If there’s one thing that Destiny 2 fans know for certain, it’s that the game’s upcoming Forsaken expansion will be shaking things up in a major way, and that includes how the expansion’s new story events will be presented. Unlike previous Destiny 2 story campaigns which involved progressing through a linear series of missions, Forsaken will allow players to undertake a series of tasks in any order they please, offering more freedom and more replay value to the story campaign itself.
In the same GamesRadar interview wherein they confirmed the return of daily heroic story missions, Bungie’s Steve Cotton and Scott Taylor discussed how the Forsaken expansion’s new story campaign (a campaign that will have major ramifications for a beloved NPC) will unfold in a non-linear fashion. According to Cotton and Taylor, part of Forsaken’s story campaign will involve tracking down and eliminating a series of powerful Scorn Barons (the Scorn being a new enemy faction introduced in Forsaken), and players will be free to decide which Barons they go after first.
Cotton warned that certain factors might influence a player’s choice when deciding which Baron to go after next. Certain Barons will have a higher recommended Power Level than others, so there is a sort of loose “intended order” to tackle them in, but if a player wants to break away from that intended order, they will be free to do so. In fact, both Cotton and Taylor expect that players will be coming up with and sharing their own intended order lists based on how fun or challenging specific Baron fights are. There will be eight Barons in total, so there will be a lot of potential variety in how the story campaign unfolds depending on the exact order in which players choose to cross the Barons off their list.
As for the Barons themselves, we don’t know too much about them for the time being, though Bungie has hinted that they’ll each represent a different combat challenge for players to overcome. One Baron, for example, will engage the player in an epic 1v1 sniper duel, while another will be a melee master wielding a giant flaming flail. Hopefully we’ll learn more about these unique foes before the Forsaken expansion launches on Sept. 4.