With all the hubbub happening this last month, it's interesting to see Bungie's Destiny 2 caught in its own firestorm of controversy. It's probably not all that surprising though. The original Destiny seemingly messed up every single week, especially en route to its first DLC. We seem to be on a similar path with Destiny 2's Curse of Osiris, which launches on December 5th. So let's take a look at five reasons why you should give this $20 DLC a miss.

Short Campaign

According to impressions from those who completed the campaign in Curse of Osiris, there's not a whole lot there. It's roughly 2 to 3 hours in length and while that doesn't count the raid layer, the weapon forging quests and whatnot, there's just not a lot there. Perhaps what's worse about the whole deal is how many stories Bungie is trying to tie up. The mystery of the Vex and how they're finally setting their grand plan in motion? Osiris, who's been missing for all this time and seemingly needs your help to stop the Vex? The simulated timelines of the Vex with infinite possibilities? All of this lore that's been built up over three years of Destiny will be resolved in roughly 2 to 3 hours.

I could see people asking me if I expected WoW-level content. And honestly, I don't know how hard it would be to wrap up the rescue of Osiris while the Vex's plan could probably be tackled in a free update or something. As it stands, with no in-game Grimoire or anything on the level of The Taken King's Books of Sorrow, at least 5 to 6 hours of campaign time would have been nice. Sure, that's roughly three quarters of Destiny 2's campaign but so many other expansions do so much more with so much less.

Boring New Zone

Okay, so Destiny 2 isn't really a triumph of story-telling and Curse of Osiris looks like it wants to continue that trend. Fair enough. Much of the game is about running around in these new areas with your buddies and killing things. Sadly, despite Mercury being a brand new zone – and by “brand new”, I mean it's probably been an unused environment since before Destiny's launch – it's just...boring. The entire map is one flat circle and you're denied the use of a Sparrow because that will probably highlight just how shamelessly small it is.

Again, you don't need a huge play space or something that's complete brand new to make something fun. Look at games like Yakuza which can reuse the same cityscape but do so with interesting little twists, new quests, etc. What does Curse of Osiris have to populate its spiffy new zone? Well...

“New” Activities Fall Flat

Check it – you get a couple of high value targets roaming around, the “biggest” Public Event that Bungie has ever created and one known Lost Sector. That's not including the weapon forging quests (which equate to “go collect this material from doing the same stuff you always do”), the two story missions were are re-fashioned as Strikes, Adventures and the raid lair. This basically equates to one dungeon out in the world, a timed event which sees you going back and forth on man-cannons and dunking orbs and the same reskinned enemies you've killed in the wild umpteen times.

It'd be one thing if Curse of Osiris implemented some kind of new mechanic that we've never seen in the series before. Really, anything at this point would be great. The raid lair is perhaps the one true activity that could stand out but if the Leviathan was any indication, it could either turn out brilliant or horrible.

Wasted Potential

“What about the Infinite Forest or weapon forging?” Both these aspects highlight the sheer wasted potential of Bungie's ideas. The Infinite Forest consists of randomly arranged segments and could lead you to different time periods. Various enemies of other races show up and theoretically, this should mean that it's different every time you enter. Last I heard that drivel it was with The Division's Underground DLC and it got boring real quick.

But what's even worse is that with such a vast amount of potential – a giant simulation that can create anything! - we get something that's so bland. There's no possibility of new mission types or interesting new features like, oh, Forge mode or custom missions or anything of that sort. This reflects in the forged weapons which could have signalled the return of random rolls. At the very least, there should have been a set number of possible configurations for a weapon rather than just one. Sadly, these are just dumbed down weapon quests and nothing more. It's such a waste.

Unreliable Bungie

At the end of the day, there's no reason to trust Bungie to deliver either. Players were promised so much story-telling that there would be complaints. What they got was a neutered Grimoire, an inconsistent timeline, poor writing, plenty of terrible characters and so on. Players were led to believe that each duplicate item they picked up would offer something unique and different. Instead, they got duplicate after duplicate unto eternity. They were led to believe that the XP earned in the bottom bar was telling the truth but alas Bungie was throttling their XP gains, most likely to incentivize the purchase of Bright Engrams aka loot boxes. When such a system was removed, Bungie then doubled the amount of XP required for a Bright Engram.

There will be a blog post very soon from Bungie that discusses the end-game and what improvements are being made. There's the same song and dance from its community managers to make players think they “care”. However, nothing has truly changed about Destiny or the way Bungie handles it.