Bungie have taken a step in to unknown for Destiny 2: Renegades, their first expansion that’s based on an existing IP, and it’s a pretty big one. You might have had a bad feeling about this, but whether you knew the odds or not, you will be pleasantly surprised to hear that this Destiny 2 Star Wars crossover is a gamble that has mostly paid off.
The idea with Destiny 2: Renegades is to take elements and themes from Star Wars and feed them into the Destiny universe. You won’t be running into Luke Skywalker, but you will hear music cues and imagery that refers to, rather than directly lifts from, Star Wars. This sounds like a bit of a mess until you step back and think just how much of Destiny, and indeed many other sci-fi shows, have been influenced by the George Lucas tale. The most obvious comparison is Spider, the gruff underworld criminal with a huge bulbous body sat on a throne, who is clearly inspired by Jabba the Hutt and takes that exact role in Renegades.
Then there’s Drifter, who has always been a wisecracking rebel working with but slightly outside the Vanguard – basically Han Solo – and Destiny as a whole has already explored the Light and Dark sides and given everyone Jedi-like powers. All this means that any additional Star Wars themes can slot in with ease rather than be honkingly obvious. It also helps that Destiny already has three worlds that are shoe-ins for those found in Star Wars. Mars stands in for the desert planet Tatooine, Io is the swampy Dagobah, and the frozen wastes of Europa are perfect for Hoth.
There are two new characters, the rather bland Aunor from the Praxic order – aka Jedis – and Bael, who couldn’t be more Kylo Ren if he tried, I honestly thought Adam Driver had been booked to do the voice work.
Renegades has two intertwined stories, the first of which finds you working for three splinter factions from existing Destiny races who have all set up home in a Cantina on Mars. This is genuinely fun and gives the game plenty of opportunity for some much-needed humour; The Vex have split from the Hive mind and gained individuality, which has manifested in them becoming obsessed with fashion, and capes in particular.
Each of the factions will give you bounty hunts, which take you to one of the three locations, where you have to perform a series of tasks whilst being hammered from all sides by an impressive number of enemies. It is mostly shooting, but that’s what Destiny is particularly good at, and as each location is large and features a good range of tasks, it never feels boring. Bungie have clearly been playing Hellidvers, as prep for each mission by going to your hangar and loading up with Strategems… I mean abilities. These are bonus powers that you can use while out in the field and include air strikes, vehicles, and healing drones, and they are very useful at giving you a few seconds of breathing space when cornered. The core Destiny gameplay remains the same and is as good as ever, and it’s really nice to have new expansive areas to explore.
The campaign lasts around eight hours on normal, longer on Legend difficulty and is bookended with two spectacular missions that are a joy to play and really channel the Star Wars vibe. After that you can start running bounty hunts for the various factions, but it remains to be seen if this going to become repetitive or Bungie are going to continue to mix things up.
I think the decision to allow players to complete the expansion in one sitting, rather than spreading out the missions over eight weeks has been detrimental to the game. When the Heresy expansion was live, Tuesday night was Destiny night. Everyone used to log in, do the mission, uncover some new areas or lord, and because your friends were online at the same time you could then team up for a Nightfall or a Raid. These days everyone does the campaign with a day or two of release and there’s quickly little need for everyone to check in the following weeks. The social aspect of the game have completely died off for me. Playing it all in one go also rushes the story beats, characters motives flip in moments, there’s no time to for things to settle and for the player to consider the most recent developments.
There are some new Star Wars inspired weapons, a set based on Han Solo’s blaster and Praxis blades – the Destiny take on Lightsabers. The blades are a lot of fun and you can perform all the classic Jedi moves with them, accompanied the by unmistakable vwooom sound effects. You can also dress up as Boba Fett, but that will cost you extra money.
Aside from the Star Wars campaign, the other plot continues the story of The Nine that began in The Edge of Fate, an expansion I did not play. Even though I had just missed one DLC, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. There’s talk of numbers and innies and outies and it all went over my head – they could have been chatting about Severance or belly buttons for all I know. There is a catch up movie at the start of the expansion, but it doesn’t explain half of what you would need to actually catch up and follow the plot.
Complaining that the story in a game over ten years old is incomprehensible does seem imprudent and with any other Destiny DLC I would agree, but The Edge of Fate was intended to kick off a new story arc, which should have been a bit of a reset, and Renegades has clearly marketed at Star Wars fans who may have not played Destiny before. If they had opened the game with a classic Star Wars text crawl explaining previous events that would have been perfect, but this is going to be as impenetrable to newcomers as usual for Destiny.
Taking of The Edge of Fate, while I didn’t play this at its launch, buying Renegades seems to have handed me access to The Edge of Fate as well. Whether intentional or a bug, I gave it a go. This has actually been my first time back in Destiny 2 since it was revamped and restructured around the Portal – the new way of delivering content used to grind for power and weapons.
I hate it. I absolutely hate it.
Destiny is a shooter RPG, and what used to happen is that to get to mission you got in your ship, flew to planet, pottered about on the surface and met some random Guardians. Maybe you’d join in a local event, find a secret area, and only then would you continue on to your mission marker to get to what you wanted to do. That has all gone, there’s no world building, there’s no random encounters, it’s just a list of tasks picked from a screen and it feels like work. It’s like someone has made a Kanban board of Destiny 2 stuff and then assigned it to you. I want to play video games to forget about my day job, not be reminded by it.