I kicked my heels that night after browsing a ton of ridiculous content destiny 2 Weekly Reset – I’ve got some major quests done, done social calls to catch up with every one of my vendor friends, and am thinking about showing my inner masochist in the Crucible to get through the night. Then, just as I was turning my chair to look at Shaxx, a thread on Reddit caught my attention… “There’s a new Exotic quest called ‘The Variable'”, it said.
Reading on, I see it’s in the EDZ – that’s all I need to know. I hopped on my boat and hauled it back to the dirtiest battlefield on earth. Lo and behold, after a few minutes of spying on my sparrow, I found it…or, at least, found the way to it. The weird Vex Data Blight disappeared from my radar, and after a quick and easy “follow the light” puzzle, I wandered into a new cave in the Old Earth area. Here, against all odds, fate will redeem itself.
I’m not kind to Lightfall. Yeah, I think there were some really cool moments, and yeah, I had a lot of fun with the Legendary campaign. But on the whole, it’s bullshit—a weird pitch aberration that undoes a lot of the work The Witch Queen has done to correct a shaky story that’s gone through nearly a decade ago. But Destiny is much more than its campaigns. The game lives and dies on its seasonal content and the way it keeps bringing players back to the top-notch FPS sandbox. Small quests like this newly added NODE.OVRD.AVAL.ON quest are great examples of Bungie’s real success.
First, you’ll meet a new NPC – a friendly harpy! again! Let’s imagine! This grumpy Vex bastard will show you why you need to jump into a big new level made of cyberspace or something and destroy a malevolent entity within. The quest has all the classic Destiny tropes; the arena battles are set up more like combat puzzles, the platforming sections are sadistically fun to pull you off the edge of the map, the little hidden areas are full of surprises, and the jerk-like Boss fights might make you rip out ethernet cables If you keep screwing up, try shutting down your console and trying the Crota whole thing.
In fact, this task has two. With a mini Gambit-lite drill, hopefully you achieve your goals in a very compact way – or risk getting rubbed off. This, combined with the seemingly never-ending harpy sniping at you from across the room, makes for one hell of a challenge. But it’s the pinnacle of Destiny; relying on its solid marksmanship and ability rotation to give you other missions, on top of simple survival. It reminds you of just how much developers can do with the tools available to them – it’s amazing how fresh nodes are still felt after all these years.
After this “slam dunk and hide” minigame comes the real boss encounter. It’s a remix of a Strike Boss from earlier in the game, and a delightful example of how good re-use of content can be. The whole quest seems to be in preparation for a new DLC raid; we’re taught how to find codes and enter them in to doorways – having our Ghost simply hack away at obstacles as we fend off three waves of hired (or wired) thugs A refreshing break.
Calling code and clearing add-ons is pure adrenaline as you desperately try to unlock passages and clear the way for the final encounter. I stayed up until 2am to take down the bastard, praying that my long-suffering Titan teammates would burn off the last of its health as I lay dead on the ground, hopelessly hit by a Vex laser, approaching a steep drop. He succeeded and we won. Our prize? A whole new exotic, baby.
And therein lies the charm. A level of this caliber could easily exist in Halo, Call of Duty, or any other shooter — of course. But is it so easy to give up something like this and reward us with something like this by fighting with high-end, end-game content? This is what a service shooter should do; it shows why Destiny is the best at what it does. It’s not just the bland look of nailing a shit gun at the end of the season pass with “Well done” scrawled across it. No, it’s a proper, meaningful kit – well presented and effective.
And there’s not much FOMO in there either; if I miss this quest this week, it’ll stick around for a while. So if you’re reading this and think ‘hey, that sounds good, actually’ just fire up the game, head to the EDZ and solve the little puzzle that opens the gate yourself. Boom, done. simple.
For all its flaws and irritating storyline, Destiny remains a shining light in the realm of service games–it’s one of the best games of its kind and leads by example. I really hope we get more of this in the coming weeks and months… regardless of what the main story of Lightfall actually is.
