New England was an…interesting choice of accent. Whose brilliant idea was that? In a way, this choice is reflective of the design team’s decision-making process across this whole “expansion.” Despite some of the weapons being interesting, the whole thing feels contrived and very much like a reach, the earmark of a developer desperately attempting to cling to the remaining player base in the same way that games like Fortnite seem to do so effortlessly - by introducing someone else’s IP into a totally unrelated game space. Add to that the usual list of bugged encounters and soft locks, poor design, and increasingly bad dialogue, and we have…well, another lackluster Destiny 2 DLC offering. It is utterly tragic that y’all have not managed to comprehend after all this time that what made Destiny special was the core of it. When we hit Rise of Iron in D1, I believe it was the high water mark for the entire franchise; The Taken King had brought back around the player base that you lost in the early days of D1 expansions (which were predominantly too short and/or poorly designed), but Rise of Iron cemented the game in a state that was sustainable for much longer than it was allowed to exist in that space. You then proceeded to repeat the exact same mistakes from early D1 in early D2, but the difference this time is that the content that followed those mistakes hasn’t gotten any better. If anything, it has made the game less approachable for new players than ever before, and nearly unplayable for the rest of us that have stuck by you as a developer despite your obvious inadequacies; giving you chance after chance to course correct, but never once being rewarded for our loyalty. Being a Destiny fan these days feels a lot like what I imagine it would feel like to be Dr. Sam Beckett; hoping that each leap would be the leap home, but it never is. I know Destiny is no longer Bungie’s primary focus, and that Marathon is likely going to make or break you as a developer. Just know that there is still opportunity to retain the true believers in the Destiny franchise if you for once in the life cycle of this game can pull your heads out of your asses long enough to realize what made this game great, and to at least make a little more than a completely half-baked effort to try to recapture that lightning in the bottle. Or maybe that’s just me perpetually attempting to be an optimist on behalf of developers who thought it would be a good idea to introduce a voice for a ghost that sounds like it just rolled out of a gutter behind Gillette Stadium.