We Saw A Destiny 2 Lightfall Live Demo. Here's What We Learned.

Bungie invited us to a digital preview event for Lightfall, showing of an early story campaign mission, a tour of the new destination, Neomuna, and a look at some of the new much-requested features like the Mod Manager menu, Loadout creator, and Guardian Ranks systems. Here's what we learned.
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In the campaign mission, we get our first look at fighting the Shadow Legion, a new version of the Cabal, and the main force we’ll be fighting in the expansion. From what we saw this is still mainly the same Cabal enemies types we’ve been fighting for years now so don’t expect any radical gameplay changes here. However, some of them did have Strand shields. Enemy shield type has always played a key role in Destiny’s combat rhythm. But because Stasis shield never became a thing I originally wasn’t expecting Strand to get them either. It feels like Bungie really wants Strand to feel like a major part of the combat meta in all aspects in a way Stasis kinda didn’t back when it first launched and I’ll be curious if we start seeing Strand shields in content outside of Lightfall-specific content.

Compared to Stasis back in Beyond Light, one of the more exciting differences is how quickly Bungie lets you play with the new Strand subclass. In the mission, the guardian comes across this strand pillar and when activated it gives temporary access to the full strand subclass to experience for a combat encounter. The idea behind this is to give you a chance to experiment and play with Strand as soon as possible. A huge complaint back in Beyond Light was that Stasis itself was locked away for most of the campaign and you only got to mess around with small bits and pieces of it. This is meant to address that issue but because it's just temporary you still get the experience of unlocking and growing Strand over time. Bungie also said the unlock process won’t be as arduous as it was with Stasis.

As for Strand itself? It looks awesome. We got to see a Hunter in action which was great for me as I’m a Hunter main. Their new super, Silkstrike, has them swinging around a rope dart, throwing it either straight into the enemy or swinging it in a 360-degree motion. The Cabal look like their physical form is unraveling until nothing is left whenever they are hit. The Hunter can also use the new grapple feature more often while the super is active and seeing the hunter zip around the battlefield really makes it sink in how Strand has the potential to completely change the feeling of combat with this newfound mobility. Neomuna itself seems designed to take advantage of this. All the combat arenas we saw were on wide-open city streets and rooftops. Perfect for swinging around anywhere you want without much issue. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’ll be able to grapple all the time as it does take up your grenade slot, which runs on cooldown. However, Neomuna is full of floating strand grapple points you can use to swing around, and using these refunds your grenade energy. In short, you gonna be spending a lot more time in the air while exploring and fighting in Neomuna.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:37 - Neomuna
02:26 - Combat & Strand
04:55 - Loadouts
06:21 - Mod Manager
06:52 - Guardian Ranks