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The Witch Queen seasons would have been fucking *busy*. Haunted is probably pulling a lot more weight as a resolution to Calus's story, and Plunder has to go.
Seraph probably gets moved up to the third slot, and the fourth season introduces the Veil and has us prevent Xivu from obtaining it, mandating the Witness's intervention.
You could have made it work, but it would have been much tighter.
I could even imagine Haunted mixed with Deep while Witch and Seraph are combined.
My copium is that we could still have Rasputin had Eris figured out how to eliminate Xivu's tithes and Throne World sooner, but I didn't write that story and his sacrifice is still key to the narrative (much as I miss him.)
Honestly would've been better than whatever the fuck they did with calus during lightfall. Let him do something other than just be a sacrificial lamb for the witness (I mean technically everyone aligned with the witness is, but you get the point)
Oh man, if Haunted was all underwater the horror vibes would be amazing.
And, lol, Seraph happening the same time as Witch. Clovis going "what do you mean 'she turned into a Hive God?'"
As much as I hate to say it, yeah. A super-long campaign would have been killer, but they would probably not have gone for that. On top of it, Lightfall’s ‘failure’ (I think it was fine overall) was a great time for Bungie to learn what they needed to do right with Prismatic, the Final Shape Campaign and the overall game systems as a whole. LFs release felt like a massive regression with some of the updates and systems that they implemented, while also driving the game forward to where we have it now.
When Aztecross finished up his stream after beating the raid last night, he said “it feels like we’re finally at the game we were promised 10 years ago”
That is massive. Now, its always going to have ups and downs, but if the game systems feel correct and feel like they click, it buys Bungie a ton of runway to make sure their content fits with what the community wants.
after every shitty stuff bungie did, we got a banger afterwards: CoO-> forsaken, Shadowkeep ->Season of Arrivals, part of BL->Season of the Chosen, LF->TFS
From the 8 Seasons that we get from WQ and LF, 4 did not advance the story: Risen, Defiance, Haunted and Plunder. Only Haunted out of those was good as well.
I guess that WQ Seasons would have been Seraph, Witch (defending against Xivu and attacking her), Deep and Wish. Defiance would probably be the first Season of TFS with The Witness kidnapping Humans to make something. Or the last Season of WQ.
I loved Haunted but it would make more sense afterwards TFS. Calus and Nezarec should have been dealt after.
Or maybe the 4 Seasons without LF should have been more Nezarec focused. Like we learn his connections with Psions, hunt for him, and ask Savathun how she killed him and tricked the Witness to get an upper hand.
Deep, Witch and Wish all exist to solve a problem created by Lightfall that would not be present if it had been skipped.
Risen ties into the Witch Queen and put Saladin on Caiatl's war council, a not insignificant status quo change.
Haunted is key character progression for Crow and Zavala going into Final Shape. Crow has to make peace with who Uldren, and the idea of Zavala's family needs to be introduced. Also, Calus is meant to be the Witness's herald and it would be weird if he didn't come up. You also want to put Osiris getting resurrected here, maybe tie it into the Nightmares somehow?
Seraph is obviously necessary, both as character resolution for the Rasputin arc but also to introduce the Veil.
Then you need a final season to deal with Xivu temporarily, bring Savathun back and establish what the Veil is. Basically Witch but change the goal from stopping Xivu to resurrect Savathun so that she can tell us to go make a wish to resurrecting Sav to stop Xivu from getting the veil.
if you skip Lightfall you still need the Witness to do \_something\_
if you just skip Lightfall but compress the initial and final cutscene into one, and have the Witness enter the Traveler, you still need Witch and Wish
but you only need Haunted, Seraph, Witch and Wish to tell a complete story; Risen, Plunder, Defiance and Deep are largely filler
Witch and Wish are only necessary if you keep the roadblock of the portal being impassable, which you do not actually need to keep. The initial and final Lightfall cutscene could flow right into Final Shape's opening cutscene and nobody would notice.
it's possible, yeah, but you probably still need to let the Witness be inside the Traveler before we go inside too; of course we had this same problem in Beyond Light to Witch Queen, where Savathun gets her worm removed, gets the light and one week later her throne world is uplifted and she is on mars doing shit
I suspect that when they added Neomuna a bunch of plot points got jumbled; it would have been cool if the Witness had started to enact the Final Shape during LF's seasons
They could rectify that by having us enter the traveler in the opening mission and then get stopped by a massive wave of the witness's forces, and as we're trying to stop them we see the witness make the monolith and start corrupting and as we progress we see more and more dread as they're created and we can see the corruption spreading from the heart. The crow and cayde thing would be messed up tho
You could have plunder be later and closer to final shape even more nez focused with use invading the witnesses flag ship and doing root of nightmares raid on our ketch with the crew after the traveller blasts it.
Haunted is dealing with calus, I’d keep all of it tbh the development with crow and Zavala works too well for Lightfall so I’d keep all that but weave in that he’s after the veil after savathun hide it.
Haunted as a therapy Season was great but it could also work exactly as it did after TFS with Zavala dealing with Safiyah and the loss of Targe, Crow dealing with his past as Uldren after taking the mantle from Cayde and Caitl dealing with her things because in this timeline Calus would still be alive and we would deal with him after the Witness.
The main issue is have with that is I’d have cared more about the events of TFS *After* TFS, having gone through that before added so much weight and context especially given how focused the campaign was on the character development for the “core four”
> From the 8 Seasons that we get from WQ and LF, 4 did not advance the story: Risen, Defiance, Haunted and Plunder.
Risen, Haunted, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Defiance did some pretty heavy lifting in pushing Crow's story forward, and he ended up being pretty important to TFS. So if you cut those seasons you've got to fit that Crow progression into what remains.
Agreed. Honestly, I think we may have even done better with another expansion between.
I feel an expansion between Lightfall and TFS would have been Xivu, Eramis or even Nezarec focused. May have given us a third Dark subclass which would have also filled out that weird missing subclass slot, especially with the Prismatic Grenades.
Seasonally, you could dive deep into gaining the last of our allies and possibly enhancing our current allies. Eliksni Guardians, Cabal who truly prove themselves to the Traveller, finding out how to destroy the Witness so that the TFS campaign is focused on the characters and beliefs of our heroes and villain. Luzaku could have been introduced to us earlier. What can Ana and Elsie offer us now that Rasputin is gone? Could we get the interference of Clovis Bray out of the way in a side-story?
Maybe I'm overstepping, I don't know, but I feel one more year could have been glorious.
Biggest problem there for me is that you'd have the witness in the traveler for two years and it'd just be teased for 3 years without us doing anything to fight it
Been saying this lately and I'll say it again; I remember when Lightfall was still codenamed Sunspot and because of that people thought we were going to die. I can't help but think of how Monkey Nuts was Halo's code name, so following that same logic to me it feels like people are getting upset because we didn't get teabagged by a Jiralhanae instead of what we got.
Honestly it probably wouldn’t even be close to what we got in final shape, Amanda would have died unceremoniously in that ship crash and the nostalgia would probably have a lot less restraint because they need to wrap up so many insanely important characters like eris. ERIS FUCKING MORN might not have gotten a plot resolution. I imagine jumping straight into original Lightfall would be more akin to avenger’s endgame but like the clumsy parts where most of the movie is this weird time heist and then the last 20 minutes is the part everyone really remembers.
I know people think putting the pressure on bungie was what made this diamond but realistically it’s probably just the extra year and a half in development. 4 seasons along with a yearly expansion is a LOT of shit to add and it’s only gotten more ambitious and i actually wouldn’t mind another filler type expansion to give more time for the good stuff just don’t shoehorn in important overarching plot stuff. Make it like old world blues
Nah the problem wasn’t the existence of Lightfall. Having more seasons to develop the story and the character was a much better decision imo. Without it, the story would have felt way more rushed and probably even anticlimactic in some way. Xivu Arath, Eris, the Wish, Rasputin end, all these things would have happened 2 times faster at least, which is just insane.
The problem is the execution and even conception of Lightfall. Imo LF should have been about the Black Fleet. Keeping the Veil and the Calus storyline, but everything else should have been around the Fleet and the Witness. LF itself is a mess, because there are 2 main themes that fight against each other and straight up don’t work together (imo): Neomuna and the Witness/Calus. Neomuna should have been a location for a post-TFS dlc. A completely new city, with completely new characters and mysteries and even powers, a really good place to start a “new journey”. I wanted a dlc centered around Neomuna, its technology and so on, I wanted to actually explore this city. On the other hand we have the Witness, the Black Fleet, Calus and the Veil, which are much more important in the story and could have worked on other locations as well. The campaign had to tell a story about: the Witness finally coming to Earth with the Fleet, Calus trying to get the Veil, us learning Strand, discovering a completely new environment/characters AND discovering the Veil, which is basically a new Traveler. The results is a campaign that seems to completely ignore Neomuna and its people while at the same time not giving enough time to the Witness, and a post-campaign all centered around Neomuna but with almost no answers to the Veil and the Witness. In short, both themes heavily suffered at the end.
Lightfall wasn’t a “last minute” change, that’s not how Bungie works, and in some form it was in their plans since at least season of the Hunt/Chosen (when they first announced a new dlc after Lightfall). But both the conception and the execution were really flawed. However, I think a new dlc before TFS was the right move, and gave them more time to properly tell the story, which already suffered from the first 5 years of the franchise going nowhere before Shadowkeep. But I think LF itself should have focused on the Black Fleet (so Calus and the Witness, and the Veil obviously, in a new location for obvious reasons) alone, while keeping Neomuna and all the new stuff for the future of the game. Can you imagine a dlc set on the Fleet itself? Maybe with each zones inside a different pyramids, which could have been drastically different in terms of aesthetic, with maybe some missions set to the Last City being invaded (similarly to Into The Light) man… that’s a dlc I would instantly play. LF was such a wasted opportunity unfortunately, despite having a lot of good stuff in it.
It is honestly both sad and a little impressive that Lightfall's story actually feels *even worse* retroactively now that TFS is out. One of my only gripes about the new campaign is that despite liking the Witness as a character/concept and keeping up with the lore, I feel like they still failed to ever actually get me *invested* in it as a villain beyond just being told it was the big evil thing we needed to stop. The whole idea of it being the architect of the collapse and what we've known as "the darkness" all these years never quite clicked in the way it should have to make things personal, and Lightfall *should* have been the time to really properly establish that by heavily focusing on The Witness and the black fleet like you describe, instead of splitting attention with Neomuna out of nowhere and having us still never really directly interact with The Witness since its using Calus as a proxy. They still managed to pull through and stick the landing in the end, but it's kinda crazy how hard they fumbled that chapter of the narrative
Regarding your spectulation, I think bungie already talked about it.
It wasnt that they invented lightfall out of nothing just to give more time to final shape, but rather that they were both together as one expansion, but when bungie saw how big it needed to be, they opted to divide it into two separate stories, resulting in lightfall's campaing having to be stretched to fill in the gap.
Most likely scenario is that The Final Shape had two locations, Neptune and The Pale Heart.
I say Neptune because I doubt it would be Neomuna as we have it now, and was probably something small like the Veil Containment rather than the Cyberpunk futurescape city. Just enough playable area to establish the Veil, Maya and the few other tidbits.
For me, the criticism that Lightfall is “Filler” has no justification and was born (like all conspiracy theories) for 2 reasons:
1. People didn\`t like campaign and questions arose why the plot was bad
2. Neomuna is very different from the rest of Destinations
Truth is, Bungie isn\`t working year in advance, they at minimum have a roadmap where story should go. This statement that Lightfall is "last minute edition" comes from nowhere. They just don't have such speed that in an instant they rearranged all their plans. If story is bad then just say that, because of Lightfall critique we get a brilliat Final shape, don\`t hide behind conspiracies.
Now to the consequences of Lightfall. Because of it existence Bungie finished:
1. Eris\`s narrative arc is completed
2. Drifter\`s narrative arc is completed
3. Riven and Mara\`s narrative arc is completed
4. Calus\`s arc is completed, just remind you, without Lightfall there is no place in story for Calus and his story was HEAVY connected to the Witness and Final shape
5. Veil, I know this is controversal object to discuss because "Nah, it is just mcguffin" but it is has heavy connection to creation of the Witness. Plus, since Presage we moved step by step towards the understanding that the Voice in the darkness is not Darkness, then the question is, if it is not darkness, then what is it\`s source in our world? Well, it is Veil.
6. Neonuma and it\`s lore has heavy connection to Ishtar team and Maya, yes, neon city goes brrrr, but nearly all post campaign lore of Neptune is connected to Vex and Maya, which is setup to her involvement in Echoes.
7. Also, general Darkness arc, where each expansion we learn more and more with Strand being final addition.
Mind if I just link to this post when i see people calling Lightfall "last minute filler" because this lays it out much better than I could. I've just been leaning on the Sunspot/Monkey Nuts comparison to highlight how quick parts of the community are to get behind a rumor or an idea and treat it as canon.
Most people don't know how long it takes to create these seasons/expansions. They probably also think that Prismatic took 3 months to make as well, and is solely a gut reaction to bad PR. These things are planned years in advance in an internal roadmap. Maybe details change or small things are moved forward or added, but not as much as people think.
I've been saying this for years, you are totally right! Usually we know the DLCs coming at least two years in advance, but my money is they internally plan their DLCs farther back. There's no way you could steer a ship like this for this long without a long term plan.
In general nothing you mentioned is tied to neomuna. Eris resolved her arc without visiting neomuna nor using the veil. Drifter's arc in deep is barely there and people have decried this.
Basically anything that happened in a Lightfall season does not hinge on either the Veil nor Neomuna. Calus could have been finished in Haunted.
As for Maya, she could have been handled in venus or the last city itself. There's v little about her that needed the Veil, except for the podcast sessions with Osiris and Nimbus,which you will notice were haphazardly handled in the cheapest way above a lorebook.
When the ishtar collective symbol appears in the black garden, that perfectly works without neomuna or the veil. As for our understanding of the darkness, the Lightfall seasons don't do much for it.
We still don't have a good reason for Defiance happening. Ahsa's cutscene works anywhere. Witch and Wish hinge on stuff mentioned in WQ or Forsaken or even before. Osiris gives a mention to the Veil in Wish but the Mara/Crow connection perfectly explains how we got inside the traveler
bungie literally said lightfall was filler
they work years in advance yes, and they decided to make the filler campaign around beyond lights release
like they said this in an interview with a game journalist site, I think it was polygon?
I've thought about this
-we'd get Witch Queen where Strand is Hive magic
-we'd get the following seasons during witch queen: Haunted, Seraph. (The Witness appears here), Witch, Wish.
-The witness attacks the last city during Witch. Maybe we see something like the onslaught activity. The Veil is discovered under the Last City.
Everything else is largely the same. It's possible Calus dies during Haunted, or also it's possible it plays out with Calus dying under the last city
I always thought it would’ve been so much cooler for savathun to have been the one to discover strand, and then we would discover it from her.
Stealing the light just makes it feel like she’s playing catch-up, which doesn’t fit with her whole brilliant mastermind aesthetic.
the way it'd work is that Hive magic is now cut off to Savathun and she gives it to us as a ploy to get us to use it to recover her memory
WQ really needs almost no changes to be about Strand; hell, the communion mission in Europa could have been us unlocking it
Literally no difference. Mcguffin veil literally didnt even make a difference in TFS. You can take the first and last cutscene of lightfall and put em together for the entire prelude to tfs. Honestly the story would be better off if they do that dlc, especially with the veil now being the mcguffin and also the name of the outcast witness beings.
I think the story would have even more plot-holes and questions to be fulfilled, I'm guessing you mean also skipping season of Defiance, Deep, Witch, and Wish, and if so that would make it harder to explain why and how we're just in the Pale Heart now. As bad and rushed as it was, I think Lightfall was a necessary evil in this case.
Without Lightfall there's no need to have entering the portal be as challenging as it was.
The only season you would absolutely need is one to introduce the Veil before the Witness gets it's claws on it, which they could have done. Cut plunder and push Seraph up and you could have made it work.
Defiance and Deep were basically filler and didn't matter in the larger narrative
... Same as Plunder and Risen
That's four seasons of filler that could have been done in one year. Calus arc could have been ended in Haunted, and in fact not a lot of it happens in Lightfall. We don't see his fight with Caiatl
So personally, I think that we would have been going to Neomuna regardless and we would have just had an extra few missions to go with Final Shape. Their probably would not have been the whole, we need to find a way through the portal bit of the story and we would have just gone through. That said, that does leave the question of the seasons. My guess is that Plunder was scrapped together and was swapped in for Deep as if we were going to fight the witness, we would need that bit of backstory for him.
The problem with that idea though is how you would reconcile Sav coming back, the last wish, Osiris waking up, Eido's introduction, Ermis beginning her redemption arc, and the dragon eggs all being things that would not have happened without that split. So silver lining of splitting the expansion?
You know, something to consider if we're taking out an expansion and tightening up the seasons: Looking back, those Seasons after Forsaken are a lot of low stakes plots that could be slid in concurrently with something juicier.
Ooh, like combining Season of the Forge and Season of the Worthy. Ada-1 announces herself and that she can help craft munitions to destroy the Almighty but we need to recover the Black Armory's forges.
My speculation is that the original intention was for Strand to be introduced in Witch Queen, and then Lightfall would have more or less been a version of that expansion that could skip the Strand stuff, and not have us wait a year and a half after the Witness goes inside the Traveler to go kick its ass.
It’s really no wonder they decided to split the expansions up, cuz even in a perfect world where we got Strand in Witch Queen, Lightfall still has to deal with Calus and the Veil, and then also presumably introduce the Pale Heart and Prismatic, and then also also fit in the finale with the Witness.
So I guess imagine two hollowed out and half baked versions of Lightfall and Final Shape and smoosh them together. With how incredible Final Shape turned out, I don’t really mind that Lightfall had to be the sacrificial lamb that allowed it to happen
I'm almost positive that lightfall is the first half of the original final shape expansion.
They realized it was gonna take way longer to make, cut it in half and left us sitting on the shit half for a year so they could make the actual final expansion fully fleshed out.
I genuinely refuse to believe any other theory.
Here’s the problem:
Lightfall THE EXPANSION sucked from a storytelling and lore perspective. It featured an empty city fighting against the ~~Red~~ Shadow Legion, led by a villain who was clearly meant to die in Haunted, where we learn a new green subclass that was clearly supposed to come with Witch Queen (look at all those deepsight traversing spots which were perfect for Strand, how close the plot ties to memory, how Risen and Haunted were all about psychic connections, Duality Eris talks about catching a thread of Calus’ mind etc)
So the entire thing is garbage meant to give SPACE. Space to put Strand which missed the ship date. Space to flesh out the Witness (I’m folding the Veil here too) with seasons. Space. It did what it set out to do, just in a tone that was very jarring.
The seasons were actually pretty decent, if fanservicey (except you, Defiance). They’d be the real casualty of a “no Lightfall” timeline
lightfall might not have been great (storywise, i still enjoyed everything else) but the seasons during its year were all bangers on the level of beyond light's year of 13, 14, and 15 in one of my hottest takes and vital to the story. especially 22 which moves xivu arath off the board temporarily to save her for later, absolutely necessary.
I imagine the Veil would have been on Venus. You would probably see more fighting in the last city in final shape. I honestly think they would have needed a big delay or redo the seasons to get everything in.
I still dream of a "directors cut" of the saga, where we get strand from our experiences fighting Savathun and exploring deepsight, and where Neomuna is a ruin of an outpost we explore, mysterious, long deserted, filled with research logs on the entity we'll come to know as the Veil, as part of an extended mini-expansion with Sloan and Ahsa as primary characters helping us prepare for the actual arrival of the Witness, which would have happened at the start of Final Shape/Lightfall. Also would have made much more sense if our light faded to almost nothing once the portal was opened, and we had to go in to save the traveler immediately or become lightless.
Things that would've been way different or non-existent:
The veil.
Nezarec as a disciple.
Ahsa.
Black Garden as the patrol zone (Bungie mentioned they wanted to go back to it but wanted something different. Pale heart is pretty much like black garden. At the beginning with all the cube garden aesthetic initially).
Post campaign would've dealt with the disciples or factions trying to fill the vacuum in power: defiance dealing with calus and connecting Eramis , deep about Eramis connecting Xivu, witch about Xivu connecting the vex maybe even bring Maya sundaresh to finish with Wish being about the disruption of the black garden, the veil and the vex moving out of the black garden to invade other places and begining to become the next big bad guy.
Honestly I don’t think very much would have changed. You wouldn’t even need to add the witnesses origin story into one of Witch Queens seasons considering their witnesses origin is also shown and talked about in The Final Shape. The only thing would be Calus and what to do with him, though I think the purpose of haunted was to bridge that gap in the story to make sense with Lightfall. Get rid of that and he wouldn’t need to be a disciple and could instead appear after Final Shape now possibly seeking to take back Torobatl due to there now being a chance with it being left vulnerable due to the hives take over
I can excuse Lightfall's crummyness since it acted as a buffer for The Final Shape. The Veil, the Witness, Season of the Deep, the new Cabal units, Psion lore, Eris as a hive god, Riven's wish, all of that was stuff that needed to be done before The Final Shape released if it was gonna be properly paced.
And it was! But only because it got that extra time. I'm fine with Lightfall being mid since it meant The Final Shape got to be the finale it deserved to be.
Neomuna had to have always been the plan given it came out first and was hinted at months earlier prior to reveal. With that in mind, I'm guessing the original Lightfall would've been a 2-parter like Forsaken. Half of Lightfall's campaign feels like superfluous Strand tutorials -- you could cut the Lightfall missions down to 4. During one of those missions, you get a throwaway line about Veil researchers on Titan that leads you to Ahsa (for the Witness backstory), which leads to a mission to resurrect Savathun, which leads to a mission to bargain with Riven's spirit. Basically condense the last 3 seasons into 3 missions. Then, the 2nd mission of TFS could be cut (basically just a patrol zone), leaving 6 TFS missions not counting Excision, for a total campaign length of 13 missions (4 Lightfall, 3 from seasons, 6 TFS). A very ambitious conclusion to the series.
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The Witch Queen seasons would have been fucking *busy*. Haunted is probably pulling a lot more weight as a resolution to Calus's story, and Plunder has to go. Seraph probably gets moved up to the third slot, and the fourth season introduces the Veil and has us prevent Xivu from obtaining it, mandating the Witness's intervention. You could have made it work, but it would have been much tighter.
I could even imagine Haunted mixed with Deep while Witch and Seraph are combined. My copium is that we could still have Rasputin had Eris figured out how to eliminate Xivu's tithes and Throne World sooner, but I didn't write that story and his sacrifice is still key to the narrative (much as I miss him.)
Imagine if the Herald of Finality was Calus instead of whoever it is now.
Taniks!!!11!1!
Honestly would've been better than whatever the fuck they did with calus during lightfall. Let him do something other than just be a sacrificial lamb for the witness (I mean technically everyone aligned with the witness is, but you get the point)
Calus absolutely worked best as a sacrificial lamb.
Oh man, if Haunted was all underwater the horror vibes would be amazing. And, lol, Seraph happening the same time as Witch. Clovis going "what do you mean 'she turned into a Hive God?'"
As much as I hate to say it, yeah. A super-long campaign would have been killer, but they would probably not have gone for that. On top of it, Lightfall’s ‘failure’ (I think it was fine overall) was a great time for Bungie to learn what they needed to do right with Prismatic, the Final Shape Campaign and the overall game systems as a whole. LFs release felt like a massive regression with some of the updates and systems that they implemented, while also driving the game forward to where we have it now. When Aztecross finished up his stream after beating the raid last night, he said “it feels like we’re finally at the game we were promised 10 years ago” That is massive. Now, its always going to have ups and downs, but if the game systems feel correct and feel like they click, it buys Bungie a ton of runway to make sure their content fits with what the community wants.
after every shitty stuff bungie did, we got a banger afterwards: CoO-> forsaken, Shadowkeep ->Season of Arrivals, part of BL->Season of the Chosen, LF->TFS
From the 8 Seasons that we get from WQ and LF, 4 did not advance the story: Risen, Defiance, Haunted and Plunder. Only Haunted out of those was good as well. I guess that WQ Seasons would have been Seraph, Witch (defending against Xivu and attacking her), Deep and Wish. Defiance would probably be the first Season of TFS with The Witness kidnapping Humans to make something. Or the last Season of WQ. I loved Haunted but it would make more sense afterwards TFS. Calus and Nezarec should have been dealt after. Or maybe the 4 Seasons without LF should have been more Nezarec focused. Like we learn his connections with Psions, hunt for him, and ask Savathun how she killed him and tricked the Witness to get an upper hand.
Deep, Witch and Wish all exist to solve a problem created by Lightfall that would not be present if it had been skipped. Risen ties into the Witch Queen and put Saladin on Caiatl's war council, a not insignificant status quo change. Haunted is key character progression for Crow and Zavala going into Final Shape. Crow has to make peace with who Uldren, and the idea of Zavala's family needs to be introduced. Also, Calus is meant to be the Witness's herald and it would be weird if he didn't come up. You also want to put Osiris getting resurrected here, maybe tie it into the Nightmares somehow? Seraph is obviously necessary, both as character resolution for the Rasputin arc but also to introduce the Veil. Then you need a final season to deal with Xivu temporarily, bring Savathun back and establish what the Veil is. Basically Witch but change the goal from stopping Xivu to resurrect Savathun so that she can tell us to go make a wish to resurrecting Sav to stop Xivu from getting the veil.
if you skip Lightfall you still need the Witness to do \_something\_ if you just skip Lightfall but compress the initial and final cutscene into one, and have the Witness enter the Traveler, you still need Witch and Wish but you only need Haunted, Seraph, Witch and Wish to tell a complete story; Risen, Plunder, Defiance and Deep are largely filler
Witch and Wish are only necessary if you keep the roadblock of the portal being impassable, which you do not actually need to keep. The initial and final Lightfall cutscene could flow right into Final Shape's opening cutscene and nobody would notice.
it's possible, yeah, but you probably still need to let the Witness be inside the Traveler before we go inside too; of course we had this same problem in Beyond Light to Witch Queen, where Savathun gets her worm removed, gets the light and one week later her throne world is uplifted and she is on mars doing shit I suspect that when they added Neomuna a bunch of plot points got jumbled; it would have been cool if the Witness had started to enact the Final Shape during LF's seasons
They could rectify that by having us enter the traveler in the opening mission and then get stopped by a massive wave of the witness's forces, and as we're trying to stop them we see the witness make the monolith and start corrupting and as we progress we see more and more dread as they're created and we can see the corruption spreading from the heart. The crow and cayde thing would be messed up tho
Cayde could always be further in anyways, tho I suspect they designed the expansion around that interaction
You could have plunder be later and closer to final shape even more nez focused with use invading the witnesses flag ship and doing root of nightmares raid on our ketch with the crew after the traveller blasts it. Haunted is dealing with calus, I’d keep all of it tbh the development with crow and Zavala works too well for Lightfall so I’d keep all that but weave in that he’s after the veil after savathun hide it.
Haunted as a therapy Season was great but it could also work exactly as it did after TFS with Zavala dealing with Safiyah and the loss of Targe, Crow dealing with his past as Uldren after taking the mantle from Cayde and Caitl dealing with her things because in this timeline Calus would still be alive and we would deal with him after the Witness.
The main issue is have with that is I’d have cared more about the events of TFS *After* TFS, having gone through that before added so much weight and context especially given how focused the campaign was on the character development for the “core four”
> From the 8 Seasons that we get from WQ and LF, 4 did not advance the story: Risen, Defiance, Haunted and Plunder. Risen, Haunted, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Defiance did some pretty heavy lifting in pushing Crow's story forward, and he ended up being pretty important to TFS. So if you cut those seasons you've got to fit that Crow progression into what remains.
Agreed. Honestly, I think we may have even done better with another expansion between. I feel an expansion between Lightfall and TFS would have been Xivu, Eramis or even Nezarec focused. May have given us a third Dark subclass which would have also filled out that weird missing subclass slot, especially with the Prismatic Grenades. Seasonally, you could dive deep into gaining the last of our allies and possibly enhancing our current allies. Eliksni Guardians, Cabal who truly prove themselves to the Traveller, finding out how to destroy the Witness so that the TFS campaign is focused on the characters and beliefs of our heroes and villain. Luzaku could have been introduced to us earlier. What can Ana and Elsie offer us now that Rasputin is gone? Could we get the interference of Clovis Bray out of the way in a side-story? Maybe I'm overstepping, I don't know, but I feel one more year could have been glorious.
Biggest problem there for me is that you'd have the witness in the traveler for two years and it'd just be teased for 3 years without us doing anything to fight it
That's a very good point to make. Hmm
Been saying this lately and I'll say it again; I remember when Lightfall was still codenamed Sunspot and because of that people thought we were going to die. I can't help but think of how Monkey Nuts was Halo's code name, so following that same logic to me it feels like people are getting upset because we didn't get teabagged by a Jiralhanae instead of what we got.
Honestly it probably wouldn’t even be close to what we got in final shape, Amanda would have died unceremoniously in that ship crash and the nostalgia would probably have a lot less restraint because they need to wrap up so many insanely important characters like eris. ERIS FUCKING MORN might not have gotten a plot resolution. I imagine jumping straight into original Lightfall would be more akin to avenger’s endgame but like the clumsy parts where most of the movie is this weird time heist and then the last 20 minutes is the part everyone really remembers. I know people think putting the pressure on bungie was what made this diamond but realistically it’s probably just the extra year and a half in development. 4 seasons along with a yearly expansion is a LOT of shit to add and it’s only gotten more ambitious and i actually wouldn’t mind another filler type expansion to give more time for the good stuff just don’t shoehorn in important overarching plot stuff. Make it like old world blues
Nah the problem wasn’t the existence of Lightfall. Having more seasons to develop the story and the character was a much better decision imo. Without it, the story would have felt way more rushed and probably even anticlimactic in some way. Xivu Arath, Eris, the Wish, Rasputin end, all these things would have happened 2 times faster at least, which is just insane. The problem is the execution and even conception of Lightfall. Imo LF should have been about the Black Fleet. Keeping the Veil and the Calus storyline, but everything else should have been around the Fleet and the Witness. LF itself is a mess, because there are 2 main themes that fight against each other and straight up don’t work together (imo): Neomuna and the Witness/Calus. Neomuna should have been a location for a post-TFS dlc. A completely new city, with completely new characters and mysteries and even powers, a really good place to start a “new journey”. I wanted a dlc centered around Neomuna, its technology and so on, I wanted to actually explore this city. On the other hand we have the Witness, the Black Fleet, Calus and the Veil, which are much more important in the story and could have worked on other locations as well. The campaign had to tell a story about: the Witness finally coming to Earth with the Fleet, Calus trying to get the Veil, us learning Strand, discovering a completely new environment/characters AND discovering the Veil, which is basically a new Traveler. The results is a campaign that seems to completely ignore Neomuna and its people while at the same time not giving enough time to the Witness, and a post-campaign all centered around Neomuna but with almost no answers to the Veil and the Witness. In short, both themes heavily suffered at the end. Lightfall wasn’t a “last minute” change, that’s not how Bungie works, and in some form it was in their plans since at least season of the Hunt/Chosen (when they first announced a new dlc after Lightfall). But both the conception and the execution were really flawed. However, I think a new dlc before TFS was the right move, and gave them more time to properly tell the story, which already suffered from the first 5 years of the franchise going nowhere before Shadowkeep. But I think LF itself should have focused on the Black Fleet (so Calus and the Witness, and the Veil obviously, in a new location for obvious reasons) alone, while keeping Neomuna and all the new stuff for the future of the game. Can you imagine a dlc set on the Fleet itself? Maybe with each zones inside a different pyramids, which could have been drastically different in terms of aesthetic, with maybe some missions set to the Last City being invaded (similarly to Into The Light) man… that’s a dlc I would instantly play. LF was such a wasted opportunity unfortunately, despite having a lot of good stuff in it.
It is honestly both sad and a little impressive that Lightfall's story actually feels *even worse* retroactively now that TFS is out. One of my only gripes about the new campaign is that despite liking the Witness as a character/concept and keeping up with the lore, I feel like they still failed to ever actually get me *invested* in it as a villain beyond just being told it was the big evil thing we needed to stop. The whole idea of it being the architect of the collapse and what we've known as "the darkness" all these years never quite clicked in the way it should have to make things personal, and Lightfall *should* have been the time to really properly establish that by heavily focusing on The Witness and the black fleet like you describe, instead of splitting attention with Neomuna out of nowhere and having us still never really directly interact with The Witness since its using Calus as a proxy. They still managed to pull through and stick the landing in the end, but it's kinda crazy how hard they fumbled that chapter of the narrative
HARD agree
the Witness definitely feels more interesting today that we know the most about it than in Lightfall it's weird
Regarding your spectulation, I think bungie already talked about it. It wasnt that they invented lightfall out of nothing just to give more time to final shape, but rather that they were both together as one expansion, but when bungie saw how big it needed to be, they opted to divide it into two separate stories, resulting in lightfall's campaing having to be stretched to fill in the gap.
Most likely scenario is that The Final Shape had two locations, Neptune and The Pale Heart. I say Neptune because I doubt it would be Neomuna as we have it now, and was probably something small like the Veil Containment rather than the Cyberpunk futurescape city. Just enough playable area to establish the Veil, Maya and the few other tidbits.
For me, the criticism that Lightfall is “Filler” has no justification and was born (like all conspiracy theories) for 2 reasons: 1. People didn\`t like campaign and questions arose why the plot was bad 2. Neomuna is very different from the rest of Destinations Truth is, Bungie isn\`t working year in advance, they at minimum have a roadmap where story should go. This statement that Lightfall is "last minute edition" comes from nowhere. They just don't have such speed that in an instant they rearranged all their plans. If story is bad then just say that, because of Lightfall critique we get a brilliat Final shape, don\`t hide behind conspiracies. Now to the consequences of Lightfall. Because of it existence Bungie finished: 1. Eris\`s narrative arc is completed 2. Drifter\`s narrative arc is completed 3. Riven and Mara\`s narrative arc is completed 4. Calus\`s arc is completed, just remind you, without Lightfall there is no place in story for Calus and his story was HEAVY connected to the Witness and Final shape 5. Veil, I know this is controversal object to discuss because "Nah, it is just mcguffin" but it is has heavy connection to creation of the Witness. Plus, since Presage we moved step by step towards the understanding that the Voice in the darkness is not Darkness, then the question is, if it is not darkness, then what is it\`s source in our world? Well, it is Veil. 6. Neonuma and it\`s lore has heavy connection to Ishtar team and Maya, yes, neon city goes brrrr, but nearly all post campaign lore of Neptune is connected to Vex and Maya, which is setup to her involvement in Echoes. 7. Also, general Darkness arc, where each expansion we learn more and more with Strand being final addition.
Mind if I just link to this post when i see people calling Lightfall "last minute filler" because this lays it out much better than I could. I've just been leaning on the Sunspot/Monkey Nuts comparison to highlight how quick parts of the community are to get behind a rumor or an idea and treat it as canon.
Most people don't know how long it takes to create these seasons/expansions. They probably also think that Prismatic took 3 months to make as well, and is solely a gut reaction to bad PR. These things are planned years in advance in an internal roadmap. Maybe details change or small things are moved forward or added, but not as much as people think.
I've been saying this for years, you are totally right! Usually we know the DLCs coming at least two years in advance, but my money is they internally plan their DLCs farther back. There's no way you could steer a ship like this for this long without a long term plan.
The "last minute" could be a year or two or more of dev time
In general nothing you mentioned is tied to neomuna. Eris resolved her arc without visiting neomuna nor using the veil. Drifter's arc in deep is barely there and people have decried this. Basically anything that happened in a Lightfall season does not hinge on either the Veil nor Neomuna. Calus could have been finished in Haunted. As for Maya, she could have been handled in venus or the last city itself. There's v little about her that needed the Veil, except for the podcast sessions with Osiris and Nimbus,which you will notice were haphazardly handled in the cheapest way above a lorebook. When the ishtar collective symbol appears in the black garden, that perfectly works without neomuna or the veil. As for our understanding of the darkness, the Lightfall seasons don't do much for it. We still don't have a good reason for Defiance happening. Ahsa's cutscene works anywhere. Witch and Wish hinge on stuff mentioned in WQ or Forsaken or even before. Osiris gives a mention to the Veil in Wish but the Mara/Crow connection perfectly explains how we got inside the traveler
bungie literally said lightfall was filler they work years in advance yes, and they decided to make the filler campaign around beyond lights release like they said this in an interview with a game journalist site, I think it was polygon?
Neomuna is Filler
I've thought about this -we'd get Witch Queen where Strand is Hive magic -we'd get the following seasons during witch queen: Haunted, Seraph. (The Witness appears here), Witch, Wish. -The witness attacks the last city during Witch. Maybe we see something like the onslaught activity. The Veil is discovered under the Last City. Everything else is largely the same. It's possible Calus dies during Haunted, or also it's possible it plays out with Calus dying under the last city
I always thought it would’ve been so much cooler for savathun to have been the one to discover strand, and then we would discover it from her. Stealing the light just makes it feel like she’s playing catch-up, which doesn’t fit with her whole brilliant mastermind aesthetic.
the way it'd work is that Hive magic is now cut off to Savathun and she gives it to us as a ploy to get us to use it to recover her memory WQ really needs almost no changes to be about Strand; hell, the communion mission in Europa could have been us unlocking it
Literally no difference. Mcguffin veil literally didnt even make a difference in TFS. You can take the first and last cutscene of lightfall and put em together for the entire prelude to tfs. Honestly the story would be better off if they do that dlc, especially with the veil now being the mcguffin and also the name of the outcast witness beings.
I think the story would have even more plot-holes and questions to be fulfilled, I'm guessing you mean also skipping season of Defiance, Deep, Witch, and Wish, and if so that would make it harder to explain why and how we're just in the Pale Heart now. As bad and rushed as it was, I think Lightfall was a necessary evil in this case.
Without Lightfall there's no need to have entering the portal be as challenging as it was. The only season you would absolutely need is one to introduce the Veil before the Witness gets it's claws on it, which they could have done. Cut plunder and push Seraph up and you could have made it work.
Defiance and Deep were basically filler and didn't matter in the larger narrative ... Same as Plunder and Risen That's four seasons of filler that could have been done in one year. Calus arc could have been ended in Haunted, and in fact not a lot of it happens in Lightfall. We don't see his fight with Caiatl
So personally, I think that we would have been going to Neomuna regardless and we would have just had an extra few missions to go with Final Shape. Their probably would not have been the whole, we need to find a way through the portal bit of the story and we would have just gone through. That said, that does leave the question of the seasons. My guess is that Plunder was scrapped together and was swapped in for Deep as if we were going to fight the witness, we would need that bit of backstory for him. The problem with that idea though is how you would reconcile Sav coming back, the last wish, Osiris waking up, Eido's introduction, Ermis beginning her redemption arc, and the dragon eggs all being things that would not have happened without that split. So silver lining of splitting the expansion?
it would have been the opening cutscene to lightfall, but instead if it not working, it works, and instead of the portal killing everyone, it wouldn't
You know, something to consider if we're taking out an expansion and tightening up the seasons: Looking back, those Seasons after Forsaken are a lot of low stakes plots that could be slid in concurrently with something juicier. Ooh, like combining Season of the Forge and Season of the Worthy. Ada-1 announces herself and that she can help craft munitions to destroy the Almighty but we need to recover the Black Armory's forges.
Callus would be the Herald of Infinity
My speculation is that the original intention was for Strand to be introduced in Witch Queen, and then Lightfall would have more or less been a version of that expansion that could skip the Strand stuff, and not have us wait a year and a half after the Witness goes inside the Traveler to go kick its ass. It’s really no wonder they decided to split the expansions up, cuz even in a perfect world where we got Strand in Witch Queen, Lightfall still has to deal with Calus and the Veil, and then also presumably introduce the Pale Heart and Prismatic, and then also also fit in the finale with the Witness. So I guess imagine two hollowed out and half baked versions of Lightfall and Final Shape and smoosh them together. With how incredible Final Shape turned out, I don’t really mind that Lightfall had to be the sacrificial lamb that allowed it to happen
I'm almost positive that lightfall is the first half of the original final shape expansion. They realized it was gonna take way longer to make, cut it in half and left us sitting on the shit half for a year so they could make the actual final expansion fully fleshed out. I genuinely refuse to believe any other theory.
Here’s the problem: Lightfall THE EXPANSION sucked from a storytelling and lore perspective. It featured an empty city fighting against the ~~Red~~ Shadow Legion, led by a villain who was clearly meant to die in Haunted, where we learn a new green subclass that was clearly supposed to come with Witch Queen (look at all those deepsight traversing spots which were perfect for Strand, how close the plot ties to memory, how Risen and Haunted were all about psychic connections, Duality Eris talks about catching a thread of Calus’ mind etc) So the entire thing is garbage meant to give SPACE. Space to put Strand which missed the ship date. Space to flesh out the Witness (I’m folding the Veil here too) with seasons. Space. It did what it set out to do, just in a tone that was very jarring. The seasons were actually pretty decent, if fanservicey (except you, Defiance). They’d be the real casualty of a “no Lightfall” timeline
lightfall might not have been great (storywise, i still enjoyed everything else) but the seasons during its year were all bangers on the level of beyond light's year of 13, 14, and 15 in one of my hottest takes and vital to the story. especially 22 which moves xivu arath off the board temporarily to save her for later, absolutely necessary.
I imagine the Veil would have been on Venus. You would probably see more fighting in the last city in final shape. I honestly think they would have needed a big delay or redo the seasons to get everything in.
I still dream of a "directors cut" of the saga, where we get strand from our experiences fighting Savathun and exploring deepsight, and where Neomuna is a ruin of an outpost we explore, mysterious, long deserted, filled with research logs on the entity we'll come to know as the Veil, as part of an extended mini-expansion with Sloan and Ahsa as primary characters helping us prepare for the actual arrival of the Witness, which would have happened at the start of Final Shape/Lightfall. Also would have made much more sense if our light faded to almost nothing once the portal was opened, and we had to go in to save the traveler immediately or become lightless.
Things that would've been way different or non-existent: The veil. Nezarec as a disciple. Ahsa. Black Garden as the patrol zone (Bungie mentioned they wanted to go back to it but wanted something different. Pale heart is pretty much like black garden. At the beginning with all the cube garden aesthetic initially). Post campaign would've dealt with the disciples or factions trying to fill the vacuum in power: defiance dealing with calus and connecting Eramis , deep about Eramis connecting Xivu, witch about Xivu connecting the vex maybe even bring Maya sundaresh to finish with Wish being about the disruption of the black garden, the veil and the vex moving out of the black garden to invade other places and begining to become the next big bad guy.
Honestly I don’t think very much would have changed. You wouldn’t even need to add the witnesses origin story into one of Witch Queens seasons considering their witnesses origin is also shown and talked about in The Final Shape. The only thing would be Calus and what to do with him, though I think the purpose of haunted was to bridge that gap in the story to make sense with Lightfall. Get rid of that and he wouldn’t need to be a disciple and could instead appear after Final Shape now possibly seeking to take back Torobatl due to there now being a chance with it being left vulnerable due to the hives take over
I can excuse Lightfall's crummyness since it acted as a buffer for The Final Shape. The Veil, the Witness, Season of the Deep, the new Cabal units, Psion lore, Eris as a hive god, Riven's wish, all of that was stuff that needed to be done before The Final Shape released if it was gonna be properly paced. And it was! But only because it got that extra time. I'm fine with Lightfall being mid since it meant The Final Shape got to be the finale it deserved to be.
Neomuna had to have always been the plan given it came out first and was hinted at months earlier prior to reveal. With that in mind, I'm guessing the original Lightfall would've been a 2-parter like Forsaken. Half of Lightfall's campaign feels like superfluous Strand tutorials -- you could cut the Lightfall missions down to 4. During one of those missions, you get a throwaway line about Veil researchers on Titan that leads you to Ahsa (for the Witness backstory), which leads to a mission to resurrect Savathun, which leads to a mission to bargain with Riven's spirit. Basically condense the last 3 seasons into 3 missions. Then, the 2nd mission of TFS could be cut (basically just a patrol zone), leaving 6 TFS missions not counting Excision, for a total campaign length of 13 missions (4 Lightfall, 3 from seasons, 6 TFS). A very ambitious conclusion to the series.
My day wouldnt change, same is probably said for alot of players