Bungie's track record with new Destiny releases and expansions has been spotty since the original's release in 2014. Despite noticeable highs with The Taken King and Forsaken, the franchise has more often or not fallen into the lows category. The past two years have been especially rough thanks to Shadowkeep and Beyond Light essentially stalling the overarching narrative. Bungie seems to have acknowledged this with Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, the latest expansion that promises to push the narrative forward in meaningful ways. Is Destiny 2: The Witch Queen another high point for the Destiny franchise or should this expansion be exiled to the Darkness?

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen picks up right after the events of the Season of the Lost. Mars has mysteriously reappeared, Savathûn's warship has appeared above orbit, and the Hive have somehow managed to steal the Light. After a brutal encounter with the titular Witch Queen, you set off to discover how Savathûn stole the Light, what her relationship to the Darkness is, and uncover some of the Light and Darkness' deepest secrets.

It's no secret that The Witch Queen is the best story Bungie has ever told in a Destiny campaign. After years of build-up, particularly during the past year's seasonal storylines, seeing how the plot threads all converge in The Witch Queen is immensely satisfying. There are great revelations, character moments, and plenty of 'uh-huh' moments that will keep you invested until the campaign ends. Beyond that, the completion of the raid 'Vow of the Disciple' has unlocked more story content teasing Destiny’s future.

What makes The Witch Queen's campaign and story remarkable is how it breaks down pre-conceived notions. Since 2014, Destiny has continuously operated under the assumption that the Guardians, Light and Traveler are all good guys and everyone else are bad guys. Beyond Light started breaking apart the trend by giving Guardians the power of Darkness. It continued in the seasonal content with players making alliances with the Cabal and Fallen. It culminates in The Witch Queen with the most radical paradigm shift yet. What started as a black-and-white franchise has evolved into a much more interesting story where not everything is as it seems.

As good as The Witch Queen's campaign is, there's one ugly truth that can't be denied. If you're not already well ingrained into the Destiny 2 story, played each expansion and participated in the seasonal content, it's easy to get lost or miss the significance of critical events. Compounding the problem is that Bungie has willfully taken away Forsaken's campaign and location, The Tangled Shore, this year. So while The Witch Queen does its best to get players up to speed with a recap and better-integrates aspects of lore into the story, there's still too much missing for new or returning casual players to get a complete understanding of what's happening.

Regardless, Destiny 2: The Witch Queen's campaign remains excellent. It's a highly-successful campaign that spans eight sizable missions and wisely skews closely towards a traditional shooter campaign. While past expansions embraced MMO aspects and padded their length with time-consuming activities and fetch quests, The Witch Queen focuses more on delivering a typical shooter campaign experience.

In The Witch Queen's campaign, you'll find plenty of cutscenes, setpiece moments and engaging encounters. Bungie accomplishes this by taking cues from their raids and dungeons, disseminating mechanics found in these high-level activities, and bringing them into the campaign. Long gone are the days of scanning an object, wading through shooting galleries and shooting endlessly at bullet-sponge final bosses. Now, you'll use the environment to solve puzzles and weaken enemies, complete objectives to make bosses vulnerable, and think on your feet when ambushed. It's an overall more-engaging campaign that trims the fat off the mission design from previous expansions to deliver something excellent and thrilling to play.

The rest of The Witch Queen's offerings are alright but not as engaging as the campaign. Savathûn's Throne World, the expansion's new location, is beautiful and haunting with its own suite of Lost Sectors, unique missions that explore Savathûn's memories, and Public Events. The location, however, feels small and empty compared to Europa, shares a similar horror aesthetic with the Moon, and lacks anything that feels genuinely new to set it apart from the other locations. Other activities like the Wellspring and public events are welcome additions but come off more as altered variants of previous activities. The Crucible, like previous expansions, has been left out to dry with no new maps or modes. Two previous maps (Vostok and Eternity) did return, but these do little to appease those that feel the PvP aspect of Destiny 2 remains severely neglected.

Destiny 2's excellent combat remains unaltered in The Witch Queen, providing excellent moment-to-moment gunplay. The mechanics remain strong five years since the original Destiny 2 release, so rather than reinvent the wheel, Bungie has made several modifications and quality-of-life improvements to improve the gameplay. Chief among them is the new Void 3.0 revision that brings upgraded layers of customization to the subclass. It now feels more personable, like you're crafting a superhero rather than just selecting what type of Void grenade or melee attack you want. It's such a great addition that it's disappointing Arc and Solar didn't get the same treatment. While updates for those classes are coming, those that prefer either of them are woefully left behind.

The Witch Queen also includes a new weapon type in the Glaive. Blending melee, ranged and defense into a single weapon is fascinating, and they can be powerful. Also new to the game is Shaping, Destiny 2's answer to weapon crafting. It's a neat system that unlocks the potential for players to craft weapons with the rolls and perks they want, but it's a slog at the moment. Much like Destiny 2's transmog system, weapon crafting is held back by the need to farm-specific materials tied to RNG drops. You'll need certain weapons with Deepsight Resonance available to get the right materials, which you can only get randomly. Likewise, the only way to get weapon blueprints is through Deepsight Resonance. Weapon crafting needed to come to Destiny 2, but it has arrived as a grindy, RNG-focused mess.

Perhaps Destiny 2: The Witch Queen's most significant issue is that it has arrived in 2022 after Shadowkeep and Beyond Light. While the campaign is excellent, the Glaive is a unique new weapon type, and Void 3.0 is a much-needed boost for the subclass, The Witch Queen doesn't offer much new or do anything outside its campaign better than its predecessors. There's no new Darkness subclass, form of activities, or Crucible content. In fact, with the removal of nearly all Forsaken content, Destiny 2 as a game only gains as much as it loses. Probably the worst aspect is that, once again, we're fighting the same enemies we've been fighting since the franchise's inception in 2014 (the Hive) and 2018 (the Scorn). Even the new Light-bearing Hive are just variations of the Knight, Wizard and Acolyte enemy types. The Witch Queen has an outstanding campaign, but it's populated with enemies and strategies known all too well. After so many years, it’s about time we see some truly new enemy factions.

Closing Comments

Bungie needed a much-needed win with Destiny 2: The Witch Queen. Neither Shadowkeep nor Beyond Light did much to push the main narrative forward and ended up feeling like one-off stories. Destiny 2: The Witch Queen does this, delivering the best narrative and campaign of any Destiny release and expansion. The expansion throws out the familiar MMO-like structure of previous Destiny campaigns to tell a more thoughtful narrative with, finally, some interesting characters. The campaign is a triumph, but the expansion does suffer from its lack of newness. Subclasses, enemies and activities remain stubbornly stagnant, never offering much new from the status quo. Savathûn's Throne World is an exotic new locale to explore but feels too empty and void of activities to the point that it never feels like it was worth losing The Tangled Shore. Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is a good expansion, combining an excellent campaign and raid with a decent content offering, even though not much of it feels exactly new. Destiny 2: The Witch Queen may not be the best overall expansion in Destiny history, but this queen sure does put on a good show while it lasts.