No Escape AFK Blog #3: The Squandered Spooky Potential of Destiny 2’s European Dead Zone
As any Destiny 2 player will tell you, there are places you like to go in Destiny 2, and places you more or less avoid unless absolutely necessary. One of the latter destinations is the EDZ, or European Dead Zone.
When Destiny 2 first launched, the EDZ was an important place for Guardians young and old; it served for a long time as the tutorial ground for new players to learn about adventures, patrols, local public events, lost sectors and character bounties. The principal NPCs in the game at time of launch were Devrim Kay (voiced by Gideon Emery), a charming non-Guardian scout who knew the EDZ like the back of his hand and always had time for tea with Guardians looking to get the lay of the land; Amanda Holliday (voiced by Courtenay Taylor), the Vanguard’s chief shipwright; and Suraya Hawthorne (voiced by Sumalee Montano), the fiercely independent non-Guardian leader of the resistance effort against the Cabal. In the original Red War campaign, players spent a LOT of time in the EDZ.
It was a big area, not easily traversible by foot. It had a lot of hidden nooks and crannies, official and otherwise, for players to explore. It was decadently lush and green, pristinely dilapidated, and exactly the kind of spot for Bungie to set up their own version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., if they wanted to. And for a second the EDZ got a lot of use, first as a major diversion in the Curse of Osiris DLC, then as an important location for us to be during a major moment Warmind, then finally as an integral area in Season 5 when the Black Armory gets introduced, Season of the Forge. Since then, the area has become basically a ghost town.
A couple of things led to this, I think:
- They brought the much more popular Cosmodrome location back, and made it the principal staging ground for new players.
- They brought the Moon back and turned up the spookification levels to maximum as the main site of the Hive, a literal nightmare generator and the location of a Dark Fleet capital ship.
- The story has just naturally moved away from Earth. The Dreaming City and Europa have just seen much more action in the last two years.
- Even if you don’t care about any of the above, the simple fact is, the EDZ has nothing of value to players who are constantly chasing increased power levels. It doesn’t have any vendor who dispenses pinnacle gear, or even just powerful gear at any tier rating, there are no new special activities to speak of (even the Black Armory stuff is basically gone), and the Strikes that take place in the Zone haven’t changed in like eleven seasons.
(I know lately there’s been a lot of discussion about the Destiny Content Vault (DCV) and what gets put into it and when; a lot of that is outside of my wheelhouse to talk about here, but the EDZ seems like the kind of place that probably does deserve to be vaulted, even if it means losing out on Devrim’s sweet voice. But I digress.)
A Survey of the Zone
This is the state of the EDZ today. I touched down in Trostland and decided to check out the five connected sub-areas: Maevic Square, The Salt Mines, and the three Lost Sectors: the Atrium, Widow’s Walk, and Terminus East. The three Lost Sectors are basically the same as they’ve been since 2017 with one exception: both Terminus East and Widow’s Walk have “Nightmare” sector bosses introduced during Shadowkeep: they’re essentially much harder to take down for no extra reward.
The Salt Mines haven’t changed either, but they’re considerably more open than Maevic Square, which has shields up at either end of the courtyard opposite of where you come in.
You can still visit Devrim Kay in the bombed-out chapel. He offers three minor bounties, a set of Wildwood faction armor tied to reputation, and the Call to Serve scout rifle, all at the bottom-most level cap a player can possibly achieve right now of 1100. You can and will earn better versions of this gear simply existing within the confines of Destiny’s world.
What about the other areas?
The Outskirts is a pretty big open area to the southwest of Trostland. There are three lost sectors — Scavenger’s Den, The Drain, and Whispered Falls — and one side area, Sojourner’s Camp. Sojourner’s Camp is interesting because while it hasn’t been used at all since the first expansion, the changes that were made to it in that first expansion are still there. You can use your Sparrow to jump the bridge and make your way to Niobe Labs, which is closed.
If you go west from the Outskirts, you hit the Winding Cove, which is essentially just a fat road to Firebase Hades, the Cabal encampment from the original game. There’s one Lost Sector here called The Weep.
North from the Outskirts is The Sludge, which has three Lost Sectors — Hallowed Grove, Cavern of Souls, and Shaft 13 — and is the main area where you went to reach the Dark Forest and the Shard of the Traveler— which is now inaccessible.
The rest of the map is basically a Cabal base, and as much as the missions involving that sector were important, I think you get the idea. There are no natural hazards, nothing that poses a challenge that isn’t kept safely in one of several tiny boxes spread around the map in this place that tries so hard (well,) to evoke the apocalyptic weirdness of Roadside Picnic and Annihilation.
I dunno. I feel like… well, I feel like nothing, to be honest. The Lake of Shadows strike has fireteams clean up a Taken contamination event at a local water purification plant, and as much as that adds some like, little flavor to the world, it doesn’t really have that sense of urgency. The Arms Dealer might as well be a training video for how to storm a Cabal ship, and doesn’t really deal with the Zone otherwise.
What’s Left?
In the original Destiny 2 launch campaign, the EDZ is important. It serves two thematic functions: introduce us to the cosmic weirdness the broader game promises us, as well as the faintest glimmer that our power might not be as clear-cut as we think (the Shard of the Traveler is said to be corrupted, its light tainted, yet we end up fine; famous last words); and perpetuate the feeling of being a single underdog resistance fighter against a much more powerful mechanized army that we want to feel after witnessing the Red Legion’s rout of the Vanguard. The aesthetic is deliberately meant to evoke a few things, chief among them World War II with supernatural characteristics, and I think it mostly succeeds in this goal.
As the game has moved away from this initial state, the EDZ is becoming less and less necessary, and the deliberately weird aesthetic trappings start to look increasingly shallow. It’s just a bombed out sector of Central Europe in a post-apocalypse that reintroduced gods and magic to its world well before we ever got here. In that sense, it’s nothing special.
And that’s a shame. It could have been so much more interesting than that.
