Lightfall Post Mortem

Well it’s been a couple of months since the release of Lightfall and I think now is a good time for my personal post mortem on this expansion. First I’ll start with the pros.

The Pros

Neomuna is more fascinating to explore than I thought it would be, but much like Destiny’s other locations it still feels empty and lifeless especially for the first few days of Lightfall’s release. I barely saw anyone anywhere on Neomuna (unless it was due to their smoke and mirrors instancing magic they like to use). The 80’s inspired neon lighting, the Turkish inspired décor, it’s sort of a cyberpunk dream come true. At first I felt like it was a better cyberpunk themed city than Night City from Cyberpunk 2077, but this one feels a bit “safer” than Night City and less grunge and a lot less dangerous outside of the Cabal and Vex. Still an interesting place to explore, and one that inspired a future Minecraft build modeled after the hydroponic lost sector. The arcade lost sector is now my favorite of all the sectors in the game. I also love the Neomuna bounty icons and that the patrol beacons are holograms of people

The new strike that came with Lightfall is also a new favorite. I love that it takes place in the Vex network and introduces the resurrected Nezarec at the end.

They brought back strike scoring and along with it, they’ve altered Nightfall so there are now only 3 levels of difficulty instead of 4.

The “Calus chests” (or perhaps Cabal chests?) are absolutely gaudy and are hard to miss.

I’m absolutely loving the aesthetic of this expansion’s weapons along with the ones for this season. Cyberware combined with crystals makes for an interesting time for me for sure. I hope that I can acquire all the resonance patterns for them all before time runs out. I think the Neomuna armor all looks terrible though, I don’t like any of it for any of the classes.

Speaking of resonance, that got simplified quite a bit since last season. This time around you just have to go to the weapon’s sub screens and click to collect the pattern. No more grinding away until you get what you need or want. It's so simple I wish it had been like this all along.

They brought back the farm! I was so happy to be able to come back but was a little sad to see how its fallen into disrepair and looks like it’s been attacked. Tyra Karn is gone and the house she used to occupy has fallen along with the house the Vanguard used during the Red War.

The secret mission in the Gulch in the EDZ to acquire the exotic glaive ‘Vexcalibur’ was a nice bonus but just didn’t have the same spark that Whisper of the Worm’s mission or Outbreak Perfected’s mission did.

And the last pro I had was The Tower. The new skyline is interesting with all the different ships everywhere - Human, Cabal, Eliksni. The tree (for leveling your Guardian rank) near where Zavala stands and the memorial to Cayde and having Cayde’s chicken running around near it are very nice and heartfelt touches to the space. But this leads me directly into the cons…

The Cons

The new skyline is quite jarring with all the ships everywhere. This doesn’t feel like home anymore, it doesn’t feel like a safe space. It feels like a refugee war zone. It’s very uncomfortable, especially with Amanda being gone and, in my opinion, Zavala essentially being a ghost. The realization that this is the beginning of the end sort a hits you in the face. Now that the Factions have long departed the Tower and Amanda being dead, I can’t help but wonder who is next in the Tower to die. It’s disheartening to say the least.

Rahool’s Secret Stash was one of the selling points for me to buy the blow it out your ass edition of Lightfall with the passes for the next 4 seasons and it’s just a huge disappointment. I got an exotic cipher from his secret stash but since I already have one on my person, I can’t collect it. It was also a disappointment to find the exotics on offer were ones I already had.

The new mod system. I knew this was getting a revamp with Lightfall but I didn’t realize it was going to completely neuter all the builds I had saved. Really not happy about that. Now I get to go through all the builds I had saved and see if anything can be substituted/salvaged but I’m not holding out any hope that any of it will work anymore. I’m sure they’re all pointless.

Commendations. People don’t really give a shit about giving them at the end of any activity that I’ve done. Most of the time at the end of the seasonal activity people just bounce before I can give (or get!) a single commendation. I think making the switch from just gaining XP to giving commendations to gain Hawthorne’s weekly pinnacle gear drop was a mistake. It’s nice that Bungie eventually dropped the amount from 20 down to 5 but I’m sure people won’t be bothered with even that amount of effort. Again, disheartening.

Along with commendations, the number of subscreens and they way they are laid out is such a mess to navigate. Guardian Rank Screen leads to either the Seasonal Rank screen or the Triumphs Screen for the expansion/season and I hate it. The Guardian Rank screen seems to be what they want you to focus on but I personally find Guardian Ranks to be another pointless and absolutely boring grind. I feel like I got to rank 7 only out of pity and not through any amount of work. I also think that if Guardian Ranks are going to reset back to 6 or whatever every season this is 100% something that I’m just not going to do. Trying to solo flawless a legendary lost sector after getting my builds neutered and flatlining the light level this season is not something I want to repeat every three to four months.

And I see from this season that they didn’t learn their lessons on seasonal grinding either. Once again we’re given a vendor that we have to grind to upgrade to get better loot and loot drops and I’m so tired from just thinking about having to do all that again next season. They say they’re making changes to how it all works but I’m not holding my breath.

Speaking of seasonal content, I see that the Heist Battlegrounds from last season are now strikes. Like, what kind of lazy ass shit is that? Are they doing it to keep from having to add to Destiny’s already ridiculous file size? Did they just not have time to create new strikes or - dare I say it - bring back the ones you took out of the fucking game? It also slightly pisses me off that content that I paid for now everyone gets to play for free but whatever.

My last remaining critiques are of Lightfall itself. Throughout the whole of the campaign, Osiris is nothing short of an overbearing, impatient tyrant with regards to the mission to Neptune, Neomuna, and The Veil. His voice acting at times (specifically the mission where you have to run out of Calus’ ship at the end) seems half-assed and phoned in. Maybe it was recorded during lockdown? Either way, I found his character arc this season to be the most annoying of them all.

Rohan dying off was 100% predictable and all the complaints about Nimbus are not justified. It just feels like everyone is complaining about Nimbus because dunking on trans people just seems to be the ‘in’ thing to do these days and it’s not a good look. And Nimbus’ revelation that they are a trans non-binary person being a quick footnote in a wall of text was, for me, disgraceful. I don’t know how I would have approached the topic considering the current climate in the U.S. but this was not the way. Since Rohan got so little screen time, I didn’t really feel much about it when he died other than “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ oh well”

The fight with Calus at the end of the campaign was nothing short of ridiculous, but now that there are ways to cheese it, fuck that guy. He deserved a lot worse than what he got. Did I feel sorry for Empress Caiatl? Yeah, a little.

And they did a repeat performance of Beyond Light by not giving us the new subclass until after the campaign was over with. That is so tired and dumb. Stop teasing me with the tip and fucking give it to me whole hog already. What’s bad about it is that I have to do that all over again on my alt characters. I guess it doesn’t matter if they pull that stunt again with the next Darkness subclass if we get one since The Final Shape is supposed to be the end. I’ll be glad when it’s over.

Other Thoughts

Infographics from Bungie regarding my Lightfall experience…

Tried to solo this shit and made it to a certain point and then I needed help to finish.

March 6 was when I got this email, I just didn’t bother to write about Lightfall until this morning.

I feel like I ranked up to 7 after the 31st, but whatever. What even is time?

I hate this whole system.

Definitely not as good as Witch Queen or Forsaken, but not as shitty as Warmind or Curse of Osiris. I’d say it’s a solid C+, middle of the pack expansion. I’m disappointed that I managed to finish all the post campaign content so quickly that I feel like Bungie didn’t really try too hard to put a lot in it. For the time being I’ve logged out and moved on to other games.