[i]Here I go making another post about the Haunted Forest...[/i] (tl;dr at bottom) There are multiple reasons I miss this activity. It is very atmospheric. It fills a gameplay role that the game has never properly filled since. It also feels like there was actual heart put into it. There is also plenty of room to improve it. There are just many reasons I find the Haunted Forest superior to the Haunted Lost Sectors. The atmosphere it provided was exceptional. It was dark and spooky. It truly felt like a limited-time special holiday event. I miss that. I got very reminiscent during that one point in Encore. Now, I am a huge sucker for festive holiday decorations, but the Haunted Lost Sectors are places we've already been a nauseating amount of times already. A few decorations haphazardly splashed around doesn't really make it feel special. At the time, the Infinite Forest was a pretty common area, but nowadays it's completely unused and would feel very fresh. Another big reason I miss it, possibly the biggest reason, is that progress was limited by your team's overall power and skill. That is one thing that kills me with Haunted Lost Sectors; that your progress is arbitrarily capped at no more than 10 Headless Ones and then the boss. With the Haunted Forest, as long as you had time left, you could keep going. This added a new layer of replayability that is entirely absent from the rest of the game, where you could keep trying to go deeper each run. There was enough content there too to really lay into it. Everything else in the game has so many limitations. Bosses have plot armor that pops up and stops you, there are so many wait-y moments where you have to just stand in a circle or get orbs to throw, and usually your potential for progress is capped. In the Haunted Lost Sectors, there's no room for improvement aside from maybe a faster completion time. Killing the Headless Ones and/or the boss faster doesn't increase anything or improve anything. Once you do it once, there is nothing more to get from it aside from loot. Everything is so shallow, where it only takes a bit of effort and any extra effort doesn't do anything. With the Haunted Forest, the harder you pressed, the further you got, and then you wanted to see if you could go further. Touch up your game, tune your build, and lock in and play as sweaty as you can and you are rewarded for it. The Haunted Forest is also absolutely perfect to experiment with some roguelike elements. Those old mask mods that granted insane buffs could be examples of the wild and wacky buffs you could get. I miss that feeling of having a busted mod that really changed the way the game felt. It made me feel so much more powerful and was a real treat to just play. Lastly, the Haunted Forest just felt like it had heart. I don't particularly remember the rewards being anything too notable. Iirc, it was literally just 2 different precision frame kinetic auto rifles, but with one having more PvE perks and the other more PvP oriented. But that was fine. They were pretty decent, but the main fun of the event was the activity itself. The mask mods allowing for some truly broken gameplay felt refreshing from the overly balanced, sterile environment of the rest of the game. Then there's that final little treat (or should I say trick?) at the end, if you remember then you remember. There was no need for that, yet it was there and I adored it. tl;dr So basically, the Haunted Forest just felt like a festive breath of fresh air. Your progress was tied to your team's power with no arbitrary caps. It felt good to be there and it felt like it was made to actually be fun and replayable, rather than just a quick, repetitive activity thrown together for the sole sake of loot and progression.