What I Learned Spending an Hour Shooting the Final Boss in the Latest Destiny Expansion While Hiding Underneath the Stairs

Last night, I spent the better part of an hour shooting the final boss of Lightfall, the latest expansion for Destiny, hiding underneath a flight of stairs, whittling away at their health until victory. “This exceeds my wildest imaginations,” screamed Calus, a towering monster capable of starting interstellar wars but not peeking underneath a staircase. I’d given the boss a few, genuine tries before throwing up my hands and seeking help on the dark web.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Every video game has cheese stats, ways of subverting what the designers are asking of players. (This is a video game that used to have a loot cave, after all.) Some of my favorite experiences, notably the Souls games, are famous for demanding near perfection from players, only to be immediately undermined by players doing something as simple as tricking an enemy into walking off a ledge and quickly dying.

But it got me thinking, as it seems to happen every few years: how did I end up here again?

Destiny, if you can believe it, is almost 10 years old. The 2014 launch of the original Destiny marked the start of what would become, after a bumpy start, a landmark mashup of shooters and MMOs. It’s a towering achievement that suckered many companies to waste money chasing after it. It also, sadly, marked the beginning of the end of my love affair with the studio, when it became clear the developer I fell for, the one behind legendary single-player missions like Halo’s “The Silent Cartographer” and Halo 2’s “Metropolis,” had new ambitions.

A lot of people love Destiny, and I’m happy for them. I’m also bitter, clearly, but happy. Mostly. The launch of Lightfall last week coincided with its most concurrent players ever on Steam. Destiny does not need to change for me, because the people who play it are clearly in love with it. They seem to complain about everything Bungie does? But they still love it, and the mark of having made a good game is whether angry people will keep coming back.

The much funnier part, of course, is the not-angry-just-disappointed people come back, too.

I have, over and over, tried to tell myself that, and never learn my lesson. I wrote about this all the way back in 2014, when I beat Destiny’s first campaign and tried to make sense of it.

“In one world, we have the traditional way I approach games. It's me vs. the world, a solo journey,” said a much younger version of me in 2014. “In that case, it feels weird to play a game that seems as though it's meant for you, but it's not. It's an illusion. This looks like Halo, it plays like Halo, but, oh boy, this is definitely not Halo. Your ingrained Halo skills may transfer over, but any idea it's designed to be played by yourself are quickly washed away.”

But with a Thanos-like inevitability, a combination of FOMO and nostalgia for old Bungie takes over, and I download the latest Destiny expansion, and see if it finally all clicks. 

The guns feel fantastic. The enemy design is top notch. It feels so incredibly good to move around—I’m always impressed at how solid the first-person floaty platforming feels! Heck, they even added a grappling hook this time, my personal kryptonite. You put a grappling hook in a video game, and regardless of what’s the best use of my time, I’ll be playing it. To make the situation even crueler, it’s not just a grappling hook—it’s a good grappling hook. 

Which brings us back to the staircase. I do not have a vault of exotic weapons acquired over nearly a decade of investment. I do not grasp how all the currencies work. And I cannot tell you why plumes of skull-filled smoke are coming out of some evil sicko everyone calls The Witness. I know the frustration will mount. I know I’m going to curse, for the billionth time, at the inability to matchmake with other people in campaign mode, because inevitably it’ll become clear a combination of lack of experience with the game’s nuances and the sheer fact that combat encounters are meant to be played with other people will prove too much.

On my own, I managed to futz through the vast majority of Lightfall, and mostly had a good time. It was an even better time whenever the designers took the kid gloves off and let me swing around like a sci-fi Spider-Man. I wish the story had featured more sequences like that! But it didn’t, which is where I usually end up during my largely solo experiences with Destiny. “But this” and “but that” and “I wish this” and “I wish that.” Destiny is what Destiny is, and while I’m sure the community has all sorts of valid complaints that Bungie will and won’t address, what always crystallizes in revisiting the game is my inability to let old Bungie go.

Do I think the difficulty spike with Calus, the final boss, is pretty goofy? Yeah! So did I feel bad when I looked up “cheese strat calus destiny 2” and found this video and immediately put it to use? Hell no. Life’s too short for such apologies. Calus is a punk, and I got his ass.

Part of the reason I pushed back into Destiny was a comment by my colleague, Ricardo Contreras, where it’s now possible to drop into the game on a weekly or semi-weekly basis, spend a few hours with it, and experience meaningful story content meaningful and keep on the weapon/armor treadmill intrinsic to games like this. I found that appealing, and it’s why I dove headfirst into a game I haven’t really played since 2015’s excellent The Taken King.

We’ll see if that pans out. For now, I’m in the same place I’ve always been, wondering if I should take a picture of myself with a screen shot from Destiny and write “don’t trust his lies” beneath it, a reminder to a future version of myself tempted by the latest fruit from Bungie.

But goddamn, Halo was so good, man. You never know.