So Destiny 1 was a pretty weird game. It had stellar gameplay married to an absolute failure of a story that occasionally aspired to making sense. Its gameplay was so strong that not only did I end up buying the game twice (for PS3 and PS4), I also sunk hundreds of hours into its grindy sandbox.
Naturally, Destiny 2 was of interest to me. Not only did Bungie promise to not make the same mistakes again (they even promised that they'd tell the story of the game entirely within the game, which you'd think isn't something that would need to be specified), they also seemed to center the campaign around the Cabal, one of D1's most interesting but least developed factions.
And now, Destiny 2 has arrived. It's really good, let's get that out of the way first. Its story isn't mindblowing in its execution, but at least the game has a story now, with characters and motivations and other things Destiny only gained in its Taken King DLC. I don't know whather it's a story that would resonate with people who are coming new to the show (enemy factions aren't introduced so much as shown to exist; If you don't know what the Hive, Vex or Fallen are about before starting the game, I think you'd be hard-pressed to figure it out by playing Destiny 2 alone).
The game, in its current state, reads very much like a reboot of the franchise. Gone is all the high-concept talk of "Light" and "Darkness" (I can't even off-hand remember any line of dialogue in the game that references "Darkness", something D1 wouldn't shut up about), instead we have a story of an invading force that literally got into ur place and started killing all ur guys because you have power that they would very much like to possess themselves. The big important places we fought over and characters we fought against in Destiny 1 are hardly ever mentioned, only Oryx (big baddie of The Taken King) gets a bit of a nod here and there.
This is of course a bit of a disappointment to me; for me (as a total lorehound), the complete discarding of the story threads the first game opened up leaves a bad taste in my metaphorical mouth. There were some very interesting things being done there, and to see them not get mentioned is bad (That being said, I can understand their desire to establish a new clean slate and then bring over old threads).
So yeah. Destiny 2. If you liked D1 or Halo, check it out.
