The anticipation levels are ramping up as the release of the Destiny 2: The Witch Queen expansion gets closer. The lore within Destiny 2 has been inching towards this moment and fans cannot wait to get their hands on the new expansion. In an effort to stoke the fire in Guardians even more, the Creative Director of The Witch Queen expansion expanded on things seen in trailers and revealed new information.
James Tsai sat with Game Informer for an exclusive interview and continued to sow the seeds of anticipation and intrigue for The Witch Queen expansion. Bungie has been setting the table and leaving crumbs for lore-craving Guardians about this expansion's big villain, Savathun. The hype for The Witch Queen has resulted in over 1 Million pre-orders and more players are potentially returning or becoming New Lights leading up to the release. He claims that the campaign will be much different than anything Bungie has done in the past with its yearly campaigns.
Tsai details that The Witch Queen Expansion entails new challenges and mechanics for Guardians at any level of experience to get used to. Tsai specifically said there would be gameplay mechanics that were previously only found in raids and other post-campaign content being brought into Savathun's Throne World and other Witch Queen play areas that will make Guardians throw away old notions of how they've beaten campaign story missions before. Keywords in the interview that came up often were "intrigue" and "mystery" when describing this area that spawned from the machinations of her mind.
We call it the definitively Destiny campaign,” Tsai says. “It’s about bringing some of the awesome grandeur of some of our endgame aspirational feel into the campaign itself. Soaring through these really cool environmental setpieces. Memorable encounters that take a lot of thought and understanding. Bringing puzzles into the campaign for players. There’s a really reinvigorated focus on the campaign in this release.
With these new challenges come new rewards as Tsai also stated that new versions of the campaign will drop Legendary armor sets and weapons and potentially even exotics in the Throne World area. The Classic and Legendary campaign missions will entice Guardians to continue farming for more powerful weapons and gear for the impending raid and challenging Nightfall activities after the campaign. These modes have increased enemy numbers, more stacked modifiers, and will also adapt to fireteam size as Tsai said, with the intention of bringing rewarding experiences whether a Guardian plays solo or with a Fireteam.
All this with the threat of new Hive enemies with Resurrection and other abilities previously exclusive to Light-bearing Guardians, Savathun's Lucent Brood is set to change the Destiny universe forever. All these new gameplay elements are setting up the Witch Queen expansion to be the new high mark in both storytelling and new gameplay mechanics that The Taken King and Forsaken expansions did for the game in the past.
Destiny 2 is out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S with The Witch Queen expansion set to release on February 22nd.
Source: Game Informer
