Destiny 2: The Witch Queen

The excellent story campaign, which is an audiovisual feast, can now be played on a higher difficulty level. This is challenging enough for even experienced players, but never frustrating. For those interested in getting into the raid early, it's also a welcome way to avoid a lengthy grind in the pursuit of a desired level. [Issue#318]

The Witch Queen is a masterful expansion. An almost totally perfect symphony played by an orchestra that seems to have finally found an optimal direction. Destiny 2 fans have something to rejoice, but above all to play, as the approach to Lightfall has just begun and we can't wait to find out what will be hiding in the upcoming seasons.

Delving into all its new features, new missions, new locations, and new raid, The Witch Queen has been extremely impressive and a ton of fun. The centerpiece is the laudable story campaign, making a lot of the game's best design more approachable for a variety of characters, but The Witch Queen also invokes the best parts of Destiny's past, as well--like the secret-laden, dense, and fascinating locations found in The Taken King and Forsaken expansions. The Witch Queen is a massive step forward for the game, the culmination of a recent history of great refinements and additions, resulting in a Destiny 2 that's in its best form yet.

The Witch Queen seems to be one of the best additions to Destiny 2 right now. The local story campaign is definitely unmatched by previous expansions thanks to the varied gameplay and location design. But only a veteran of the game will be able to fully enjoy the plot, and for a beginner, half of the names and terms will remain an empty phrase. Is this a good entry point to Destiny 2? Barely. But the campaign gameplay can captivate them both, as it juggles playstyles and places entirely new demands on combat skills on Legendary difficulty. This is not a full-fledged single-player action yet, but something very similar to it. All the more interesting in which direction Bungie will go and what the finale of Destiny 2 will be.

Just as The Taken King was the Destiny ‘version two’ relaunch the game so sorely needed, The Witch Queen boldly elevates Destiny 2 into a richer space fantasy. Without taking any risks beyond giving players more options in how they build their Guardians and wreak havoc, Bungie has iterated what may safely be Destiny 2’s best year yet. Until Bungie gives players significant new additions of enemies and characters, Destiny 2 may have peaked for now.

The Witch Queen is a great expansion that puts Destiny 2 on the right track after the partial misstep of Beyond Light. There’s a lot of content here, even though some activities are blocked behind the season pass paywall.

This is a good expansion, a solid foundation for the next year of updates, and a lousy place for newcomers to start. [Issue#370, p.108]

Long time no see a good Dlc on destiny. But witch queen show us that even in bad times things can change. And for better. Masterpiece. Main storyline is awesome Sidequest are great And everything left is fantastic

It was extremely overrated. It was a good campaign but not as good as Forsaken or final shape a good 3rd raid was incredible top 3 easily crafting was a bad idea and the seasons were mid-as hell

Its a good campaign but seriously this mechanic is dumb and is needs to be balanced better. Its no secret that bungie has struggled with balancing way to much in Destiny 2. Constantly removing stuff from the game until they can be bothered to fix it. Buffing stuff to a point past "Obviously to powerful" but now enemies have ghost which respawn them with full health. Which yh would be fine if they didn't take 20 minutes to kill and then stick to all the other enemies like glue so you can't kill there ghost within 10 seconds. Maybe they should slowly start pushing towards you at low health so then you can actually kill there ghost. Or maybe they shouldn't spawn with a full health bar. These are just obvious things that should be kind of obvious. The campaign isn't bad but like all Destiny campaigns, you either need to play every single 1 to fully understand the story or watch a ton of YouTube videos. I think Bungie need to work on making the game easier for new people to get into. Plus work on there story telling abilities and make each campaign easy to understand if you didn't play previous ones. Like I don't need to complete Halo Combat evolved to understand what was going on in Halo 2? The worst part is several of the campaigns have been removed from the game? Why didn't you just add an option to download or remove campaigns so you could still play them if you wanted to?

I genuinely do not understand how after 8 years, Bungie still hasn't implemented basic user friendliness features into the game. They have monetized every aspect about it imaginable, but accidental dismantling? Oh, a button was pressed for an entire second on the wrong item on accident? Gone forever. Weeks worth of progress deleted in an actual second. Want to re-customize your Guardian? Nah, delete em and all of their quest progress and make a new one. Want to avoid feeling miserable as you're forced into playlists you don't like purely because if you don't get the rewards, you'll be left behind? Tough. Suffer. And no, the campaign in Witch Queen is not good. Have the people positively reviewing this one actually played any good games in their lifetimes? It's pretty, but literally all that happens is "Hive get ghosts" and you already knew that going into it. Everything else in the campaign is just one big lore dump, cool for hardcore enthusiasts, but for people just looking to have a good time, it is mind-numbingly boring. Legendary difficulty is a joke with how insane the power creep has gotten, and the only form of challenge Bungie can muster together is artificially inflating enemy health and damage. The negatives don't even end there. With old content being regularly deleted with no signs of ever returning and seasonal stories taking the forefront, anyone just now getting into the game or returning after a hiatus will NEVER be able to experience the story they missed firsthand. Much the opposite, you're just thrown into current events and the game pretends like you've been there all along, only providing a brief synopsis of what happened in a little circle in the corner of your map. This is, perhaps, some of the worst methods of storytelling I've ever experienced, and the cost of staying up to date is substantial - Bungie even SELLS you DELETED CONTENT just to access whatever leftover scraps that remain in the game. Please, avoid this game like the plague. It's fun and addictive at face value, but there are so many other games that are also fun and addictive, but actually respect you as a human being.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]