This is gonna be kinda long so I'll try and add a tl;dr. I'm strictly talking about in-game story, not gameplay, art direction, or lore. Clear? Okay. Lightfall makes me feel that Witch Queen was an exception, not the new standard. Lemme run through my personal feelings towards the story in Destiny from Vanilla D1 to now to give to context and explain myself. It's gonna be marked as a spoiler because I'm covering roughly a decade of story, it's a lot. [spoiler][b]Destiny 1:[/b] Nothing was explained, all the dialogue is just vaguely dancing around actually saying something. Left the player in a frustrated confused haze rather than curious and wanting for more. (sound familiar?) [b]Taken King & Rise of Iron:[/b] Good, direct, but still just a 7/10 stories with cool lore and good presentation. (Which good presentation goes a long way, we'll get to that in a bit.) [b]Destiny 2 Red War:[/b] Probably gonna get flak for this. This felt like the Netflix remake of Destiny when it came to the storytelling. Yeah, motivations were clear, story felt direct and made sense, but the delivery of it all was just... Cheesy. I'd go as far as to say uninspired. Yeah, sure, there were neat set-pieces, but that's all they were. The real issue to me was it felt so below Destiny 1 as a whole when it came to dialogue, presentation, and originality. That unique "destiny feel" that I had come to love was absent and replaced by a copy-paste blockbuster flick. It's been so long that I genuinely wonder if the storytelling in Destiny 1 was also just as cheesy and uninspired but I was just too young to notice it then. I hope not. [b]Curse of Osiris:[/b] Nothing of consequence happened, or rather, nothing felt like it mattered. Exiting the story nothing had changed or mattered. And all of it dragged on longer than it should've been, which is saying something for how short it was. Osiris still wasn't even around like he is now. [b]Warmind:[/b] A massive narrative waste, everything made no sense, was inconsistent, Zavala was massively out of character. Vague, unexplained, and once again despite being short, was dragged on for too long. (or at least felt like it, going from "rasputin ally" to "-blam!- that warmind"). [b]Forsaken:[/b] I'm probably gonna get flak for this, but this was just another 7/10 to me, maybe 6/10. The revenge for Cayde was a good motivator, but the end felt... weird. Again, a lot of really cool stuff happened... in the lore. The dreaming city was confusing until I read the lore. Which lore should not be required reading to make a campaign good. A huge issue this game series seems to struggle with. [b]Seasons after Forsaken:[/b] All kinda... mid. They weren't really "campaigns" but rather stuff to do, that makes sense, but that means for a whole year all the story was just lore, and lore a good story does not make. [b]Shadowkeep:[/b] Here's were the current trend is properly manifested. Not even an actual campaign but a series of questlines, we've had better stories in seasons since this. (We'll get to that later too.) Aside from the introduction of the Darkness, it felt as if nothing of real narrative value happened. Just "oh, the darkness is here, neat." Even [i]some[/i] of the seasons afterwards felt like that had the same if not slightly more narrative value than this. Keywords there are "some" and "felt." [b]Beyond Light:[/b] Once again, just a series of quests as opposed to an actual campaign. The question I have is why the this and Shadowkeep both felt this was an okay replacement for a campaign. Why? Why did you think this was the right decision? That aside, the story here was once again chock full of cheesy, uninspired, (but at least this time in-line with destiny's flair) dialogue and storytelling. The presentation was extremely lacking in areas that desperately needed it.Taking out Eramis' leadership didn't feel like it even happened at all, we just kinda shot -blam!- until it was Eramis' turn. The vex gate thing felt very out of nowhere and contrived to just waste time. [b]Seasons after Beyond Light:[/b] This is an odd one. Hunt had a good story that was bogged by lacking presentation, Chosen had a good story generally, splicer's story was pretty engaging, and lost was... a really really long prelude to Witch Queen. Even if it hadn't been delayed, Lost felt like it could've been a three week story instead. But overall, an okay set of seasons, 6/10 total. But here's the issue with that. They're seasons. They're GONE. New players? they'll go from Beyond Light to Witch Queen and all the sudden Caital and Crow exist, Osiris is in a coma, and the big twist with Savathun is very disconnected because some might have missed the thing about the ceremony. All there is to remedy this is a summary cutscene at the start, which is mildly effective at best. This'll lead into a major point I want to make in a bit. [b]Witch Queen:[/b] Despite leaving me a little confused on one or two things, and a little let down by Savathun's Song turning out to just be a simple trick that didn't actually do anything aside from tithings, this was a very very good story, with good presentation, dialogue, and clarity that left me excited and curious. Season of the Risen felt pretty aimless however, things happened, but it didn't explore the Lightbearer Hive anywhere near as much as it should've and they have since just vanished. Haunted was a fantastic narrative season, period. Plunder was confusing and unmotivating, and I guess I'll have to read up on it again to remember what the -blam!- even happened regarding Nezarac. Seraph was a pretty good season, with a wonderful ending. [/spoiler] And now that leaves us here, at Lightfall. Where my only possible review is the exact same as vanilla Destiny 1: [i]"Nothing was explained, all the dialogue is just vaguely dancing around actually saying something. Left the player in a frustrated confused haze rather than curious and wanting for more."[/i] This leaves me with the following major concerns: 1) So much story in this series is gone. And I don't just mean the Red War and Forsaken being sunset. Seasonal content disappears yearly. Seasons of Dawn, Arrivals, Chosen, Risen, Haunted, and Seraph are all seasons with wonderful stories, that CANNOT be experience by new players. Sunsetting is an unfortunate, but understandable loss because of content size, development, bugs and patches. However, what I cannot look past is the sheer volume of narrative content a new player simply will not experience. I admit I am one of the people who said that they wished the season had better stories. And that wish was granted, and the monkey's finger curled. 2) Cheesy dialogue, a strange mix of lacking presentation followed up by great presentation, immediately followed by more lacking presentation. Ever since the Red War, and maybe even before that, Destiny has suffered from having amazing narrative build-up in the lore, only to be finally brought into the game and just feel completely gutted. Like I'm getting a shell of a narrative. One thing I noticed upon playing a few old things here and there is that a lot of dialogue feels better once it's years later and I know more than I did then. This [i]greatly[/i] concerns me because it feels as if the writers are writing the story to be enjoyed by someone who already knows it, that they're writing for themselves and failing to write for the intended audience. Part of me wonders if by next year I can replay Lightfall's campaign and enjoy the absolute hell out of its story... which isn't a good thing. I should enjoy it now, not later. 3) Presentation. Destiny seems to wildly flip between good and bad presentation. The Red War, a completely mediocre story covered in so much set-dressing it successfully tricked swaths of the playerbase into thinking it was good. Amazing build-up to confronting Savathun, an amazing bit of lines from Ghost as he call her out on her crap and we go to finish her off. A desperate and dire finale mission, followed by a fantastic cutscene to end off the Season of the Seraph. Hurdling to Neomuna in a Cabal Drop pod and going to rescue lightless Osiris. Opposite of that, there's the [i]entire[/i] Beyond Light campaign, where all the flair went into little moments with ghost, and the darkness. Eris, Drifter, and Elsie showed up, used stasis, said some -blam!-, and promptly -blam!- off. Or for Elsie just stood there, doing nothing, just like in Lightfall. Or the loads and loads of times in this series where some amazing build-up was happening in the lore, that would've added a ton to the actual experience, but was only that, lore. Not in the game. No, being available to read doesn't count as being in the game. That's accessibility. I mean that lore it isn't presently active in the story as I play that game. It's homework, assigned reading, extra credit at best. In summary, Bungie, please, you need to address this. Go back and analyze what worked, what didn't how you can better approach this. Because the worst part of it all, is that from my point of view, the damage has been done. 10 years of story, yet how little of that can I play? I don't even mean sunsetting, which makes that even worse, I mean how much of that 10 years of story was even part of the game? [i][b]tl;dr:[/b][/i] Bungie has a long history of ruining their own story by struggling to incorporate it into the game, along with cheesy dialogue like the entire Beyond Light campaign, and moments like our Guardian just not noticing Ghost at the end of Beyond Light. The confusing elements scare me as they seem like a symptom of writing the story to be enjoyed by someone who knows what will happen, not us, the current audience. And along all of that, is just how much story is lost to seasonal content that has no way of being playable again. We need more than summaries.