Puzzles have been an integral part of Destiny since day one, but Destiny 2: The Witch Queen‘s story campaign placed greater emphasis on them than ever before–without reducing the importance of weapons. The Witch Queen campaign is the closest Destiny 2 has ever been to feeling like a story-driven single-player game, balancing weapon combat with those delicious Void 3.0 character builds and non-combat gameplay. Battling my way through the solo Legendary campaign and experiencing puzzles that are usually seen in multiplayer activities was enlivening. Using my brain and my new weapons elevated the campaign experience and proves that Bungie should look for more opportunities to let players engage with its game world in ways that involve more than just shooting enemies.
Destiny lore branches off into tons of other stories that can be best told without gunplay. Puzzles are a core component of Destiny, whether it’s in Exotic missions, raids, dungeons, or the numerous alternate reality games (ARGs) that the Destiny community comes together to solve; the satisfaction of cracking the code is the most enjoyable part of experiencing Destiny for many. These mechanics, usually reserved for endgame content, meshed so well with the campaign story because Destiny finally placed non-combat mechanics at the center of everything.
Moments like in The Ritual mission, where incorrectly completing the puzzle caused Savathun to laugh at our incompetence while enemies flooded the area, created an exciting atmosphere because I wasn’t just shooting at hordes of enemies to get through the room. It’s that balance of puzzles and combat we need to see more of in Destiny. It controlled the story’s rhythm in a game where players normally rush through enemies, it pushed us to be aware of our surroundings, and it made us feel the threat of this antagonist instead of merely being told to fear the enemy.
By integrating more puzzles, The Witch Queen enhances its story and plays into Savathun’s trickery and even the concept of accessing memory through the Darkness. But it took Bungie a while to get to this point because puzzles outside of endgame content didn’t always go well. The Niobe Labs puzzle in Season of the Forge from 2018 required players to use Black Armory weapons to complete an in-game puzzle. Many fans felt this excluded most gamers, who might not be skilled in decrypting complicated codes, and that only those partaking in this puzzle race would care about it–some players even went as far as saying that Bungie shouldn’t experiment with these methods in-game because Destiny is supposed to be a shooter. We’ve experienced a plethora of puzzles in Destiny that have included solving riddles, navigating mazes, uncovering hidden meanings of symbols, and the most challenging of all, jumping across vast chasms. Puzzles aren’t mutually exclusive to first-person shooters, and Destiny is the best example of that. And critically, these mechanics often relate to the story, whether they involve Techeun abilities or Hive runic magic. Understandably, in-game puzzles like Niobe Labs may have felt exclusionary, but The Witch Queen campaign had puzzles that any player could solve without needing to pull up an infographic like you’re solving one of Bungie’s ARGs.
The Witch Queen used a variety of non-combat mechanics to progress the story with approachable puzzles through Deepsight. Post-campaign, the Altar of Reflection missions utilizes puzzles and combat, and concludes missions with a bit of lore–and these puzzles don’t affect the replayability of these missions, either.
An order memory puzzle in Altar of Reflection: Catalyst.
The implementation of puzzles in The Witch Queen is so successful that their absence in some areas stands out more than ever before, as demonstrated by the Evidence Board. Given the concept, I was expecting to carry on the psychic-detective role-play of the story through puzzles, mystery-solving, and Deepsight–but was instead met with numerous runs of the six-player Wellspring activity to earn weapons I needed to advance. I wouldn’t mind the grindiness if I were required to play a plain old quest, but this felt way off from the advancements made in this DLC, which is particularly disappointing for a questline that is ostensibly meant to be an investigation–ripe territory for puzzles.
The multiple mini-quests from the Evidence Board are meant to progress the research of Ikora’s Hidden intelligence group (and reward players with an Exotic Glaive), but they focus on tasks that feel unrelated to the story being told. Logging reports at the Board leads to reading multiple sentences about the findings we somehow made by killing the Scorn or Champions. The significance of Deepsight, used throughout the campaign as our secret tool for solving these types of mysteries, was minimized in the Evidence Board quests, and it’s a shame those interesting puzzle mechanics weren’t allowed to shine alongside combat.
Telling an intense story like this in a multiplayer first-person shooter requires Bungie to step away from potentially redundant combat and engage players in more puzzles and mechanics, outside of endgame activities. Seasons do a great job of maintaining Destiny 2’s story while introducing new PvE combat modes, and we’ve seen how Bungie tries to make Destiny 2 into something more than just a game where you fight against the bad aliens. We still care about the loot, the weapons and their rolls, their feel, and their unique abilities–but where Destiny’s story is at now, more needs to happen in the game than gunplay. The Witch Queen was a good start, proving that non-combat gameplay and additional mechanics can be just as interesting as the shooting ones.
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