I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read “I hate Destiny 2, it’s my favorite game.” There are always complaints around you – things that don’t work or that the community wishes they didn’t – but it’s also clear that raises passions like no other. And that is something that manifests itself better in these moments, waiting for a new expansion.
Through a quick check on SteamDB, you can see that on August 24, coinciding with the airing of the long-anticipated Destiny 2 Showcase, a spike of more than 267,000 concurrent viewers was recorded on Twitch followed by more than 178,000 players concurrent on the Valve platform after finishing a maintenance.
The sales speak for themselves, too: that week, Steam’s top seller is Destiny 2: The Witch Queen Deluxe + Bungie 30th Anniversary Bundle valued at 99.99 euros. In the tenth position of the top is Destiny 2: Legendary Edition, which includes all previous expansions. Meanwhile, the subreddits fill with threads analyzing trailers.
Bungie is definitely having a good time.
Don’t get on your laurels, either; because there is one Second lecture more extensive after all these events. For example, after the excitement of the show, the game’s activity gradually stabilized until it returned to the ~ 60,000 simultaneous players on Steam that D2 has on a regular basis. The sales figures go through a situation similar to this.
The top 10 sales That same week it had Aliens: Fireteam Elite in second place, a double A production that realistically has it difficult to compete against a big commercial from a studio like Bungie. Below, Psychonauts 2 also coming to Xbox Game Pass; In ninth position, The Witcher 3 (2015) surpasses the Destiny 2 collection reduced to 50%.
Balancing feats and nuances, I would say that D2 is still in its vein: Bungie has a huge and fervent community. Sometimes it is “asleep” waiting for news, but every time a new expansion arrives, things like that happen. Three-quarters of the same for when raids are released or an ARG appears. In other words, you feel like The Witch Queen.
What great news have been added lately?
- Cross play is here, in addition to cross save.
- BattlEye is mandatory on PC, which will help filter out cheaters in PvP.
- Season of the Lost is running until February 2022.
- We have armor transmogrification from the previous season.
Destiny 2 the Witch Queen: what you need to know
So an MMO announces a new expansion and the community succumbs to the hype. Nothing weird around here, right? Well no. But is that this specific content is quite special for the Destiny universe, because it introduces the characters and events that will define the end of the first saga. That’s it: that plan of “the IP of ten years“In which nobody believed in his day is going through its seventh cycle, and far from losing steam, it does nothing but blow the minds of the fans.
This article is dedicated to all those who wanted to enter this exciting space opera and they got stuck on the road. Catching up on absolutely everything that has happened is very difficult, even with the appearance of a timeline in the main menu of the game; but if you just need to refresh some key concepts, you are in the right place.
The Darkness trilogy: a plan that goes on for a long time
After a somewhat forgettable foundational launch in 2017 followed by a couple of DLCs that served to introduce some important characters to the story, the first one came. great expansion by D2, Forsaken. Along with a massive injection of content, came a dark and personal story in which Uldren, brother of the insomniac queen Mara Sov, killed the prankster hunter Cayde-6 of the Vanguard. In the end he died, and was revived as a guardian.
At all levels it was a success, an evolution; But if we compare Forsaken with the equivalent expansion (in terms of size and price) of D1, The Taken King, we find that a component of greatness was missing. Of cosmic gods, of threats to universal scale. But instead, Bungie just planted a seed with the last words by Uldren.
“The line that separates Light from Darkness is very thin, do you know what side are you on? “What a way to go to the other neighborhood. Back then it didn’t mean much, but here we are today, manipulating the Darkness itself as the source of many of our abilities. in-game and negotiating a ransom with a true hive goddess. Wow.
Taking into account that the closest thing we had in D1 vanilla was a phrase from the spectrum that said “be careful [con esa espada], his power is dark “it is clear that we have taken a giant step at the narrative level. But it is a stepped step. After those parting words for the main Forsaken campaign, Shadowkeep arrived as a Foreword for what Bungie thought back then would be a final trilogy.
Beyond Light, The Witch Queen and Lightfall: That was the roadmap that was unexpectedly offered to us back in 2019. But at the beginning of this year we were told that the plans had changed, a fourth episode to shape the proper vision of the study. Now, we know its name: The Final Shape. A really suggestive name.
In other words, we are in a “Marvel’s Avengers moment” where things are lining up for a great deal. final battle where the greatest entities of the Destiny universe struggle to remain standing. The real motivation of Darkness is just that, to eliminate all mortal and imperfect things, polishing the cosmos in search of something absolute and perfect.
What is a “Savathûn” and why is it causing such a stir?
Savathûn is the villain main feature of the new Destiny 2 expansion, The Witch Queen. There, he manages to grant his entourage the powers of light, which until now had not been available to any of the enemy factions in the game. This cosmic force emanates from the Traveler that has cost us so much to protect, which effectively gives us all the right in the world to feel betrayed by a white floating sphere.
The reality is that we have known Savathûn since 2015, when D1’s The Taken King expansion introduced a series of narrative chapters in the grimoire (codex) called “Books of Pain”. In them, we are told how three scrawny princesses from planet Fundamento make a pact with the Worm Gods to avenge an act of treason in his kingdom. Those sisters they become the deities Oryx, Savathûn and Xivu Arath.
Of course, every pact is a business: you give me something, I give you something in return. The sisters had obtained a paracausal power —That is, effect without a cause — capable of annihilating entire planets and civilizations, but in return they would have to obey their own instincts forever. In the case of Savathûn, that innate talent is that of cunning, the lie, the ruse.
So he has been operating by that rule since his conversion to a hive entity, which indirectly caused the Vex to reach the solar system or end up facing the last Ahamkara in a Dream City possessed by an insurmountable cyclical curse, among many others. stuff. All that, operating in secret, from the shadows.
In other words, fans of the Destiny universe have Savathûn very present even if he never made an appearance as such. But that changes now. In recent months, the cunning queen managed to possess Osiris, the most powerful guardian of all time, to weave the threads in the Tower. And now that he is holding him hostage, he proposes a barter.
If we destroy the worm that it carries within, which is the source of its power and at the same time what will end up destroying it, it will return us to Osiris. Those events are counted in the Season of the lost, which is active until next February. As the story unfolds on the fly, there is no (intentional) way to know what happens between now and February.