Destiny 2 Beyond Light

Bungie finally released a new trailer for Beyond Light and while it didn’t reveal any new information about what we’re doing on Europa or why, it did reveal a few key details we didn’t know before.

Let’s start with the NPC’s that we know will show up in some way during the game’s events. First, the Exo Stranger. A returning character from Destiny, there’s very little we know about the elusive Exo. It’s speculated she’s in some way related to Ada-1, the Exo character from the Black Armory expansion released back in December 2018. Her appearances prior to this come solely from the original Destiny, where she had a few lines in five cutscenes. Her time in the Beyond Light trailers with the Drifter and Eris Morn has been the most screen time she’s ever had.

Another returning character making a surprise reappearance is Variks of all people. The vendor for the Prison of Elders game mode in the original Destiny, Variks has been missing-in-action since the events of Forsaken, where he declared himself to be the prophesied supreme leader of the Fallen and reformed his destroyed House of Judgement. What his exact role will be isn’t known, although I’m hoping he won’t be an enemy.

The game’s lore hasn’t been clear on who exactly the Guardians of the Last City will side with, as we’re seeing the rise of two Fallen factions that seek to ally themselves with the Last City: Variks’ reformed House of Judgement, and Mithrax’s House of Light. Mithrax is a Fallen Captain the player canonically spares in a mission on Titan during the vanilla campaign, and who now fights as a member of a Guardian Fireteam, protecting the Last City and the Traveler.

Looking at the gameplay itself, the Europa trailer doesn’t show off too much. There doesn’t seem to be a completely brand-new enemy race, but some enemies do seem to be using the same Stasis powers Guardians will have access to come November. How that happens we don’t know, but it’s a welcome change to the same enemy AI we’ve been dealing with since 2014.

We also get the chance to see a new set of locations that we’ve never seen before. We seem to be taking a trip to another Bray Exoscience facility, as well as a number of new Vex-themed locations. This expansion seems to focus almost exclusively on the Fallen and Vex; I couldn’t find any instance of Hive or Cabal enemies or architecture, and I’m okay with this. We’ve had no real expansions centered on either of these races, while the Hive and Cabal tend to eat up the majority of the screen time.

I hopped off the Destiny 2 train around the time of the Curse of Osiris DLC and came back for Forsaken and the seasonal pass, but fell off again during the Season of the Drifter, where the core gameplay loop revolved around Gambit. (You can’t pay me to play Gambit anymore. I can’t stand the mode.) I’ve been a loyal fan of the Destiny franchise since the day one release of the first game, and while I’ve become far more jaded when it comes to these sorts of live-service games, I still want the best for Destiny 2, and maybe to find something about it that will have me playing for hours every day again. So far, Beyond Light seems like it just might be enough to drag me back in.