Destiny 2's The Witch Queen era provided players with many new tools to use in the game, from a complete rework of all three Light elemental subclasses to weapon crafting, and more changes could be coming further down the line with Season 19 and Lightfall. While the seasonal model has been a blessing for Destiny 2 on many levels, not all of the game's many seasonal activities have succeeded to become fan favorites. In fact, several of those Bungie introduced over time have been considered sub-par at best because of the repetitive or not very rewarding gameplay loop, for which an example comes from Season of the Haunted's Nightmare Containment.

Due to the game's current balance between gunplay and ability usage in PvE, it could very well be a good time to reintroduce the concept of horde modes in seasonal content, which Destiny 2 did tackle to an extent in the past. For example, Season of the Drifter had an activity called The Reckoning where players were supposed to traverse long and narrow bridges while fighting numerous enemies. The Warmind expansion also employed this concept, albeit to a much more successful degree, in the form of Escalation Protocol. And yet, Bungie hasn't brought back horde modes for a long time, potentially leaving money on the table.

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Why Destiny 2 Needs a Horde Mode Activity in Lightfall

Deep Stone Crypt's weapons will be among the next set of Destiny 2's craftable weapons in season 19.

Because Destiny 2's new builds, Exotics, and abilities tend to provide players with many tools to defeat large groups of enemies at once, and also doing that quite rapidly, a horde mode would be a great way to celebrate all this. Power creep is very much a reality of Destiny 2 already, and it's something Bungie would have an extremely hard time eradicating because it both fulfills the players' power fantasies, and it is intrinsic in games where there's a progression of gear and difficulty.

Escalation Protocol was a horde mode done right because it flooded players with dozens of enemies at a time, making add-clearing weapons and Light 3.0 abilities fantastic for this type of activity. However, Destiny 2 was a very different game back then, in the vanilla era, and clearing a handful of red-bar enemies is extremely easy nowadays - but not necessarily less engaging. Still, because there's an abundance of devices players can use to do this, Bungie could make the horde mode enemies harder to take down, in turn also making the activity inherently more rewarding to compensate for it.

Endgame content in Destiny 2, like Grandmaster Nightfall Strikes and Master Raids, does use the same principle after all, with modifiers like elemental Burns or Match Game. Champions could also find a more confined and apt purpose in a horde mode activity than they do in current endgame content, where they mostly end up limiting players' choices when it comes to which weapons they should use to be effective. Instead, having a mix of Match Game on tougher enemies and a plethora of Champion mods (including ability-based ones) to select from could make these pleasant encounters, even, when tackling a horde mode.

A horde mode would be an exceptional way to launch Destiny 2's Lightfall the right way, with an engaging seasonal activity that doesn't feel repetitive after the first few weeks, and it would be the perfect test environment for the new Strand subclasses. Even more importantly, it could be a fantastic way to provide less boring ways of leveling up crafted guns and completing any weapon's Deepsight attunement, which the game will desperately need more of in the near future. Overall, there's no apparent downside to a horde mode like Escalation Protocol in today's version of the game, and Bungie should at least give it a try.

Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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