While there isn’t much of anything going on in Destiny 2 right now, with its not great Ash and Iron mid-season event shedding players, there was hope this week as Bungie launched a new exotic quest. It’s something Bungie has excelled at in Destiny 2, generally speaking, going all the way back to Whisper and Zero Hour.
But yesterday’s new exotic quest, Heliostat, may be the worst one they’ve produced. In part because of the content and also because of its size. If you wanted yet another indication of just how much Destiny 2 has scaled down at this point, look no further.
- Heliostat reuses a lot of assets from the Spire of the Watcher dungeon including environment pieces, some mechanics and even music.
- Its story makes little sense, as has been the case with all of Ash and Iron’s content thus far.
- If there’s any length to the mission at all, it’s how long it takes to stop getting fried by electric doors. There are maybe three rooms of enemies to fight in total.
- The boss is reused from one of the Curse of Osiris strikes way back in 2017. The encounter felt like a mid-mission boss, and when the game tells you to “reach through time” at the end, it felt like it would continue on. It doesn’t, that’s the end.
- Wolfsbane, the exotic axe, is pretty underwhelming thus far.
Heliostat is certainly one of the missions of all time, and a big disappointment during a period of time where Destiny 2 badly needs a win. This is not a win. The game is just so…small now. Smaller expansions with smaller zones. Smaller seasons to the point where they’re not even seasons at all, which also means a smaller story. Smaller mid-season updates when players were promised something akin to Into the Light. A smaller exotic quest. The only actual content made in the last six months or so that really stands out is the Desert Perpetual raid.
After The Final Shape, the Episodes afterward may have been controversial, but they were substantive. Here, there are yawning voids with no content and what content there is has been drastically reduced in scale.
Destiny 2 almost doesn’t seem like a live service anymore. You can log in and beat the expansion in a few days. You wait three months and log in for a mid-season update (after which I promptly logged out). You return for a very short exotic mission, which you may or may not run a couple times for catalyst. In between is nothing but Portal grinding and the occasional holiday event. It’s a six-month season where you really only have to log in for new content for three weeks in total.
All this is very bad. I don’t know what will change with Renegades, but I’m guessing not much, as this format seems locked for at least a year. But I guess we’ll see.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
