First Impressions Of Destiny 2: Forsaken's Gambit, The Mode I Never Knew I Wanted

With family in town this weekend, I had precious little time to squeeze in some rounds of Destiny 2’s new Gambit mode during the 24 hour pre-Forsaken trial. But I managed to stay up late last night and get in enough time with it to formulate a first impression, and load myself up with enough ammo to write this article today.

I am not surprised I enjoy Gambit very much. This has always seemed like Extremely My Jam as someone who routinely manages to get 4x the enemy kills in strikes as my teammates for reasons I can’t explain, and is also usually “kill leader of the losing team” in PvP, which probably best describes my skill there. In short, lots of enemy farming and boss burning combined with a modest amount of PvP is pretty much my entire Destiny experience in a nutshell. And now it’s all in one mode.

I like Gambit because it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before in either Destiny itself, or really, any other game. Everyone from Call of Duty to Battlefield is currently chasing the Battle Royale Fortnite/PUBG train, so it’s nice to see Destiny just pause and consider doing something…wholly original. You just don’t see that often in an almost purely iterative industry. The closest thing you might be able to compare Gambit to is a sort of MOBA mode with more limited PvP, but even that is a pretty weak equivalency, as it really is like nothing else I’ve seen.

Matches are essentially two phases, one where you’re trying to farm PvE enemies to get a bank of 75 total motes, and then after 75 motes when you spawn a boss that you try to kill before the other team. Complicating this is that throughout the match, when the other team banks their motes, they send over tough enemies that prevent you from banking yours until you kill them, and then of course the PvP component where one member of your team can invade the other side every 25 motes or any time during the boss phase to make players either drop motes before they can bank them, or heal their final boss through kills.

It sounds more complicated than it is, and even though I had teammates that were clearly struggling with these concepts, it does seem like a mode everyone will be able to catch on to quickly.

I performed well in my games. I won practically all of them, and usually ended up mote/mob kill leader, and pretty much always guardian kill/primeval healing leader because I always wanted to invade as soon as I could, and I think most other people don’t understand when the portal goes up yet.

Invasion is a ton of fun, as you’re at a huge advantage when doing so with an overshield, radar invisibility and the ability to see exactly where every enemy is for the 30 second duration. Unless you’re immediately heavied or supered, you will probably get at solid amount of kills per invasion, and even in just a few games, I had a bunch of 4-man team wipes with my Hammers of Dawn. It’s incredibly fun (when it goes right, at least).

On the other side, when you know you’re being invaded you really need to stop what you’re doing and find the invader before you continue worrying about farming or boss burning. No one seems to realize this yet, but he has to be your number one priority or a good invasion can swing the entire game. Some of the best moments of the game come when an invader kills a bunch of mote-carriers stuck at their bank by blockers, putting them super far behind, or wiping a team during the boss phase healing their primeval by 75% or more in one go. Crucible has been trying to get “hero moments” back with sandbox changes for ages now, but here we have Gambit which has taken that hero concept and made it a central tenet of the mode with invasion. That’s rather brilliant, if you ask me.
Source: https://www.forbes.com

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