Destiny 2's upcoming expansion, The Edge of Fate, launches at an uncertain time in the long lifespan of Destiny 2. It follows the high-octane culmination of Destiny's first era, The Final Shape, and a series of transitional episodes that attempted to tie up some loose narrative threads. You'd be forgiven if you fell off of Destiny 2 after The Final Shape--after all, final is right there in the name. Developer Bungie seems to be trying to walk a tightrope with this new expansion: ideally, The Edge of Fate will be enough to bring back lapsed players, but it also needs to give Destiny 2 a shot in the arm that will keep avid superfans engaged for the foreseeable future.
I recently had the opportunity to dig into The Edge of Fate at a preview event hosted by Bungie, and after around eight hours of gameplay, I can confidently say that the expansion's big changes bring new life to the game. Its campaign takes some big swings with its environmental puzzles and new methods of traversal, and it overhauls Destiny 2's core gameplay to make it significantly more streamlined and comprehensible. It remains to be seen if that's enough to revitalize Destiny 2 with the numbers it once had or reinforce the game's status as a live-service powerhouse, but it is enough to make me want to play more.
The Edge of Fate is headlined by a story campaign that takes players to Kepler, a new location located at the far edge of the solar system. Following the conclusion of the story of the battle between the Traveler and the Witness in The Final Shape, The Edge of Fate shifts narrative focus to The Nine, shadowy supernatural beings that predate the Traveler's arrival in the solar system. Instead of powers linked to Light and Darkness, which defined all of Destiny's previous expansions, The Edge of Fate introduces powers related to dark matter--which, in Destiny's universe, is a usable resource that permeates Kepler. The narrative that unfolds features new civilizations, enemies, and a bearded and hipster-glasses-wearing human with an enigmatic backstory and uncertain motives named Lodi.
I spent my time exploring Kepler and engaging with the early part of the expansion's story, and while I found some of the narrative hooks intriguing, I was most impressed with Kepler's world design. The remote planetoid is distinct from Destiny 2's other locations: The dark matter appears as yellow-orange fungal growths that cover many of the surfaces, serving as organic ornamentation for red canyons and purple-green tunnels. The place is not completely alien, though--human architecture, vehicles, and objects are strewn throughout the world, bringing an eerie sense of familiarity to an otherwise foreign place. One of the most impactful scenes in the expansion comes right at the beginning of the opening mission, when you gaze out from a vista at a skybox dominated by a colossal aircraft carrier.
Recognizable human objects are strewn throughout Kepler, contrasting with alien landscapes.
The dark matter diffused throughout Kepler powers the new abilities that you acquire throughout the campaign. In contrast to how Destiny's subclasses and associated skills have traditionally focused on combat, Kepler's "destination abilities" (meaning they are only usable while on Kepler) are geared toward navigating environments and finding secrets. While platforming and light puzzle-solving have always appeared in Destiny campaigns, The Edge of Fate leans more into environmental puzzles than previous expansions, drawing directly on Bungie's past experience with Dungeons and Raids. As such, the new abilities all provide ways of moving through or manipulating levels.
The first ability you receive is called Matterspark, and it transforms your character into a compact, glowing ball of energy. While you can damage enemies using sparks of energy jettisoned off of your new spherical form, the main purpose of Matterspark is to allow you to travel through tunnels, air ducts, and tight spaces, and to charge up locations throughout the world that open doors or chests. Another ability, called Matterform, similarly provides new means of traversal, allowing you to manipulate particular parts of the environment--such as sheets of metal or loose walls--into temporary bridges and ladders. Many missions that I played also heavily used the Relocator Cannon, an item you pick up at certain points that lets you create portals to move through otherwise inaccessible barriers.
You'll use Matterspark to traverse narrow spaces, but not all tunnels are marked by fungal growths like this one.
These abilities are key to Bungie's goal of making The Edge of Fate play more like a metroidvania than a linear, first-person shooter. The developer has, in fact, invoked this genre multiple times in its discussions about the expansion; game director Tyson Green told me in an interview that the team was directly inspired by Metroid and Hollow Knight when designing the new campaign. In my time with the game, I found that these new abilities provided a welcome injection of new mechanics into the otherwise quite familiar Destiny 2 gameplay. Finding secrets and figuring out how to traverse through new areas is enjoyable, and the promise of being able to return to old areas to use upgraded abilities to unlock previously unattainable chests adds a fun reason to retread earlier paths and fully explore this new planet.
As is frequently the case with environmental puzzles in shooters, though, the line between enjoyably challenging and deeply frustrating is a thin one. There were several instances throughout my time on Kepler where I struggled to find the specific nooks and crannies that I needed to move my Matterspark ball into; some of these moments of fruitless searching literally doubled the length of what was otherwise a compact mission. I was playing an early build and Bungie is aware of some of the particularly opaque moments of Matterspark traversal, so these may be improved by launch. I am cautiously optimistic that the abilities will be a welcome change of pace, but Bungie is definitely taking risks in order to shake up Destiny's formula.
The Exotic sniper rifle New Land Beyond returns from Destiny 1 in all of its iron-sights glory.
In tandem with the new campaign that unfolds on Kepler, Bungie is also implementing significant revisions to the core Destiny 2 experience. While the changes are numerous, two of the most obvious and impactful are an overhaul of the game's UI--called the Portal--and the addition of a shooting range.
These may sound like marginal updates, but in a game as complex as Destiny 2, they make a huge difference. The Portal represents a fundamental break from Destiny's past, as Bungie is deprioritizing the familiar destinations map and implementing a streamlined menu-based system for selecting and customizing activities. The developer is attempting to throw out Destiny's fairly obfuscated rewards system and the multi-layered map that has often hidden activities away in far corners. It is supplanting them with a system that is meant to give immediate information about what activities are available, how difficult those activities are, what rewards you can expect upon completing them, and any highlighted events or modifiers they might include.
One of the best examples of how the Portal aims to make Destiny 2 more digestible for all types of players is how it organizes activities on the basis of the way you want to play. As a person who plays almost exclusively solo, I have long been frustrated by the way that Destiny 2 hides or discourages activities that are good for playing alone. The Portal improves this by having "Solo Ops" as one of its four core categories of activities. In addition to curating a set of missions that are highly compatible for short play sessions, the interface also made it clear that I would not be punished with lesser rewards or slower progression for choosing to go solo. Other categories include Fireteam Ops, for Strikes and missions that are built for the classic three-person Destiny experience; Pinnacle Ops, for particularly challenging missions that reward the best loot; and Crucible Ops, for PvP gameplay.
The Portal makes rewards and tasks much more streamlined.
The Portal's other transformative change is the inclusion of a much more extensive set of modifiers and options that you can use to customize a mission's difficulty to your liking. This is a huge change over Destiny's past, where missions generally have only a few difficulty settings and little granular control over the gameplay experience. Now, you can choose from dozens of different buffs and de-buffs, evocative of the way that finding Halo's collectible Skulls unlocked a series of options to tune particular elements of the game. These all affect scoring multipliers, which themselves affect how many rewards you are able to earn in a mission. In addition to allowing high-level players to create extreme challenges, it also lets you, for example, tune things to make a mission easier to complete in less time.
I found the Portal genuinely transformative to the Destiny 2 gameplay loop. While I have always generally liked the use of the destination map, the improvements to visibility and customizability that the Portal implements will make the game more enjoyable and replayable for many different types of players. I even ended up replaying quick missions multiple times during my preview, just because I was invested in seeing how different combinations of modifiers would affect my performance, enemy difficulty, and the rewards I got. It was exciting to try to push my limits, and that excitement was driven by the fact that I got to choose exactly how I was going to get challenged.
The other big change to the core Destiny 2 gameplay, the addition of a shooting range, is designed to benefit both beginner and expert players. Destiny 2's gear and stats system is extraordinarily complex, combining both intrinsic weapon and armor perks, user-selected mods, and upgrade mechanics. This has resulted in high-level play increasingly oriented around build-crafting, or the creation of combinations of gear and mods that are most suited to particular tasks. However, this process is more involved than, say, creating a loadout in Call of Duty. It can be extremely difficult to figure out exactly how armor and weapon perks interact, or how marginal increases in character stats impact one's performance. I have played Destiny 2 for hundreds of hours and I am still a relative beginner at build-crafting, as I have found comparing combinations of gear to generally be too difficult and time-consuming.
Lodi, a human, just appeared one day on Kepler. What's he up to?
The shooting range is Bungie's attempt to encourage players to engage more deeply with builds. Located in a corner of the Tower, the shooting range lets players safely experiment with different weapons, gear, and mods to figure out exactly how they want to approach certain encounters or mission types. There are many buttons to hit to change the shooting range's setup (you literally shoot buttons to switch settings), including what enemy types are included, whether a champion spawns, and whether the enemies should engage in combat with you. There is even a big scoreboard that tells you exactly how much damage per second you have put on a target.
It's a stat nerd's dream, but it is also a profoundly useful way of learning Destiny's more involved mechanics. Even in the short time I spent at the range, I found myself quickly picking up on gear complexities that I hadn't been willing to engage with in the past. I was able to carefully investigate how the perks on the new Exotic weapons worked, and I figured out how to match certain mods to significantly increase my combat effectiveness.
There are dozens more additions and tweaks that Bungie is implementing with The Edge of Fate--including a simplification of the armor and power systems--that I generally found to make my gameplay experience more enjoyable. However, it is still unclear if Bungie has done enough to bring back the lapsed Destiny players who have fallen off at some point over the game's long history, or to entice new players who have never touched the game before. Destiny is a daunting game in many ways, and despite The Edge of Fate attempting to initiate a new, more welcoming phase, there is a lot of narrative and mechanical intricacy that has accumulated over the years. Bungie has to find a way to simultaneously signal that it's a good time to (re)join the Destiny community, while also giving its committed players both continuity and new treasures to chase.
In the absence of a truly clean break in the form of a new sequel, I don't think this challenge is getting any easier–and I'm not sure Kepler, the Portal, and the Shooting Range will fully solve it. Despite all that, I am optimistic about the swings that Bungie is taking with the expansion, especially those that overhaul the core game. You're likely to find me spending too much time fiddling with weapon mods at the shooting range when The Edge of Fate launches on July 19.
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I recently had the opportunity to dig into The Edge of Fate at a preview event hosted by Bungie, and after around eight hours of gameplay, I can confidently say that the expansion's big changes bring new life to the game. Its campaign takes some big swings with its environmental puzzles and new methods of traversal, and it overhauls Destiny 2's core gameplay to make it significantly more streamlined and comprehensible. It remains to be seen if that's enough to revitalize Destiny 2 with the numbers it once had or reinforce the game's status as a live-service powerhouse, but it is enough to make me want to play more.
The Edge of Fate is headlined by a story campaign that takes players to Kepler, a new location located at the far edge of the solar system. Following the conclusion of the story of the battle between the Traveler and the Witness in The Final Shape, The Edge of Fate shifts narrative focus to The Nine, shadowy supernatural beings that predate the Traveler's arrival in the solar system. Instead of powers linked to Light and Darkness, which defined all of Destiny's previous expansions, The Edge of Fate introduces powers related to dark matter--which, in Destiny's universe, is a usable resource that permeates Kepler. The narrative that unfolds features new civilizations, enemies, and a bearded and hipster-glasses-wearing human with an enigmatic backstory and uncertain motives named Lodi.
I spent my time exploring Kepler and engaging with the early part of the expansion's story, and while I found some of the narrative hooks intriguing, I was most impressed with Kepler's world design. The remote planetoid is distinct from Destiny 2's other locations: The dark matter appears as yellow-orange fungal growths that cover many of the surfaces, serving as organic ornamentation for red canyons and purple-green tunnels. The place is not completely alien, though--human architecture, vehicles, and objects are strewn throughout the world, bringing an eerie sense of familiarity to an otherwise foreign place. One of the most impactful scenes in the expansion comes right at the beginning of the opening mission, when you gaze out from a vista at a skybox dominated by a colossal aircraft carrier.
Recognizable human objects are strewn throughout Kepler, contrasting with alien landscapes.
The dark matter diffused throughout Kepler powers the new abilities that you acquire throughout the campaign. In contrast to how Destiny's subclasses and associated skills have traditionally focused on combat, Kepler's "destination abilities" (meaning they are only usable while on Kepler) are geared toward navigating environments and finding secrets. While platforming and light puzzle-solving have always appeared in Destiny campaigns, The Edge of Fate leans more into environmental puzzles than previous expansions, drawing directly on Bungie's past experience with Dungeons and Raids. As such, the new abilities all provide ways of moving through or manipulating levels.
The first ability you receive is called Matterspark, and it transforms your character into a compact, glowing ball of energy. While you can damage enemies using sparks of energy jettisoned off of your new spherical form, the main purpose of Matterspark is to allow you to travel through tunnels, air ducts, and tight spaces, and to charge up locations throughout the world that open doors or chests. Another ability, called Matterform, similarly provides new means of traversal, allowing you to manipulate particular parts of the environment--such as sheets of metal or loose walls--into temporary bridges and ladders. Many missions that I played also heavily used the Relocator Cannon, an item you pick up at certain points that lets you create portals to move through otherwise inaccessible barriers.
You'll use Matterspark to traverse narrow spaces, but not all tunnels are marked by fungal growths like this one.
These abilities are key to Bungie's goal of making The Edge of Fate play more like a metroidvania than a linear, first-person shooter. The developer has, in fact, invoked this genre multiple times in its discussions about the expansion; game director Tyson Green told me in an interview that the team was directly inspired by Metroid and Hollow Knight when designing the new campaign. In my time with the game, I found that these new abilities provided a welcome injection of new mechanics into the otherwise quite familiar Destiny 2 gameplay. Finding secrets and figuring out how to traverse through new areas is enjoyable, and the promise of being able to return to old areas to use upgraded abilities to unlock previously unattainable chests adds a fun reason to retread earlier paths and fully explore this new planet.
As is frequently the case with environmental puzzles in shooters, though, the line between enjoyably challenging and deeply frustrating is a thin one. There were several instances throughout my time on Kepler where I struggled to find the specific nooks and crannies that I needed to move my Matterspark ball into; some of these moments of fruitless searching literally doubled the length of what was otherwise a compact mission. I was playing an early build and Bungie is aware of some of the particularly opaque moments of Matterspark traversal, so these may be improved by launch. I am cautiously optimistic that the abilities will be a welcome change of pace, but Bungie is definitely taking risks in order to shake up Destiny's formula.
The Exotic sniper rifle New Land Beyond returns from Destiny 1 in all of its iron-sights glory.
In tandem with the new campaign that unfolds on Kepler, Bungie is also implementing significant revisions to the core Destiny 2 experience. While the changes are numerous, two of the most obvious and impactful are an overhaul of the game's UI--called the Portal--and the addition of a shooting range.
These may sound like marginal updates, but in a game as complex as Destiny 2, they make a huge difference. The Portal represents a fundamental break from Destiny's past, as Bungie is deprioritizing the familiar destinations map and implementing a streamlined menu-based system for selecting and customizing activities. The developer is attempting to throw out Destiny's fairly obfuscated rewards system and the multi-layered map that has often hidden activities away in far corners. It is supplanting them with a system that is meant to give immediate information about what activities are available, how difficult those activities are, what rewards you can expect upon completing them, and any highlighted events or modifiers they might include.
One of the best examples of how the Portal aims to make Destiny 2 more digestible for all types of players is how it organizes activities on the basis of the way you want to play. As a person who plays almost exclusively solo, I have long been frustrated by the way that Destiny 2 hides or discourages activities that are good for playing alone. The Portal improves this by having "Solo Ops" as one of its four core categories of activities. In addition to curating a set of missions that are highly compatible for short play sessions, the interface also made it clear that I would not be punished with lesser rewards or slower progression for choosing to go solo. Other categories include Fireteam Ops, for Strikes and missions that are built for the classic three-person Destiny experience; Pinnacle Ops, for particularly challenging missions that reward the best loot; and Crucible Ops, for PvP gameplay.
The Portal makes rewards and tasks much more streamlined.
The Portal's other transformative change is the inclusion of a much more extensive set of modifiers and options that you can use to customize a mission's difficulty to your liking. This is a huge change over Destiny's past, where missions generally have only a few difficulty settings and little granular control over the gameplay experience. Now, you can choose from dozens of different buffs and de-buffs, evocative of the way that finding Halo's collectible Skulls unlocked a series of options to tune particular elements of the game. These all affect scoring multipliers, which themselves affect how many rewards you are able to earn in a mission. In addition to allowing high-level players to create extreme challenges, it also lets you, for example, tune things to make a mission easier to complete in less time.
I found the Portal genuinely transformative to the Destiny 2 gameplay loop. While I have always generally liked the use of the destination map, the improvements to visibility and customizability that the Portal implements will make the game more enjoyable and replayable for many different types of players. I even ended up replaying quick missions multiple times during my preview, just because I was invested in seeing how different combinations of modifiers would affect my performance, enemy difficulty, and the rewards I got. It was exciting to try to push my limits, and that excitement was driven by the fact that I got to choose exactly how I was going to get challenged.
The other big change to the core Destiny 2 gameplay, the addition of a shooting range, is designed to benefit both beginner and expert players. Destiny 2's gear and stats system is extraordinarily complex, combining both intrinsic weapon and armor perks, user-selected mods, and upgrade mechanics. This has resulted in high-level play increasingly oriented around build-crafting, or the creation of combinations of gear and mods that are most suited to particular tasks. However, this process is more involved than, say, creating a loadout in Call of Duty. It can be extremely difficult to figure out exactly how armor and weapon perks interact, or how marginal increases in character stats impact one's performance. I have played Destiny 2 for hundreds of hours and I am still a relative beginner at build-crafting, as I have found comparing combinations of gear to generally be too difficult and time-consuming.
Lodi, a human, just appeared one day on Kepler. What's he up to?
The shooting range is Bungie's attempt to encourage players to engage more deeply with builds. Located in a corner of the Tower, the shooting range lets players safely experiment with different weapons, gear, and mods to figure out exactly how they want to approach certain encounters or mission types. There are many buttons to hit to change the shooting range's setup (you literally shoot buttons to switch settings), including what enemy types are included, whether a champion spawns, and whether the enemies should engage in combat with you. There is even a big scoreboard that tells you exactly how much damage per second you have put on a target.
It's a stat nerd's dream, but it is also a profoundly useful way of learning Destiny's more involved mechanics. Even in the short time I spent at the range, I found myself quickly picking up on gear complexities that I hadn't been willing to engage with in the past. I was able to carefully investigate how the perks on the new Exotic weapons worked, and I figured out how to match certain mods to significantly increase my combat effectiveness.
There are dozens more additions and tweaks that Bungie is implementing with The Edge of Fate--including a simplification of the armor and power systems--that I generally found to make my gameplay experience more enjoyable. However, it is still unclear if Bungie has done enough to bring back the lapsed Destiny players who have fallen off at some point over the game's long history, or to entice new players who have never touched the game before. Destiny is a daunting game in many ways, and despite The Edge of Fate attempting to initiate a new, more welcoming phase, there is a lot of narrative and mechanical intricacy that has accumulated over the years. Bungie has to find a way to simultaneously signal that it's a good time to (re)join the Destiny community, while also giving its committed players both continuity and new treasures to chase.
In the absence of a truly clean break in the form of a new sequel, I don't think this challenge is getting any easier–and I'm not sure Kepler, the Portal, and the Shooting Range will fully solve it. Despite all that, I am optimistic about the swings that Bungie is taking with the expansion, especially those that overhaul the core game. You're likely to find me spending too much time fiddling with weapon mods at the shooting range when The Edge of Fate launches on July 19.
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