Destiny 2: Episode 2 – Revenant‘s Act 1 of content launched very recently with an impressive trailer and a promising content roster, but it didn’t take long for players to become disillusioned. Now that Bungie’s lifted all time-gates from episodic content, it’s become clear how little of it there is.
Now, I complained early on in Episode 2’s Act 1 about Bungie’s annoying insistence on time-gating meaningful narrative development in Destiny 2. Imagine my surprise when Bungie announced that, starting with Episode 2 onwards, time-gates would be no more, allowing players to progress through Acts one at a time in their entirety. Exciting! Well, yes, but also no, because players are now surprised and unhappy with the fact that there’s about an hour’s worth of main story progress to be found in Revenant‘s first Act. Honestly, it’s not a great look.
With the time-gates gone, Destiny 2’s Episodes look surprisingly meager
For players with lots of experience in playing Destiny 2‘s seasonal content, this shouldn’t be a huge surprise. In most cases, Bungie doesn’t actually have all that much seasonal story to dispense willy-nilly. During the years prior, we genuinely did get just a few dialogues’ worth of story development before being sent back into the trenches to grind and/or engage with a variety of seasonal activities.
The fact that there was activity-based drudgery to be found in-between weekly 15-minute story beats helped camouflage the whole setup. Now, however, Bungie’s done good on its promise and taken away virtually all the drudgery. This leaves us with a nice, brisk, and lean story to enjoy in roughly an hour’s worth of playtime once every couple of months. It’s not hard to see why players would be unhappy with this.
Quite obviously, Bungie’s providing us with an extremely compressed version of seasonal story progression, but if we want to be honest about it, this isn’t all there is to Revenant. Based on the NPCs’ dialogue, it’s clear that the Episode was still built with time gates in mind, as Eido references players continuously fighting for the Eliksni in between major story beats. Presumably, these instances talk about the upgraded version of Onslaught, which is the resident seasonal activity for the Episode.
So, it’s not that there’s nothing left to do in Revenant‘s first Act, really. You still have a bunch of Tonics to complete and Fieldwork to get through, and each of those nets you some additional dialogue to move things forward. The gameplay is there, most certainly. The main quest isn’t. Granted, the story’s never really been the focus of Destiny 2‘s seasonal content if we’re being honest, and minuscule progression beats now don’t have the brunt of the game’s activity-based gameplay loop to hide behind.
Now, I’m not sure why Bungie chose not to keep rounds of Onslaught in between important story progression steps. Simply doing away with the time-gates themselves would’ve solved the biggest problem many of us had with Episodes. As it currently stands, Destiny 2‘s second Episode is having the opposite effect and diminishing its own content fantasy.
Personally, if Acts 2 and 3 don’t have more narrative to offer, I’ll find myself hard-pressed to believe Revenant actually has more content in it than any of the old Witch Queen-era seasons. Even with all the fluff removed, I genuinely believe there was more stuff to be found there. Again, though, it’s still early to tell and future Acts might pick up the pace.
With all of the above in mind, the older news that Codename: Apollo is not time-gated and should be fully nonlinear has me concerned. Once again, Bungie is struggling to deliver on the bits that the community is asking for, and even when we do get the bit we wanted, it’s not quite at the level we expected to see. Destiny 2‘s biggest problem is, indeed, uncertainty. At least the non-story content is good in Revenant, right?
Published: Oct 9, 2024 09:01 am