Year 5 of Destiny 2 launched with The Witch Queen expansion earlier this week, and for many players, it is the best expansion that they’ve experienced yet. Destiny has always had an interesting story, and its deep lore encourages players to dig through all the information it tucks away in lore entries and throughout its world. However, The Witch Queen brings this all front and center. The campaign for the expansion is a fun and rewarding experience that hits a lot of the same notes as classic Destiny 2 experiences, but at the same time provides much more for players. This not only stems from its storytelling, but also how the campaign can be played.
For The Witch Queen expansion, Destiny 2 provides two different campaign difficulty levels. The standard version is more in line with what many Destiny 2 players have experienced in the past. Its pacing and difficulty are acceptable, and for players that want to enjoy the game but also hit the story beats faster, it’s a great way to play through The Witch Queen in Destiny 2. The Legendary difficulty for The Witch Queen, however, brings a lot more to the table and forces players into challenging scenarios. This provides a rewarding experience, while also delivering some of the most important story content that Destiny 2 has introduced so far.
The Witch Queen Campaign Encounters
The challenging experience that The Witch Queen’s Legendary campaign setting provides is done in ways that help it feel organic. Players across most genres can attest to the struggles of what feels like artificial difficulty. The overall challenge feels less about the mechanics and actions taken, and more like it is directly related to giving enemies more health and increasing their numbers. This can make encounters feel unbalanced and drain the joy players get from their challenges. The Witch Queen does run into this problem on occasion, but not often.
While there are rooms filled with what feels like too many enemies, as well as sections where some might have more health than players are expecting, these instances are few and far between. Running into them can still detract from the experience in the moment, but as a whole, they don’t govern the experience that players have on The Witch Queen’s Legendary difficulty. It is still a nuisance when this occurs, but playing around it is easy. This is especially true with The Witch Queen’s Void 3.0 update at the player’s disposal, providing in these situations if nothing else, a fun way to deal with innumerable mobs while gunning down a bullet sponge.
Once these moments are gotten past, though, the overall experience of The Witch Queen’s campaign is so positive that the negatives almost immediately begin to fade into obscurity. The mechanics for boss encounters move into raid and dungeon encounter territory, requiring players to establish a strategy. These end segments can feel overwhelming, but only as players work to figure out exactly what tactics they need to overcome the challenge. These moments in the campaign speak a lot to what The Witch Queen is, and will likely set the expansion and Destiny 2’s Witch Queen raid, apart from the rest of the game, as a definitive turning point.
The Challenge of Legendary Setting
The encounter mechanics aren’t the only way that Destiny 2’s Legendary setting has made The Witch Queen campaign so much fun. The other half of the struggle comes from how each of these missions is set up. As a whole, the message of The Witch Queen feels like it’s saying that humanity and the player’s understanding of what power can do is flawed. This is reinforced by the level of difficulty and Light level caps that Destiny 2 enforces on players in The Witch Queen’s Legendary campaign.
This might lean into the artificial difficulty aspect of things, but within the context of Destiny 2, it’s very important. Rather than giving everyone else more health and increasing their numbers, the Legendary campaign reduces how effective the player is against opponents. It caps their maximum possible Light level for the specific mission, and it often feels like trailblazing through the map of Savathun's throne world means constantly needing to be ready to pivot back and take a defensive position. Throughout The Witch Queen’s Legendary campaign players are faced with the fact that for once there is no denying that they are the aggressor.
Savathun the Witch Queen and the leader of the Lucent Brood might be trying to achieve a goal that doesn’t align with humanity’s desires, but the player is still part of an invasion force. Savathun’s throne world is her domain and home to her sect of the Hive, an aspect that the campaign consistently reinforces by making the player feel substantially weaker and more alienated than in any other campaign in Destiny 2. It’s an approach that differs greatly from other campaigns but it is also a key part of the Legendary campaign that sets The Witch Queen so far apart from the other expansions in Destiny 2.
On top of this, players are consistently greeted by the Lucent Brood and Light-wielding members of the Hive. These characters were teased when The Witch Queen got its full reveal in August 2021, but many players probably had a different expectation of how they would be encountered. Some players may have expected to face old enemies in Destiny 2 thanks to Savathun’s use of the Light, but the rate at which Light-wielding Hive appear moves past just making them mini-bosses. It reinforces that the balance in Destiny 2’s universe is changing, and with the added difficulty provided by the Legendary setting, they feel like combatants with power similar to the player.
This was needed for the story as much as it was for gameplay. Even though a lot has changed in Destiny 2 over the years, it’s always been hard to not see the Guardian as an unstoppable force. In the context of Destiny 2, this has been a positive feature, as players are intended to wield great power. As the game’s story has changed over the past two expansions, however, there’s been a need for enemies and gameplay that show the players and Vanguard that their path and power are not unique in the universe, nor does it make them right. This is something that will likely solidify even further as players finish The Witch Queen and level up in Season 16 of Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.