Let's Talk About That Insane Izanami Forge Unlock Quest In Destiny 2's Black Armory

Destiny 2


Yesterday marked the launch of the Izanami Forge in the Destiny 2 Black Armory expansion, part of Bungie’s gradual rollout of new content that will take place over the course of an entire season. That’s three Forges down and one to go, but players logged on yesterday to find that they couldn’t just start forging new weapons, but were instead greeted by a questline to unlock the Forge that seemed like it would never end.

There are nine full steps to unlock the Izanami Forge, minus a bunch of return trips to Ada to show her things. You unlock the Forge, realize the Forge is broken, then spend the other half of the quest fixing the Forge spark plug.

The quest features steps like “Kill 100 Vex” and “Kill 20 Minotaurs” and tasks players with inane tasks like doing specific heroic public events in specific places, or running through Lost Sectors to kill a single blight, reloading, and doing it again and again.

This busywork is interspersed with what could be considered actual “content.” There’s an unlock mission where you fight Vex at the new Forge. There’s a new platforming mission on Nessus that’s brand new and features somewhat unique mechanics. And there’s a “practice” boss fight back at the Forge.

Destiny 2


But everything else? It feels like filler. The entire process took me about 3.5 hours, but I’ve heard for some people it’s closer to five hours before they even get their first weapon frame, and some are struggling on the 630 strike that doesn’t have matchmaking and kicks you to orbit if you die, a strike that is different in no meaningful way from the original other than that modifier and its increased PL.

This has sparked a debate in the community about what kind of content people actually want. On one side, there are people saying “well, you wanted a grind, here’s a grind,” and on the other, larger, louder side in this case, there are people saying “yeah but we didn’t want this.”

I might not have minded this slog of a questline as much if it unlocked the Forge across all my characters. But it doesn’t, and I’m going to have to repeat this process twice more to access a single Forge for all my people. That’s 10-15 hours of an “intro” quest for one Forge, most of which is nothing but busywork.

I think I understand what Bungie is trying to do here. The idea is to pad out time and design a process that takes a while to unlock. The idea seems to be that this is something you can just slowly work toward, and achieve many of these steps through just normal playing (killing Minotaurs, happening upon the public events you need).

Destiny 2


The problem is that Bungie has to know that the hardest core players, the ones still invested in D2 after two years, don’t want to consume content like this. If you tell them a new forge is out, players want to grind through the entire questline in one sitting so they can unlock it. And when you do these quests all strung together like this, it feels exhausting.

I don’t always hate “kill X enemy” quests as they make sense for things like say, forging Black Armory weapons by getting kills with a certain type of gun or something, but when they show up here they just feel like extra fat Bungie could easily trim. I think you could have definitely had an entire “unlock” questline that was literally just the initial Forge discovery, the platforming mission, and the practice boss fight. That would have felt like enough content to be a substantive introduction, while not so much that I am genuinely dreading having to repeat this quest on two more characters. The grind of Black Armory is supposed to be the Forges themselves, the grind should not be these inane questlines to unlock the Forges in the first place. It’s like trying to watch a movie, but before you’re let into the theater an employee asks you to count a bowl of paperclips or recite all the state capitals.

Overall I like Black Armory, but Bungie is going a little overboard trying to create the illusion of “content” with some of these rollouts. I know the alternative is everyone finishing everything faster and then complaining about that, and yet at this point, I would take that over 10+ hours to unlock 1/4th of the Forges of this expansion, and I know I’m not alone.

