Curse of Osiris begins after the events of Destiny 2. The mysterious Warlock Osiris has vanished, and a new Vex threat has surfaced on Mercury. Pushed by Ikora Rey to investigate, you and your Ghost set your sights on the planet closest to the Sun in the hopes of saving Osiris and defeating this new threat. The Vex have always been the most interesting of Destiny 2 Weapons’s five alien species. Unlike the others, we don’t know what motivates them to convert planets and who their allegiance belongs too. Likewise, the character of Osiris has been hyped up over the past three years through the Grimoire and Brother Vance, which means that there should be an interesting story here. Unfortunately, there isn’t. In fact, Curse of Osiris’ storytelling is a regression back to Vanilla Destiny.
That's Protheon's big mechanic. Once you get him down to a certain damage point, he drops out the floor beneath you and lands you in a new arena. He does this three times throughout the fight. The difficult part about Protheon is that he plays floor's lava with you. When he gets pissed enough, he'll slam his fist on the ground and burn the entirety of the floor, which forces you to jump up on some small platforms. All this does, however, is put you in the line of sight of Protheon, who has two different weapons with which to take you down. It's a tough fight, but it's interesting and different, and that's what we want. I will say, however, that the rest of the strike is pretty mundane. Save for the couple of interesting set pieces I mentioned earlier, it's kind of simple. It doesn't have many interesting mechanics, but it is short, so running it over and over as you grind will at least be quick. So again, if all of the strikes in Destiny 2 are short and simple but also take you through a new and interesting setting with a neat boss at the end, then sign me up for more.
For all that can be said about Curse of Osiris’ disappointing content, it can’t be denied that Mercury is a beautiful place to visit. The Vex architecture that litters the landscape is as fascinating to take in as ever, and the brief glimpses at Mercury before its transformation are astounding. If only we had more space and time to play around in these fascinating playgrounds.
Casual players are the single largest audience in gaming; there’s no getting around it. This is the audience that every major publisher wants to appeal to; the one group that every development studio hopes will latch onto their game. After all, capturing the attention of the casual or mainstream audience usually means massive success and wondrous profit. So it’s understandable that they, publishers especially, would have a vested interest in making their games more accessible and appealing to that audience. Making that appeal often means simplification. The simpler the game is, the more accessible it is, the more mainstream appeal it can have. While there’s nothing innately wrong with making one’s game more accessible to the wider gaming audience, doing so always comes at a cost. Just as a game cannot be both simple and complex, neither can it simultaneously serve its niche and successfully appeal to the mainstream audience. Therefore compromises must be made, usually ones that rob the game of what made it special in the first place.
On the moon you find a deceased Guardian, not to mention a mysterious figure shadowing you. It’s revealed that the Hive have been in contact with an unknown presence are making preparations for an invasion of Earth, something you need to stop. Thus, you dive deeper into the Hive ruins only to find the Sword of Crota. By destroying this, the Hive’s communications have ceased with the unknown force, and for the remainder of the vanilla story, the Hive threat has been squashed. Unfortunately, they’re not the major problem as the mysterious figure who has been stalking you hails you to Venus.
There's a lot going on in this Beta, even though it's relatively small with not a lot to do. The changes so far are mostly positive, showing promise for the real thing. Destiny 2 comes to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 6 and then to PC on October 24, so there's not much time left.
Getting back to the main story, though, you kill one version of Oryx in his chambers, but that’s not good enough, so you need to track him down once more in the Ascendant Realm and put the final nail in his coffin. This come in the form of the lengthy and well organize raid.
Many familiar faces filled the screen as the hour of Destiny 2 played out, characters any player could recognize (Holiday did look slick flying that ship.) Destiny 2 means introducing new faces to the fold, folks that may have been there the whole time, but Guardians were to busy running around the galaxy to pay attention too. At least, that’s what I like to think. Getting down on the people's level though, actually coming down from their Tower, Guardians will hopefully see firsthand the struggles that the Last City had to go through on a daily basis. New places and new faces means new content. Guardians always had a pretentiousness about them. I enjoyed my Guardian, but it felt like we were all on a high horse policing the universe without a care for those we were actually supposed to be protecting. This isn’t a new concept, though, even having been written into the lore. It's known that children are told stories at night about Guardians to frighten them. Protectors or a something worse? Guardians are undead soldiers after all, Zavalas haunting speech while returning over and over again, shook me. My guardian has done this exact thing, but actually seeing the impact and hearing how twisted it sounded made me feel like one of the children that lives in the Last City.