I have returned to ‘Destiny 2’. I also did it when ‘The Curse of Osiris’ was launched, its first expansion, but as soon as I got over the part of the story that I had to do in a few hours I abandoned it again because I didn’t have a clear objective destiny 2 service. This time, with ‘The Strategist’, I think I’ll stay a little longer.
This second expansion is not perfect, but I have the feeling that it is starting to put ‘Destiny 2’ on the right track. The first game also got a lot of sticks, but in the end, thanks to a lot of improvements and new content introduced by Bungie over months and months, the studio managed to fix almost everything to provide a most enjoyable experience.
Destiny 2′ began its journey with the lesson learned: many of the things that were wrong in the first delivery had been solved and the game promised to be a more and better one. Unfortunately we only had to finish the story and get into the endgame to realize that Bungie had ruined what she had otherwise managed to fix in the first one by means of improvements and new features.
The quick summary would be this: there was very little to do once the story was finished and seen the different competitive modes. For months it has been difficult to find a real reason to go in every day, a goal to grindear with pleasure. I remember putting hours and hours into the first game, especially when Bungie solved everything I had to solve, repeating over and over again the rounds or whatever was necessary to keep improving my keeper.
In ‘Destiny 2’ I hadn’t felt that attraction until now. What’s more, I remember going in a couple of weeks ago, after leaving it behind at the end of ‘The Curse of Osiris’, and coming out a few minutes later with the feeling of “why keep wasting time on this”.
The Strategist has more chicha than it seems at first sight
That’s where I was when ‘The Strategist’, the second expansion of the game, arrived. Time to go back, I said to myself. On the one hand to see if the part of the story was hiding something interesting, but also to see what other novelties that could give me reasons to enter the game regularly came. And there are pleasant surprises.
The part of the story focuses on Rasputin, an AI also known as The Strategist that we already knew from the first game, and on the Bray family. In fact, we will meet a hunter called Anastacia Bray, Ana for friends, who at the end of this story will become a new character capable of offering us missions and selling us objects from her base on Mars.
During the hours of gameplay offered by the expansion to the level of history there are things that are interesting and others that are not at all. I don’t like at all that of having to go through zones that exist since the game was launched to carry out more or less insane missions, like the European Dead Zone. They give the impression of laziness on the part of the studio. However, the Valkyrie, a new relic weapon in the form of a spear that we will have to use at various times in history and that is truly destructive, deserves all our attention. A real pleasure to use and a real show on a visual level.
The new zones of Mars, on the other hand, are a breath of fresh air and, beyond giving us new locations, they include a good deal of novelties that, this time, can make us return again and again to the game.
- Climbing Protocol. This is a new type of public event that is very demanding. Throughout the new area of Mars there are a number of platforms that, when activated, start this mode type horde. It has a total of seven waves, each one with harder enemies than the previous one, and a final boss. The rewards are different every week. It is a fun event and it is convenient to play with as many companions as possible, because it becomes truly hellish.
- Data fragments. This is a new type of collectible in the form of luminous circles that we will find scattered around Mars. It is enough to shoot them two or three times to collect them, although it is not worth any weapon: each one of them, according to its color, can only be destroyed with a weapon associated to one of the three types of weapons available (solar, arc, vacuum).
- Sleep nodes. There are 40 of them distributed by Mars and they are a kind of floating rhombuses that need an annulment frequency to be activated. To obtain these frequencies of annulment it is necessary to be done before with the so called Resonance Stems. Joining four of these stems we obtain an annulment frequency. But be careful, each of these frequencies is associated with a specific sleep node, so you will have to explore the map until you find it (the frequency itself, in its description, offers clues about the location of the node). When we are near one that we can unlock, we will receive a series of acoustic signals. When we open them, we get loot.
These are some of the novelties aimed at giving a little more life to the endgame, something to keep playing and entering daily (or at least on a regular basis), but there are more secrets and, logically, a new raid den and new exotic weapons waiting to be unlocked.
Destiny 2 still has room for improvement, but I think ‘The Strategist’ is the clearest step Bungie has taken so far in the right direction. Beyond the story, which is perhaps the weakest part of the expansion, it does offer activities, secrets and many objects through which to explore the map in search of the best loot that will allow us to continue raising the light level of our guardian and obtain new powerful exotic weapons.
