A glowing praise and modest critique of Renegades

1)) The story is good. Not great— it’s weaker than EoF— but I still enjoyed it and it has many good aspects. It’s simpler, very short and sweet, and feels like a strong middle chapter in this new saga, meant to push things forward.

2)) Gameplay wise, EoF was such a boring slog. Renegades is more bombastic, it really does feel like you’re fighting an entire empire by yourself. The Renegade abilities are actually useful, fun to play with, and not forcefully shoehorned like the Dark Matter abilities. I didn’t mind the Renegades campaign being a cakewalk, because the entire game has been way too hard for 5 months.

2)) Dredgen Bael is one of the more menacing villains we’ve had in this franchise. The attack on Tharsis was the most outwardly evil thing we’ve seen on-screen in 11 years. Seriously, think about it. Ghaul killed people off screen. Uldren killed one guardian. Bael slaughters dozens of guardians and ghosts at once, which traumatizes poor Eido. The twist with him being a lightless human was awesome and opens up so many interesting questions.

3)) Just a perfect on screen debut for Aunor Mahal. I’m a lore nerd and she’s been one of my favorite characters for a long time. This is not how I imagined her at all, and I think reframing the Praxic Order as essentially Jedi was a really cool direction to take. It is bullshit that the Praxics are still hung up on people using Darkness, and it was nice to see Aunor get called out on this. She also hates Drifter and rides him way too hard for much of it.

4)) The devs were right, this is firmly a Destiny story that borrows the aesthetic and tone of Star Wars. It is a seamless blend of two IPs. The reason this works is because so many elements of the Destiny universe naturally lend themselves to the Star Wars lens. This is incredibly strange, unique, and experimental, and while I hope this is a one time thing, I would not object to collaborations like this in the future.

Some not-so-minor gripes:

1)) This isn’t a problem with the story itself but it still affected the experience: dialogue wasn’t playing properly at times. This happened basically every time I launched, and only a couple times during a mission. I never missed anything important, but some jokes and minor character bits got skipped, which was annoying.

2)) We don’t need funny Ghost sidekicks anymore. This type of character can be a thing of the past. I liked Blue, she’s more interesting than Immaru or Fynch, and her role in the story made sense and felt necessary. But the voice direction was really jarring, even if I get what they were going for.

3)) As much as I loved Bael, his motivation for hating the guardians was really weak. The Vanguard have literally never done anything wrong, and we save the world once every three months. I think it would have been okay for Bael to just be evil. He’s part of a death cult and a magic space deity is telling him what to do, that’s enough motivation for him.

4)) I’m fully over exotic missions. I can’t quite put my finger on why I don’t like them. They feel like a mandatory piece of the destiny formula, we get one with basically every content release. The last one that I enjoyed was Presage 5 years ago. Something as significant as the Praxic Blade deserved its own story mission, or maybe a long and involved exotic quest, but these missions are no longer unique or interesting.

5)) Still not sold on The Nine as the main villains. The “speaking through a vessel” trope is already getting a bit tired, and considering the direction the story is heading, we’re going to see this a lot more. It feels like we’re back at square one in a way— The Darkness was an amorphous, inaccessible idea for 8 years before we got The Witness. The Nine are like this too, we don’t have a tangible, front facing main villain. They’re all supposed to have different personalities but this is presented as showing up and screaming weird random words every once in a while.