Destiny 2

System played: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
DLC completed: Yes
Logged at review time: Approximately 35 hours.
Experience: Finished everything in Vanilla. Total playtime of 443 hours.

Curse of Osiris is the first of two DLC's that release for Destiny 2 in its first year. After exactly one year, we will get a grand expansion similar to Taken King, after which we will get another two smaller DLC's over that year. This DLC adds a new small storyline, two new Strikes, a new small patrol zone on Mercury, a new endgame activity in the Infinite Forrest and a new Raid Lair. It sounds like a good chunk of content, but it turns out to be burned through very quickly.

Curse of Osiris has had a rocky reception in its first few days after release. The story missions that were added are largely solid and actually go beyond my expectations. There are new environments and it looks like a lot of work went into them. The new antogonist, Penoptes, looks great and results in an active and fun final boss fight. The various locals you visit look incredible too. Unfortunately, some of the new missions reuse previous environments too much. The first mission of the campaign looked fantastic, but I was disappointed to see the second mission just had me return to Io from Vanilla, and retread the same area's I had already been in a million times before. The new campaign splits the difference between new and old environments and while my experience was largely pretty good because the new locals were so amazing, it was still disappointing it wasn't an all-new set story.

The new patrol zone, Mercury is amazing in the sense that previous Destiny DLC's had never introduced a new area to explore before. Both The Dark Below and House of Wolves were smaller DLC's similar to Curse of Osiris that only featured new missions and endgame activities. Unfortunately, Mercury is the smallest zone introduced in Destiny to date. While this is expected and not a bad thing at first glance since it is a small DLC, the area is so small that you can get from one end of the map to the other in as little as 40 seconds. You cannot call your sparrow in this area, likely because it would make it feel even smaller that way. There also isn't a lot to explore in this zone, it having exactly one Lost Sector that is once again just put on your map before you've even located it.

The area looks very nice, but is uninteresting in the sense that it is just a circle of land. There are no interesting transition sections or branching paths. As a result, even though it is a new area which Destiny has never done before in a small DLC, it feels throwaway and a zone I actually felt discouraged to play in since it only has one Public Event that spawns once every 7 minutes or so, which is an incredibly long time to wait for. For reference, other area's have this too, but because there are 5-7 locations for Public Events in them, there is one that happens usually every minute or two. You also cannot call your Sparrow on Mercury, making it a chore to get around even if the area is small. As a result, playing in the new zone is fun for a little bit at first, but you'll quickly go back to old zones to get done what you want to get done.

The new endgame activity, the Infinite Forrest is a cool concept that immediately shouts to be fleshed out more. As it stands, newly introduced Heroic Adventures are the only thing that one can do here, and only 3 a day. The progress of the Infinite Forrest is cool, you enter it and it forms somewhat randomly as you go, climaxing in you time traveling to the past, future or present to kill a boss in a wonderfully designed arena. In practice, it results in you skipping most of the actual Forrest and going straight to the ending zone, kill the boss quick which is easy because they are basically just Majors, not actual bosses, collect your loot and be done.

It immediately stood out to me that the Infinite Forrest lends itself well for something akin to Diablo's Greater Rifts. A real challenge and a real reason to kill enemies with powerful loot at the end. But alas, while challenging on Heroic, most enemies can be skipped, the boss is no real threat and the loot is uninteresting random drops that drop from any source regardless. There is no unique loot to these adventures that I know of.

Heroic Strikes are back and they are admittedly a lot of fun to play, but there are no modifiers and still no unique loot to actually run them for. There are 12 or so unique weapons to collect by grinding out materials and forging them into one of these twelve weapons, which is cool, but the four weapons available in the first week so far are all subpar to existing meta-weapons. It could be the case that the other 8 are gr8 (had to do it), but I won't hold my breath for that.

Coupled with the Curse of Osiris release is a string of quality of life updates. These are all quite nice, but given the fact that they honestly should have been part of the original release and the fact that they are available to all players (as it should be), not just the ones that bought Curse of Osiris, I'll leave them for what it is.

All this given, I enjoyed my time with the campaign (even though Bungie seems allergic to fleshing out their core characters in the lore such as Osiris) but felt the rest of it was pretty bare bones. Not just bare bones, but also lacking substance. I don't fully understand why the meta-weapons of Vanilla are not being trumped or at least competed with by the weapons introduced in the unique forging questline. The amount of Exotics added is also very limited, with two Exotic armor pieces for each class and one Exotic that every class has access to, which is admittedly a very cool Exotic armor concept in its unique ability. I believe around four new Exotic weapons were added as well. The problem is that the bulk of them are returning Exotics from D1. Prometheus Lens is the only truly new Exotic not seen in D1, and it is just an alter ego of an existing Exotic in D2: Coldheart. The Exotic armor also features returning Exotics from D1, though there are a few new ones in here as well.

It was an unfortunate start for the DLC to kick off with. However, the last piece of content added in this DLC launched a few days after which is the Raid Lair. In D1, Bungie never had the time to create a fully-fledged Raid with each small DLC. For D2, they are adding a Lair to the existing latest Raid with each small expansion. The Lair is basically a new, much smaller Raid with all new encounters set on the same locale as the existing Raid, in this case Leviathan. It doesn't add to the existing Raid, it merely adds a new smaller Raid to that location. So you can complete Calus' Raid or do the Lair (or both of course) but you don't mix them in a single activity.

The Lair features all-new environments too except for the entrance which is still the same as Calus' Raid. You enter a different door in the first few seconds and from then forth you won't see a familiar area you've been to before again. Without spoiling too much, you delve deeper into the Leviathan instead of exploring its top side. You'll eventually find Vex, the enemies around which the expansion is built around, and a very interesting and extremely fun final boss to fight. It is right up there with the regular Raid in terms of challenge, if not moreso. As someone who is not a fan of standing on plates to get things done, I was very pleased by the design of the combat encounters in this Raid as it is very freeform and allows various strategies to defeat the boss, similar to Aksis in Wrath of the Machine.

I never expected a lot of content from this DLC simply because I knew it was going to be a small DLC, not a Taken King style expansion. Nevertheless, the same amount of content could have switched things up a lot more and allowed more replayability without having to add more content, just tweaking how they work a bit. In conclusion I found the base content to be disappointing for this reason. But when that Lair came out and I played it, I have to admit I am not bummed about spending money on this at all. In fact, I would probably spend that money just on the Lair. Therefor if I had to make the decision to buy this again, I would purchase it without hesitation. Raids are some of the most fun experiences I've ever had in videogames. That said, it doesn't excuse the lack of creativity with the rest of the content put in this expansion and while I would rate the Lair a full five-stars easily as an isolated experience, Bungie can and should do a whole lot better with the rest of the stuff in this DLC-package.