As a recurring player of the series since the first game’s initial expansion, The Dark Below, The Edge of Fate was the first time I found myself less than excited to dive into a new chapter of Destiny 2.
Last year’s The Final Shape brought a satisfying conclusion to Bungie’s grand saga so far. Players learned to combine all aspects and elements of their powers and unlocked a new “Transcendence” power, while bringing closure to most dangling story beats. The expansion itself was a victory lap for the entire game. But it left Bungie to explore… what now?
The Edge of Fate has the unenviable task of moving the larger game forward while telling its own independent story arc. As more online or live-service games continue into their second decades, this awkward moment becomes inevitable; just ask Final Fantasy XIV, which has been doing a complicated narrative dance since its blockbuster Endwalker expansion brought an end to its first massive overarching story arc.
Like FFXIV‘s Dawntrail, Destiny 2 has to clear the table and ask for the players’ patience and trust in the meantime. There’s another main course coming, but it takes time to cook; story chapters like this are necessary to bring out clean table settings, cleanse the palate, and build up appetites again.
“What The Edge of Fate may lack in enemy variety, it attempts to compensate with new gameplay aimed at shaking up mission progression and puzzle solving.”
Also like Square Enix and Dawntrail, Bungie opted to take players to a new location for this endeavour: a planetoid called Kepler hiding in the Oort cloud, the proposed outer boundary of our solar system. The Guardian and Ikora Rey go to investigate it, only to meet a strangely plain fellow named Lodi who claims to be investigating a time anomaly. He’s every bit the fish-out-of-water he looks to be, but helps connect the player with the locals and get their bearings.
Thus begins The Edge of Fate‘s “one step forward, one step back” approach. We’re headed to the fringes of the solar system to solve some time paradox—that’s cool! Destiny 2 has long focused on the Traveler at the heart of the system, so it’s a great time to look much farther away. Kepler itself, though, is not as thrilling a location as it may sound in theory.
It’s a fresh start on paper, but we’re still fighting off a splinter faction of the Eliksni for much of the campaign. A whole new faction would’ve been nice, or even one of the lesser-used groups, but instead, we have the Fallen once again. Even in uncharted territory, the most common enemy group is there to plague us with very few tricks up their sleeves—post-The Final Shape, these guys just can’t carry a main story anymore.
What The Edge of Fate may lack in enemy variety, it attempts to compensate with new gameplay aimed at shaking up mission progression and puzzle solving. Unfortunately, they mostly come across as taking boring notes from other games. The Matterspark ability looks and plays like the Morph Ball from Metroid Prime, and the Relocator Cannon is like an uninspired clone of the Portal Guns of Portal.
Ultimately, these new tricks boil down to glorified alternate ways to open doors. After the previous expansion smashed all of our powers together into cool hybrids, it’s a bit of a letdown—especially when it’s a bad Eliksni house we’re fending off to use them, most of the time.
Thankfully, The Edge of Fate has a very interesting threat looming in the background. By the story’s end some key players have realized reality-shaking truths, and the Nine are finally becoming involved in the narrative properly. Who else can pose a big enough problem after the Witness, after all? Perhaps even more unlikely, along the way, they justify the existence and purpose of Drifter’s Gambit somehow.
“The Edge of Fate accomplishes its unenviable task and lays down some solid foundations.”
Narratively, Destiny 2 has stuck another landing, but it took a considerable trust fall to get to that point. I went from being tepid on the expansion to thinking my fears were realized, to realizing the groundwork Bungie was building all along. (And I do wonder how long the narrative team has been safekeeping a certain revelation about a longtime character.)
That being said, Destiny 2 is about more than the expansion storylines; it’s the daily or weekly grinds that keep players coming back regularly. And this time, there are many fewer special activities in the campaign’s wake. Last year, we had the (repetitive) grind up to the game’s first 12-player activity to keep the momentum going for a little while, at least. The Edge of Fate introduces a new portal menu to point players to the right sorts of activities, but it feels pretty sparse at this point.
Meanwhile, The Edge of Fate accompanies an update to the gear system. Stats have been reworked once again to become the “Armor 3.0” system, complete with a reset of power levels. This is another department where long-running games eventually hit a wall and need to reinvent the wheel—the power-scaling gets out of hand, baffling newbies and potentially causing problems with coding. (This is another problem FFXIV ran into, coincidentally.)
Games still like to make numbers go higher, so working back up to the softcap of 200 was attainable after all. However, even understanding the “why,” I admit when I first logged in and saw all my gear was reset to 10 power, I had a small moment of existential apathy and deja vu. It’s Whose Line, “where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”
Already, the initial reaction from hardcore players feels tepid; even if the Steam player counts are healthy enough as of this writing, it feels like the next year of Destiny 2 could be a challenging one. The “Year of Prophecy” roadmap shows a five-month rotation, roughly; a major update dubbed “Ash & Iron” will arrive September 9, followed by the next paid expansion, Renegades, on December 2, and another major update, “Shadow & Order,” on March 3. Hopefully, Bungie will roll out the red carpet for those moments and really make them count, if they want players to keep coming around.
This time last year, I said that The Final Shape had done some daring things and brought closure to some series-long arcs and mysteries, while also playing it a little too safe in some areas. The Edge of Fate feels like the inverse situation: too tepid and familiar for most of the expansion, with a dash of daring and innovation toward the end.
Nonetheless, The Edge of Fate accomplishes its unenviable task and lays down some solid foundations. In the process, it also taps into some aspects of the Guardian experience that have long been ignored, and brings back some of that retro-futuristic aesthetic that made the first game so curious—an encouraging omen as the game embarks into this new territory. Let’s just hope we all get to Bungie’s destination in one piece and see what fruit it bears.
