Destiny 2: Warmind’s strikes are recycled missions — except the PS4-exclusive one

Destiny 2’s latest expansion, Warmind, includes some new strikes. These cooperative three-player dungeon-esque exercises usually comprise a major chunk of the new content in each Destiny add-on. But they don’t feel very new in Warmind, unless you’re playing on PlayStation 4, where Destiny publisher Activision maintains an exclusive content deal.

On Windows PC and Xbox One, Warmind comes with two strikes: Strange Terrain and Will of the Thousands. But like multiple Destiny expansions before it, Warmind offers an extra strike exclusively to PS4 players, The Insight Terminus. Longtime Destiny players remain frustrated by this situation — even PlayStation customers, who benefit from the exclusive content, often express sympathy for their PC and Xbox brethren — but they’re accustomed to it by now.

What’s particularly galling with Warmind, though, is that PS4 players aren’t just getting an additional strike — they’re getting the only strike that is actually new content.

In Warmind, Bungie is continuing a strategy it employed with Destiny 2’s first expansion, Curse of Osiris: bringing strikes directly into the campaign, in an effort to ensure that more players experience that content. Of course, a cynic might say that the studio is misleading people by recycling campaign missions as strikes; they had typically been unique exercises, even if many of them partly took place in familiar environments.

Curse of Osiris featured two strikes, Tree of Probabilities and A Garden World, both of which were repurposed from missions in that expansion’s story campaign. The same applies in Warmind to Strange Terrain and Will of the Thousands — and again, those are the only two strikes that exist in the PC and Xbox One versions of the game. Only PS4 players get to play something entirely new: The Insight Terminus doesn’t exist as a campaign mission.

PC and Xbox One players are understandably furious at this. The top thread on the Destiny subreddit at the moment concerns this topic. “The only OC strike in this DLC is Playstation exclusive? Are you kidding?” is the thread, where “OC” stands for “original content”; as of this writing, it has nearly 5,000 upvotes.

Bungie and publisher Activision have said that Destiny 2’s PS4 exclusives will remain locked to the platform until “at least Fall 2018,” and the companies have a history of using that loose language to their benefit. When Destiny: The Taken King launched in September 2015, a year after the original game, all PlayStation-exclusive content from Destiny’s first year of life came to Xbox. But when the game’s fourth expansion, Rise of Iron, arrived in September 2016, Bungie and Activision announced that Xbox players would have to wait an additional year to get The Taken King’s exclusives. (They weren’t released on Xbox until October 2017.)

For more on Destiny 2: Warmind, check out our impressions of the new buffs to exotic weapons.