes themselves are just terrible I mean really the worst they've done Bad direction bad lighting bad animation bad voice acting terrible dialogue. It is awful You could have cutscenes that actually show her struggling with her decisions Or even better. How about this the campaign is about Variks and his efforts at uniting the fallen The lore of the last year has been hinting that this was what Variks was doing It seemed that he was trying to become the kello kells You could have the player helping him try to rebuild and unite the fallen as an ally against the darkness and the pyramids Over the course of the campaign He can make bad decisions that leads him to making brutal choices in the name of uniting the houses Eventually he talks you into harvesting the darkness for the good of the solar system and then it corrupts him Or do that exact same storyline with Aramis if you want to keep Variks around Interesting stories require characters that change during them If the story began with you allied to Aramis and progressed so that you watched her succumb to darkness It would be far more interesting when you ended up having to fight her And it would be easier to explain how the darkness corrupts people If you're going to do a story about how darkness corrupts, we need to see what that means It would probably mean having to make hard choices that hurt others in the name of helping others So for instance needing to kill a bunch of innocent fallen because you think uniting the houses is the best thing in the end That's the kind of moral ambiguity you need if you're going to tell a story about darkness and succumbing to power As it stands the darkness here is actually just an ice super your ghost talks about how conflicted he feels But as a player you're like dude, whatever. It's just like my fire super, but ice like who fucking cares? What what's the problem just as importantly? There is no reason to have to defeat Aramis in the campaign It's impossible to care about anything if every problem is solved in four missions Destiny would be tremendously improved if it told its stories over the course of the entire season Why even have the fucking season format otherwise? You could tell the story of the fallen and Aramis over the entirety of the next six months Which gives you a ton of time to explore the whole darkness theme And it gives the characters time to breathe and change and do stuff And it would actually matter and feel earned when you finally have to defeat her Finally, there's actually nothing in this campaign about the darkness. You're able to use it with ease There's no indication that it's anything other than a different super. That's blue One would think in something called beyond light the writers would explore the fact that you can't have light without darkness Or darkness without light There's a good story about how balance is needed not fealty to one view There's a million great stories you could tell with the facts and lore present here But bungee fails to even tell one You find and kill Aramis's lieutenants I know nothing about these people other than one briefly tells Aramis to be patient before you blow her up And one of them has a cool backpack. Then you blow him up I learned nothing about the darkness other than that the super is a bit less useful than the ones I already have Because crowd control isn't really needed in destiny because it's easy And it's always a better idea to explode people with a nova bomb or tracking fire swords Then it is to have to first freeze them and then have them explode Listen, this expansion is totally depressing because not only is the story terrible Which is the same as it always is but mostly because it really proves that this will never change Once again, we get a story that would get an F in a college creative writing course I know because I took a bunch of creative writing in college before dropping out to lift heavy things for $15 an hour whatever Gameplay I had higher hopes this time because I fell for bungee's marketing again But ultimately I don't play destiny for the story. Thank god For all the shit they get bungee does know how to craft interesting encounters The strikes are almost always great and the campaign missions are almost always at least good I found forsaken to be great because every story mission felt as well designed as a strike The locations were great. The fights were good. The new enemies were fun to deal with But even here beyond light is only decent. The campaign feels surprisingly phoned in Europa as a map is gorgeous I actually really like the weather system and the areas are all well adapted to good fights But it's also huge and strangely empty A big part of the campaign runtime is driving your sparrow from one end to the other Bungie brought back the cosmodrome from d1 and then doesn't even use it for a mission Instead you're like strangely sent there in the middle literally to just run around and kill fallen I think it's like getting a bunch of headshot kills for some reason like really Not even one actual mission on the quote-unquote new planet Just a long bounty the original game had several really memorable missions in this location There are a ton of great maps for missions here and instead of using one of those or Making a new one. I'm just sent there for 10 minutes to get 50 precision kills Beyond light has a few pretty good missions with decent boss fights and like eight hours of getting void kills on vex Or headshot kills in lost sectors. It's just really really short and really really mediocre None of these missions are the least bit memorable None of them feels like mini solo strikes Even the boss fights are often pretty annoying because being frozen solid is the worst fucking feeling in a game all about movement The only deaths I had were because tracking ice attacks would hit me while I was jumping a gap and I'd freeze and fall to my death And on that note crucible is a disaster with every enemy being made from overwatch Players hate getting cc'd they fucking hate it and wow They hated an overwatch and now you get to hate it in destiny too as usual The core movement and shooting of destiny is really good. So of course most of the time it's decent enough But this campaign doesn't leave you feeling like you're doing anything other than what you've been doing for the last six months The new planets feel Woefully underused and useless and the process of unlocking the different aspects of the new supers feels unnecessarily grindy Ridiculously so often destiny 2's campaigns feel great because the game is expert at pushing you through an interesting level With just the right music and enough enemies to make you feel pressured But here I don't know if it's a bug like half the missions have no music going on at all It's like totally silent And even by d2 standards the campaign missions are way too easy Even when underleveled, it's like comically easy On your second character when you're at the right level It's just way too easy to keep you engaged at all players have been telling bungee They are getting very tired of patrol checklists as missions And instead of really committing to delivering better missions in their big expensive fall expansion Bungee instead leaned into it more Beyond life is basically five missions and then hours of checklist bounties Yes, it's a bit more engaging getting fall and grenade launcher kills on a new planet But it doesn't feel like 40 dollars worth of content Now I've seen a lot of people say that you can't judge this without playing the seasonal content But that is total bullshit and just factually wrong The seasonal content was an extra purchase this time Unlike shadowkeep it was not included so I absolutely can judge beyond light on what it contained And for 40 bucks you get fewer strikes Fewer raids fewer planets Fewer guns fewer armor sets Five missions one new strike one old strike and a bunch of bounties This is the first of the big expansions that is less than the minimum viable product It feels like I have been ripped off And even the stuff that is here is really underwhelming Probably the least interesting mission design since Curse of Osiris The expansion is not as good as Rise of Iron or Shadowkeep Even though it's releasing on the schedule of Taken King and Forsaken It is massively disappointing Finally Bungee really needs to figure out how to create more interesting missions They could benefit from devoting a ton of time to creating a procedural mission generator Europa is an amazing map So some system that created random encounters and boss fights within each map would be a way to improve the replayability of each planet Doing the same below average mission three times a week per character for the next three months For a loot pool that is basically shit now is not going to keep me playing very long This doesn't mean destiny should be warframe One of the best things about destiny is the really impressive handcrafted levels But a system that rotated enemies and bosses randomly on Europa into missions would be great As it stands, it's just a huge wonderfully designed map that doesn't serve a purpose D2 is still a great shooter But when an expansion has a bad story A total fucking disaster when it comes to loot Less content than the game had before you bought it And missions that aren't as good as the last few expansions Something has gone very wrong Beyond light is the first time I feel like I didn't get my money's worth from a fall expansion And that is a really bad sign moving forward All right up next will either be Miles Morales, which is great Godful, which is pretty good or AC Valhalla, which I do not like at all Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye