What game release or expansion did you enjoy more than you expected?

Like everyone else here, I’ve played countless games throughout my life but only a handful would make it in to my personal gaming pantheon – these games are undoubtedly my favorites of all time and have impacted me in more ways than simple entertainment. One of these games is Destiny — though to be clear, I mean the franchise as a whole and not just the first game. A little less than a month from now, Bungie will release Lightfall, the latest expansion for Destiny 2, and I’ll be honest — I’m not really excited.

This is a really weird admission because I absolutely love the core gameplay, the weapons, the visuals, and the music of the franchise. In recent years, the narrative direction stabilized and provided clear, interesting story threads capped off most recently by The Witch Queen, a fantastic all-around expansion that gave me high hopes for the direction of Destiny’s story.

Lightfall, however, has left me with a sense of feeling underwhelmed because everything I’ve seen so far has failed to inspire any level of excitement. One of the main blocks is the story setup — previously, in Destiny it was established that humans were able to successful colonize some planets and moons beyond the asteroid belt, however, Neptune — the expansion’s setting — was not one of them and eventually human civilization on each planet in the galaxy collapses due to invading para-causal entities. Throughout the franchise prior to this, there were only two mentions of Neptune —  one line of ambient dialogue and one line of text in a piece of gear. Despite this, a small colony of humans somehow bypassed galactic annihilation and developed a hidden society bolstered by technology far more advanced than what was and is currently available to humans elsewhere.

Currently, no explanation exists for this and in a world where dead people came back to life with superpowers, I know it sounds absurd to be stuck on a para-causal enemy of otherworldly power just missing Neptune like that the first time around. As for the planet itself, most of the settings from previous expansions showed that these were places humanity is attempting to reclaim but the choice of making Neptune’s capital city, Neomuna, look like a cyberpunk-meets-Miami Vice inspired technological wonder just feels out of place.

I’m still going to give Lightfall a shot because the gameplay and new abilities do look really fun. I just hope we get a decent story explanation that makes sense with the previously established lore but at the end of it all, I want to like the game and I want to continue to be invested in the story, so I hope it ends up grabbing me.

I’d like to hear from you — what game release or expansions did you enjoy more than you expected? What made you hesitant or turned you off initially — and what about it brought you around? What about it did you end up enjoying?