E3 2018: Hands on with Destiny 2 Forsaken

Bungie and Activision were doubling down on Destiny 2 at E3, not only was the new mode Gambit playable at both the Activision booth, but also the PlayStation booth, they had a BCD setup, where selected people could play the opening from the main quest in Forsaken and that is what I did.

The sequence takes place at the Prison of Elders, a new location set amongst the Reef, a series of floating asteroids and something has happened, which has let all the inmates break loose from their cells and start to take over the prison. Petra Venj sends you and Cayde-6 in to investigate, along with herself, with the simple plan of getting the prison back online and the inmates back into their cells, but as always, things don’t go to plan.

What took place after the opening cinematic, is honestly pretty standard Destiny gameplay, you run, shoot and repeat, there is little change in the gameplay. The enemies though are more varied than you would normally encounter out in the wilds, because instead of it just being a single enemy variety, you get them all and this time, you can just wait out a fight and taken on the winner. Because the prison was stocked with members of multiple factions, when they are all let loose, they don’t play well with each other, so when you enter a large space and see an enemy fighting someone, its usually another faction, so if you wait and then take down the winner, its less of a fight for you.

Eventually, you will make it to the room, where you can reboot the prison from, with the help of Cayde-6 and what follows is a tense survival mission, where you need to clear gunk from machines and then wait for Cayde-6 to complete his part. For that part, he remains tucked away safely in a control room, but that does not last long as Cayde-6 is killed and he is done in by Prince Uldren, a character that players first encountered back in the original Destiny and who seemingly was defeated, when he crashed his ship after being defeated by the dreadnaught ship, led by Onyx.

What his role is, in the grand scheme of things, is still an unknown, but given the number of baddies that litter the prison, it is unlikely he will be on his own. Bungie had announced changes to the way the weapon management would work with Forsaken, sadly, I don’t recall anything about how they work now, so I can’t compare them, but those who I was playing with, did seem to enjoy the changes, so that’s a good thing.

Forsaken aims to shake up Destiny 2, much like Taken King did for Destiny 1 and from the story portion that I played, I can’t see it, clearly the developers have more planed than they are talking about, but for now, it is just more of the same and that is not really a bad thing.