Here it is, finally we’ve seen Destiny 2 in action. Bungie held a special gameplay reveal stream last night on Twitch and I’m here to talk about what we saw, what I liked, what I didn’t like and anything else that springs to mind.
First things first, to kick off the show we get a nice CG trailer showing Zavala being a badass Titan. The trailer takes us through his time before the Tower was built and also during the construction of the Tower. It’s a nice way to kick things off, but doesn’t show us anything about Destiny 2.
After a little bit of chat from Luke Smith we get to take a look at the first mission of Destiny 2, Homecoming. The Cabal or more specifically the Red Legion, have launched their attack on Earth and the Tower, by either destroying satellites or blocking them somehow, which allows them to then ride in under the cover of a storm for a surprise attack.
It’s only about 8 minutes of gameplay, but it’s packed full of little nuggets of new stuff which we will get in to in a little while.
In a nutshell the story for Destiny 2 goes as follow. Dominus Ghaul has shown up with his Red Legion, he believes the Light is his, or should be his, he’s jealous of all of us popping emotes in the Tower, so he captures the Traveller and basically imprisons it in a shield cage thing, this takes away all Guardians powers, during this process the Tower is destroyed and Guardians are sent scrambling. It’s then up to us to right this wrong a kick his huge ass back to the darkest regions of space.
It sounds like there is a lot more emphasis on a cinematic campaign, with more cutscenes and story than ever before.
Destiny 2 is a fresh start for all players, so it looks like nothing will carry over – I’m actually ok with this though.
Subclasses
There are three new subclasses at the moment, one for each class,
First, the Sentinel for your Titan. Much like Captain America, your Titan will now wield a shield to block enemy fire and to throw in the faces of your foes.
Then we have the Dawnblade for the Warlock, a solar based class that reminds me a lot of the Sunbreaker. You get a flaming sword that you can sling around and wreck everything.
Finally we have the Arcstrider – probably the worst looking of the new classes, for the Hunter. To be honest it looks a lot like the Arcblade but instead of a knife it’s now a staff – even the ‘activation’ animation looks the same. It looks cool in action, but for me it just feels a little similar.
It also looks like the classes have another ability too. During the first mission we see the Warlock cast Empowering Rift, which has an AOE that boosts damage to all players within range. The Dawnblade also has another ability called Healing Rift, which heals players in the same way.
Along with these new classes has come a bit of a UI update, everything looks a lot cleaner and more logical!
No word (that I’ve seen) whether there will be more subclasses.
Weapons & Armour
As you can imagine Destiny 2 will feature a whole raft of new weapons and armour some of which we got to see during the first mission. Probably the most notable being the grenade launcher and a minigun looking thing. We also got to see something that looked very similar to Dubious Volley the exotic that never showed up in Destiny. Another most interesting change in weapons is the categories that they fit in to. Gone are the Primary, Special and Heavy. They’ve now been replaced with Kinetic, Energy and Power. What this means is you will now be able to mix up your weapon selections a lot more. The Kinetic slot is designed kind of like the Primary slot, but the Energy slot is for breaking down shields, whilst Power is for maximum boom boom! In essence you could have a sniper rifle in each slot if you like. It’s an interesting move and I’d like to see more.
There will also be completely new armour sets to collect, some of which we get a glimpse at, but nothing in any major detail, so no real info on perks etc…
New Worlds
Yes, there are new planets and zones to visit, so far we’ve had three new planets confirmed – Titan – the Moon of Saturn, Nessus – a Vex planetiod and Io – the moon of Jupiter.
There is also a new zone on Earth called the European Dead Zone which is apparently twice as large as any other previous zone in Destiny.
All these new areas will feature new patrols, new side quests, public events and ‘Adventures’ described as missions that characters will send you on with different mechanics and discoveries. Plus, there will be ‘Lost Sectors’ that will act as dungeons with bosses and loot!
What’s nice about these new areas is that you now won’t have to return to orbit to embark on missions, you can launch activities from the surface.
All promising stuff so far.
Playing Together
The way that people can play together has had a lot of changes. Matching making will now be a thing for all activities like, Strikes, Raid, Trials etc…
Destiny 2 will also see full clan support, where you can create custom clans and logos, and then compete with them.
There is also something called Guided games coming, which is basically for Solo players looking to find a group to play with or a group looking for an extra player to play with.
PVP
PVP is getting an overhaul with the team sizes being reduced to 4 vs 4. There will also be new game modes to play.
One thing that isn’t so positive though is that there won’t be dedicated servers, so there is a good chance some PVP matches will still have players with terrible ping lagging around the map. To be honest, in this day and with Bungie’s budget, we should be getting dedicated servers. Sure for the most part, multiplayer matches are fine, but it only takes a few games in a row of terrible lag to really ruin your night of gaming.
Raids & Strikes
One raid has been confirmed for launch, and we’ve already heard details about some new strikes, but it hasn’t been confirmed how many there will be just yet although we’ve heard of two so far, The Inverted Spire and Every Rose has its Hawthorne.
PC & Console Info
We already knew that the game was coming to PC, but what we didn’t know was what platforms it would launch on. Well, now we do, Destiny 2 will exclusively launch on Battlenet. I have absolutely no problem with this, it’s a good platform, so yea…. cool.
The game has also been confirmed to run at 30fps on console and uncapped on PC. Honestly, this is pretty terrible, we have both the PS4 Pro and Scorpio that are meant to be pretty beefy machines, but we’re not going to see them utilising that power? I don’t know the background on the decision, but either way, that’s a big turn off for me.
But it’s not all rosy on the PC side of things, there is currently no confirmed release date for the PC version, it’s coming after the console version, but how long after, we don’t know. We should have more details on that soon. I’m pretty bummed about this, I was really looking forward to playing on PC come 8th September and the fact that we will have to wait a bit longer is a real blow. Hopefully it won’t be a big gap.
Other Notable ‘Stuff’
There was a lot of info released and to dissect all of it will take ages. So I’m just going to list some of the other notable things that I saw and heard.
- Player driven Tanks!
- Sparrows Return
- New HUD in multiplayer
- New HUD info in story mode
- New Multiplayer maps
- New modes – one called Countdown confirmed
- New enemy types – ‘Incendior’ shown in mission
- New Exotic gear
- Treasure Maps in patrol
- Potentially able to choose landing zones
- No word on Beta date
- NPC’s in open world areas to meet
- Text chat on PC confirmed
- 21:9 Support on PC
- Adjustable FOV on PC
Personally I’m really happy with this reveal, it looks like Destiny is still very much the same, but just expanded on and that’s what I wanted and I’m pretty sure what other people wanted too. It’s early days, but I’m very excited about the future of the game and seeing more of it.
There are some things I’m not so happy about like the PC release date and non dedicated servers, but there aren’t deal breakers for me.
What are your thought on the reveal, are you happy with what you’ve seen?
-Will
