While we know that Destiny 2’s Witch Queen expansion has been a high point for the franchise in many ways, it’s also something that has expanded the game’s mainstream appeal beyond its usual reach, and when you stop and look at the numbers, something pretty impressive is revealed.
Right now, Destiny 2’s Witch Queen expansion is the second highest reviewed PS5 game in 2022 with an 89 Metascore, second only to the untouchable 96 of Elden Ring, one of the best reviewed games ever. Pulling back even further, Witch Queen is tied for sixth in terms of the best PS5 releases since the console launched, though three of the games ahead of it are re-releases or remasters or remakes, Tony Hawk, Hades and Demon’s Souls. If PS5 score translated to Xbox Series X, it would also be #2 for the year, though the Xbox score is some points lower with fewer reviews in.
And yes, in case it isn’t clear from all these other comparisons, Witch Queen is Destiny’s highest scoring expansion or main game release overall. That list is the following (with some variance across platforms, these are PS4).
- Destiny 2: The Witch Queen – 89
- Destiny: The Taken King - 86
- Destiny 2 – 85
- Destiny 2: Forsaken - 82
- Destiny 2 – Beyond Light - 77
- Destiny - 76
- Destiny 2: Shadowkeep – 73
- Destiny: Rise of Iron – 72
- Destiny: House of Wolves - 72
- Destiny: The Dark Below - 63
- Destiny 2: Warmind - 63
- Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris – 57
So far as I can tell individual seasons do not get scores, but a few interesting things jump out here, other than Witch Queen being ahead of everything. First, as you might expect, Destiny’s The Taken King out-reviews everything else besides Witch Queen (and that would reinforce my previous claim that I do believe WQ is better than the series’ previous high water mark). Second, I was a little surprised to see vanilla Destiny 2 outreview Forsaken, though I do remember that at least during the initial runthrough, everyone, myself included, was focused on how much the campaign had improved from the first game, and I’d probably say vanilla scores are inflated as a result given that the endgame and PvP is where things quickly fell apart in the double primary era.
Finally, I find it interesting that the bottom four are the more traditional DLCs that were demanded from the game in the Activision era before Bungie realized A) they couldn’t do produce that much content that often in Destiny 1 and B) realized that instead they could move to a seasonal model in Destiny 2. And clearly that panned out in many ways.
I suppose you could also use this as a rough ranking order of the expansions in terms of quality. I would say Rise of Iron as a period of time in Destiny history was very good, but the expansion itself, minus the raid, was not great. And I too would rate Shadowkeep the lowest out of D2 expansions by a good margin. Sorry, I really didn’t like that one.
Anyway, Witch Queen rules, now with data.
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