So far, Bungie is threading a difficult needle in Destiny 2: Renegades
Bungie's approach to marrying Destiny 2 and Star Wars is far more thoughtful than I anticipated
In 2016, I decided to finally get my first tattoo. It wasn’t going to be something expensive, or flashy, or beautiful – I’d cover all of those bases with my second tattoo, which is a humungous sleeve on my left leg. No, for my first one, I wanted to get something that hit both my nostalgia from childhood and the political times I found myself in: the symbol of the Rebellion from Star Wars.
In the days that I watched it heal and bleed – around Christmas that year – all I could think was “rebellions are built on hope.”
That’s pretty embarrassing, right? Writing it now, knowing people will read that level of cringy sincerity from a 22 year old dipshit … it feels embarrassing. But I’ve often remembered the truth of that phrase over the last decade when my natural inclination was to turn toward cynicism and hopelessness.
And so no matter how many times I look at my forearm with disdain – for how basic and boring it is, for the amount of real estate it takes up on a part of my arm I could use on a better tattoo, for a majority of modern Star Wars – I think back to why I got it in the first place and it soothes me.
It gives me hope.
When I flew to Bellevue Washington earlier this month, I had two big questions for Bungie when it came to Destiny 2: Renegades – a one-of-a-kind Destiny 2 expansion that is directly inspired by Star Wars, so much so that Bungie collaborated with Lucasfilm Games to make it happen.
The first question was “is Renegades going to fix Destiny 2?” That’s a trick question, because I already knew the answer going in: “no.” But I was still hopeful when I sat down on the plane and arrived at my hotel. Because I was deeply curious (albeit mostly skeptical) about the answer to my second question: “can Bungie successfully mix Destiny with Star Wars to make Destiny 2 interesting again?”
Here, we’re going to answer that second question before we loop back around to the first.
Destiny 2: Renegades kicks off in media res, with the gang – you, Eido, Drifter, Eris, and a Warlock of the Praxic order that’ll be a new face to most Guardians, Aunor – being chased by a giant Cabal vessel. But this isn’t just any Cabal faction, it’s a new empire that’s come seemingly out of nowhere, and they’re trying to get back a data disc that Drifter stole from them before the story began.
If that sounds at least vaguely familiar, congratulations, you remember the first 15 minutes of the 1977 classic: Star Wars.
The clear homages continue with a smokey blaster shootout during a breach sequence, which leads to sneaking onto the ship to face down a bunch of Cabal in white armor standing on reflective black tile. You then accidentally get navigated into the trash compactor before rescuing Drifter who has been frozen in a Stasis block. And the whole thing ends with a battle in the hanger with two Cabal AT-ST-ass walkers and a lightsaber fight cutscene between Aunor and the definitely-not-Kylo-Ren baddie, Dredgen Bael.
That probably sounds derivative and a little trite. But to my genuine shock, it really worked for me.
See, Renegades pulls from Star Wars a lot in the slice of the campaign I played, as well as the Lawless Frontier activity and the new social hub. But it’s not on the nose the way other Star Wars references have been in Destiny’s past, because it doesn’t have to be: Bungie has the Star Wars license for this expansion. So when a blaster goes off, it sounds like a blaster. Not a cute Bungie twist on a blaster, an actual Star Wars blaster.
That idea carries forward to the rest of the visuals and effects. The Praxic Blade may not be called a lightsaber in-game, but it sure as hell sounds, looks, acts, and plays like one. I know they call one of the maps Venus, but the sinking ship in the middle of it sure makes it feel like Dagoba.
Going in, I was beyond skeptical that this blend would work. I thought it would be forced and cheap, and I thought that it would ruin two things I love by smashing them together, like Airheads on pizza. And I had good reason to feel that way given previous branding team-ups in Destiny 2. I’ll be no fun and tell you that I hated the Witcher 3 tub sitting in Mara’s chamber a few seasons back, or the silver and iron swords resting against them. I throw up a little whenever I see someone dressed in full Stormtropper Titan armor, OK? (I do like being able to play as a Titan with a cape when using the Darth Vader set, so thanks for that one, Bungie). The Fortniteification of Destiny makes the world feel small. And it makes the game feel like an advertisement for something else entirely.
But Renegades feels different. It’s telling a Destiny story with Destiny characters, but in a Star Wars way. And not in a “it’s kind of our version of a Metroidvania” way like Edge of Fate, it’s full-on, unabashedly a Star Wars in here. And I loved that about it.
This is something that, if I were to read it in a preview like this, I would really struggle to believe it. And that’s fair, I get it. It probably just sounds like “hey, remember when that thing happened in Star Wars? What if it happened in Destiny? lol.” But Bungie has managed to thread the needle here in a way that I found extremely impressive. It still feels like Destiny in the moment, but the Star Wars of it all does more to bring a freshness to a world I’ve spent the last 11 years exploring than any Destiny expansion has in years. If The Final Shape was a nostalgia fest for Destiny, this is the opposite.
But let’s get into what really matters to most dedicated players like myself: is it going to keep my attention?
I was initially worried that there would be no new location to explore in Renegades, and that is, unfortunately, the case. However, there are three very large new maps with different zones — almost like mini-patrol spaces or a Helldivers map, if that helps you — that take place on Mars, Venus, and Europa.
The maps all look amazing and I loved that they felt like new places on existing planets — a reminder that these celestial bodies are much bigger than the single patrol zones we usually get to see on them. They also each house a bunch of varied objectives for the Lawless Frontiers game mode, which sees you running around smuggling out Exotic engrams, chasing down bounties, sabotaging baddies, etc.
What I didn’t love as much about the maps is the way Bungie uses them to supplement some campaign missions. Similar to Edge of Fate, there are a small handful of big campaign missions that take place in bespoke locations, and then there are smaller ones that take place on these Lawless Frontiers maps. These smaller missions aren’t bad, but they pale in comparison to the bigger set piece missions (like the intro one) or the Exotic mission where you get the lightsaber (Praxic Blade), which is part of the campaign.
If I have a fear with the campaign, it’s that it’ll have the opposite problem to Edge of Fate and be a little too short – which, based on what I’ve played, I’m pretty sad about. But even if that is the case, I do think the narrative is already quite compelling, and Bungie has done a really excellent job of continuing the Edge of Fate story into this Star Wars-themed expansion so it doesn’t just feel like a side quest.
So if the campaign might be done relatively quickly, what will keep us coming back? Well, there’s the dungeon, obviously, which I haven’t played, so we’ll assume that’ll be good for some weekly runs. The Lawless Frontier is the most obvious candidate for “Destiny expansion time suck,” and it’s a huge level up from anything in Edge of Fate.
As I mentioned earlier, The Lawless Frontier takes place on the three new maps and has you completing various Star Wars-ass jobs during the match. There’s some extra juice there to keep things spicy — like opt-in invasions from other players and calling down powerful abilities like Cabal Drop Pods — and there are plenty of interesting objectives to make it feel new. But, ultimately, Lawless Frontier is in a pretty similar vein to Onslaught and Overthrow.
What will keep the Lawless Frontier interesting — and what sets it apart from Edge of Fate — is the ecosystem Bungie has built around it, namely the factions in Tharsis Outpost, the new Mos Eisley Cantina-like social hub. There’s the Pikers, a technicolor group of atheistic Fallen; Totality Division, a band of rebellious Cabal that serve some cunty Psions; and the most interesting of the bunch, Tharsis Reformation, a group of sentient Vex that have insane drip.
Before gaming in Lawless Frontier each day, you can pledge yourself to these groups and submit currency to level up their reputation tracks. These tracks not only reward faction-specific weapons, they also give unique cosmetics. But, more importantly, they give Guardians something meaningful and, critically, new to do outside of the Portal.
The factions are rad, but The Lawless Frontier will primarily draw players in with the new gear, which is all stellar. The new blaster weapons – which all trade out traditional reloads for a heat venting system and perfect reload mechanic – are some of the coolest and most powerful weapons I’ve seen added to the game in years. There are hand cannons, pulse rifles, machine guns, submachine guns, sidearms, and more all under this new blaster archetype, and they’re all so satisfying to shoot.
Because of the game’s current state, I was initially very worried that I’d get the roll I wanted on all the guns – which is very easy with a Tier 5, considering you get three perks per column – and then bounce. But by the time I left Bungie, I wanted a truly god-rolled version of every weapon coming with Renegades, with great options in all three columns. Will that elongate the game until the next content update? I very much doubt that, and it’s a problem I do wonder if Bungie can solve, but I’m interested enough in the loot that I’ll be spending a lot more time than I originally anticipated building out my arsenal (thank god for the 300 extra Vault Slots).
But why do all the cool guns, the sick-ass Exotic lightsaber, the interesting story, and the cool factions matter if Renegades was never going to be able to “fix” everything that’s been broken in Destiny 2 for years, let alone the misguided shakeups from The Edge of Fate? Because, as much as players like to point toward big expansions like The Taken King and Forsaken as “transformative” moments in the franchise, they were always preceded by stepping stones. The original Destiny took notable strides forward with House of Wolves before The Taken King, and – most obviously – Destiny 2 was primed for a resurgence because of Warmind, the expansion that preceeded Forsaken.
My hope with Renegades, and the feeling that I got from my time with it, is that it’s this era’s Warmind.
It’s not the return to a golden era of the game. I highly doubt people will finish it and go “wow, that was Final Shape-level good.” But it was never going to be that. What it can be is a turning point — a move in a better, healthier direction for this game that we, the Guardians, have spent thousands of hours in together. It’s exciting and it’s bold. As hard as it is to look past The Portal, and the power grind, and the other mistakes of The Edge of Fate, it’s clear that the game has changed drastically since that expansion launched over the summer. And what little I’ve seen of Renegades does an excellent job highlighting that.
Bungie started Destiny over a decade ago by blasting us with a Paul McCartney music video about hope. And despite all of us being disappointed by the initial game at launch, by the sequel at launch, and at low points like Curse of Osiris, Shadowkeep, and Lightfall, Bungie has always managed to live up to that hope eventually, and bounce the game back to the places we all dreamed it could during the dark times.
After The Edge of Fate, that Destiny doomer hopelessness felt stronger than ever before, and nobody I talked to at Bungie would deny for a moment that it’s been a very difficult six months for the game. But walking out of Bungie, and sitting in my hotel room thinking about my time with Renegades, I felt a new hope. I had hope that we might see a great era of Destiny again. I had hope that Renegades could be the spark that puts us on a path to a game that’s worth the pain that Edge of Fate brought. I had hope that this darker period is not the end for Destiny.
And so my brief time with Renegades has given me exactly what I needed it to give me after the past six months: hope for the future.
Transparency note: Bungie provided travel accommodations for the visit to their headquarters. However, there are no restrictions from Bungie on how critical we could be of the content we saw at the event. Bungie did not review or demand edits on this preview before it was published.
