Destiny 2: Black Armory: Forge Onward, Guardian.

The revamp that Forsaken brought to Destiny 2 was sorely needed, giving it the shot in the arm that many players were longing for. To be sure it was aimed primarily at a certain crowd, those who make Destiny their hobby, but at this point in the game’s life those are the ones who Bungie needs to please the most. For myself it was a reawakening of that original Destiny spirit I had been longing for, giving me enough drive to grind out gear for the raid and ultimately, for the first time in a long while, max out my character at 600 light after some 41 more hours after I wrote my review. So when I saw Black Armory was coming out, the first of its kind of mini-expansions, I was intrigued to jump back in to see some new content and maybe even try the new raid in the first week.

Unfortunately it seems those many hours I put in beforehand just got me a ticket to the dance. To really enjoy the new mini-dlc fully I’d have to go back to the grind.

Black Armory gives you an extremely short bit of story which introduces Ada-1, the purveyor of the DLC’s namesake. Essentially they’re a weapon maker whose clientele is those not blessed with power, I.E. not you, guardian. However your relationship with The Spider has granted you access to them and Ada-1 quickly puts you to task in reclaiming their forge in order for them to start cranking out weapons again. So after about an hour or so of following a quest chain to unlock the first forge you’re then introduced to the game’s new mode, a kind of revamp of the escalation protocol with a few new mechanics thrown in the mix.

Jumping into this headfirst on day 1 wasn’t the greatest experience, something that was echoed by many other 600 light level players who tried the new content day 1. The main issue was that the light level for the first encounter started out at around 610, topping out at 630 for the final boss. This meant for those of us diving headfirst into the new encounter, especially considering it was a matchmade event, were usually met with defeat. Bungie then lowered the light level by 5, which made it a little more doable but still anything but easy even for previously maxed characters, necessitating a need to go back and begin the same grind out all over again. For some this is a non issue, indeed there were numerous examples of people reaching 640+ after the first day, but for those of us playing a single character with little interest in redoing much of the grind we just went through this experience didn’t resonate well.

You see for those who run 3 characters the 50 light level bump isn’t going to mean a lot to them, maybe a week or two of their regular grind in order to get there. For people like me though, who run a single character since that’s all they have time for, that level cap is more like 3+ weeks worth of work. That puts half of this expansion’s content (I.E. the raid) out of reach for some time. With the lack of story or other interesting activities to keep driving me forward, like the ever changing Dreaming City dialogue and ascendant challenges, the will to plough through the grind again just wasn’t there. To be sure part of this is to blame on expectations, I was somewhat hoping for a little bit of a campaign that would then plonk me into a new set of activities to grind but instead what I got was mostly the old grind with a few new things tacked onto it. I’ve already done my dash on that part and really have no interest in re-grinding all the same things again just so I can run the raid a couple times.

I think it’s clear that this kind of expansion isn’t really designed with players like me in mind. Forsaken was, to be sure, a rather long and drawn out grind but there were enough new and cool things to push me forward towards an ultimate goal. Black Armory adds all of the key trappings that used to keep me coming back but lacks that hook to keep driving me forward. This isn’t to say it’s a bad expansion, more that it’s directed at a certain subset of players who’ve been craving some kind of new content for a little while now that they’ve run the raid, got all their curated rolls and haven’t had much of a reason to login for the past month or so. I’m not one of those players, I had a goal of running the raid, which I did, then it progressed into completely smashing the raid with the best weapons, gear and mods available, and I did that too. Now though I don’t feel compelled to grind forges for new weapons, seek out the new exotics or even look into the raid. Maybe that’s because I have other games to fill that need that Destiny once met or maybe it’s due to the lack of story content, maybe it’s all those things but the long and the short of it is I don’t see much reason to log back into Destiny to play through Black Armory.

I don’t begrudge Bungie for releasing Black Armory like this though, they’re making content for their dedicated player base and I’m simply not one of them. I come back for every expansion, play it until I’ve had my fill and then I leave it again waiting until I’ve got a good reason to invest my time in it again. This time around I simply didn’t find that one hook, that one thing that pushes me to want to achieve something. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, indeed it seems a lot of people are finding their own reasons to keep playing it, just it didn’t surface in time for me. Maybe the additional content drips for Black Armory will tempt me back eventually but, for now, Destiny 2 will remain on ice for me.

Rating: 7.0/10

Destiny 2: Black Armory is available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One right now as part of the Annual Pass for $34.99. Total time spent in the expansion was about 3 hours, with total playtime in Destiny 2 now totalling 171 hours.