The Destiny 2: Forsaken launch trailer has you speak up for the first time
Forsaken? I hardly knew Ian!
"We want to make Destiny weird again", says Forsaken game director Steve Cotton in a new video dev diary. I want them to make Destiny 2 weird again too, though the trailer for the upcoming Forsaken expansion looks positively mundane. Space wizards leap through the air, four-armed aliens snarl at each other and blue skinned-folk with glowing yellow eyes mutter about the nature of light and dark. Standard Destiny stuff.
The Forsaken expansion is out on September 4th, but patch 2.0 actually landed yesterday. There's an extensive list of balance tweaks, but the biggest change makes the weapon system less restrictive and lets you have, say, a shotgun and a sniper rifle on the go at the same time.
There are shiny Forsaken details to talk about, so I'm just going to pop the 2.0 patch notes here rather than dig too deeply into the changes. Basically: many year one activities have been shuffled into the background to make way for the the new stuff, and damage values have been re-balanced to fit with the new loadout system.
Here's the new Forsaken trailer, in which the player character bizarrely speaks up for the first time.
I really don't understand that decision. That's not me. I'm a robot. It looks like some boring human has volunteered to save the world/avenge Nathan Fillion, so I don't need to bother?
I don't know many details about the big bad's plot beyond 'send some funky aliens out to cause chaos while messing about with the Light', which I think describes almost every Destiny villain we've met so far. I'm more interested in the new abilities shown in that trailer, though I've got a sad suspicion that Genji-like deflect ability isn't for the class I play. I also like the sound of Gambit mode, which blends PvE and PvP. More details about that can be found on Bungie's site.
As well as the trailer, Bungie have also released a roadmap and a dev video where they talk about what they've got planned in the coming months. You'll need to pick up an Annual Pass to see the snazzier stuff, which includes a grifter who lugs a big rock around behind his spaceship.
I wound up skipping Warmind so I'm actually quite keen to step back in, even though parts of that video seem actively designed to put me off. Their enthusiasm about the amount of work you'll need to put in in order to wear some fancy name badges ("When I see one in the wild, I'm going to be like 'that person is a god to me'") is anathema to my own.
They close with chat about how this will be the biggest overhaul to a Destiny game since the Taken King expansion, but I dearly wish they'd spent less time nattering about prestigious rewards and instead introduced the new enemy types - which do exist! They're called the Scorn, and they're aggressive mutated zombie versions of the Fallen. You'll have to head on over to Game Informer to learn more about those.
Destiny 2: Forsaken is available from September 4th through Battle.net for £35/$40 if you just want the expansion, or £60/$70 if you're also after the Annual Pass. You'll need to buy the base game first.