Destiny 2 gets a little bit bigger today: the game's first expansion, titled Curse of Osiris, just went live. It's the first major content drop since launch and the game's first opportunity to entice back hardcore players who may have lost track of the game after having hit the level cap shortly after the game's launch in September. The DLC is free if you already have the season pass and $19.99 if you buy it individually. That puts it in line with the original Destiny's year-one expansions, though it appears to contain a good deal more content.
Curse of Osiris is the realization of some longstanding elements of Destiny lore. Osiris himself is an exiled Warlock living on Mercury, and he's been hanging out in the periphery of the game ever since early on in the original Destiny's first year. There's a sort of Egyptian-styled cult surrounding him that ran the Trials of Osiris, a high-level PvP activity that set teams of three against each other and rewarded those who won successive matches without losing. Mercury, too, has been hanging out in the game for a while, mostly in the form of PvP maps but also with the Lighthouse, a central social location in Curse of Osiris but locked away to all but the best of the best PvP players in the original Destiny.
This DLC promises quite a bit to explore in the form of a new suite of story missions, a new patrol zone and new challenges in the form of a "Raid Lair" and the "Infinite Forest." We'll also, naturally, be getting a big new drop of weapons and armor to hunt after. It's a good deal more meaty than the original Destiny's widely-panned first DLC The Dark Below. It's a low bar to clear, but Curse of Osiris still has its work cut out when it comes to restoring fan confidence in a game that's struggled since launch. I don't doubt that we'll have plenty to do in the next week, but the real test for this game will be how it performs after we've already moved through the new content and returned to the grind.
So far, all I've done is watch the opening cinematic, but even that shows promise: Osiris is an interesting character, and we're seeing a continued commitment to the vastly improved storytelling that this sequel shows when compared to its predecessor. Stay tuned for more thoughts.
