(Warning LONG review. Skip to the end for a tl;dr if needed)

Amazing game, I've played since it launched on BNET and started in D1. I'm gonna try and break down the game for any new players, or some of you that might want some extra insight.

The gist of this game is a FPS loot and shoot grind. You are a 'guardian' of the last city on earth and can outfit yourself with endless types of guns and armor on your quest to keep the city safe.

But before we dive in, let's cover the basics:

Choosing Your Character
You can choose between 3 races as well as 3 character types. These are very similar to most MMORPG characters:
- Hunter (Lone wolf, high damage super, great add clear supers)
- Titan (The tank, great supportive supers, and decent add clear supers)
- Warlock (The healer, great supportive super, medium damage super, and decent add clear supers)
You are allowed to have 3 characters on your account (all three will be accessible to play from the title screen) and after creating 3 you will have to delete one to create another

All characters are good for solo/team play and it is a personal preference. With this being said, some endgame activities require a combination of different characters for optimal performance. (I will get into it more further on)

Choosing Your Characters Class
Looking at the list above you might be thinking supers? What the hell are those? Supers are what you call your 'class'. Each of the 3 character types has 3 different classes focused around the 3 elements in game; these being Void , Arc , and Solar .
I don't want to bore you to death with even more of my mediocre writing, so if you want to go into detail about classes and subclasses check out this Website [d2.destinygamewiki.com], they do a very good job:

Story Progression
Moving on, there are many campaigns from previous expansions. These are:
- The Red War (The Cabal's assault on the tower)
- Curse of Osiris (Finding Osiris and helping him)
- Warmind (Finding Anna Bray and helping her)
- Forsaken (Helping Cayde, and a revenge story)
- And now Shadowkeep (Finding Eris and helping her)
(I included a mostly spoilerless description of the campaign, but look at your own risk)
These should be your go to as you level your character and get to know the game.

Casual Play
As you continue the story, there are other opportunities to play and progress. These are known as the Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit playlists:
- Vanguard: This is a PVE playlist where you can choose between heroic story missions, strikes, and nightfalls (nightfalls are a harder version of strikes, and The Ordeal nightfall is an endgame activity.) Strikes being the only matchmade activity aside from the first two difficulties of The Ordeal.
- Crucible: This is a PVP playlist where you will go up against other players in various game modes of your choice. You can use titan because it is broken any of the guns and abilities in your arsenal to win and secure the bread. There is also a ranked playlist that you can compete for glory and pursue pinnacle quest weapons.
- Gambit: This is a PVPVE playlist where a team of 4 matchmade/fireteam guardians will compete to summon and kill a boss before the other team. To summon the boss, you will need to bank X amount of motes and fend off invaders. The amount of motes depends on the type of gambit you are playing, whether it be normal Gambit [destiny.fandom.com] or Gambit Prime [www.destinypedia.com].

Endgame
As you progress through the world of Destiny 2 you might find that the story is great, but you want to find something amazing and more challenging. This is where the endgame comes in, and is undoubtedly the best part of the game (opinion).

There are many endgame activities like dungeons, Nightfalls (The Ordeal), etc. But for the sake of this I'm just going to talk about raids.

Raids are a challenging activity that have a team of 6 guardians traversing a new area undergoing new challenges. These raids are not match made, and will require communication (preferably through a mic & headset).

These challenges include:
- New bosses with new mechanics
- Encounters with jumping puzzles
- Sparrow races (One raid in particular)
- There are also secret chests in some raids that will require traversing dangerous paths to reach.

These raids are made up of different encounters consisting of the above challenges. Every encounter will reward loot, with non boss encounters dropping non powerful loot.

To beat these encounters players will need to use a combinations of buffs and debuffs [destiny.fandom.com]. These will increase the potency of your weapon damage, health, shield and regen. Many different combinations will be better for different situations, so don’t be afraid to learn as you go or ask some fellow guardians.

But not all players will have 5 friends on standby for raids, and that’s where LFG (or looking for game) servers come in. There are many out there but the discord server [discord.gg] is a great option.

Tl;dr
There are many different ways to play destiny and customise your character. The story (the beginning kinda sucks, also my opinion) is a great way to get started, and after you progress there are other activities like Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit. After all of this if you are up for a challenge check out some of the dungeons, raids and The Ordeal.

If you are planning on becoming a regular on Destiny, there are many different resources you can use to increase QoL. Im leaving a few below and feel free to join my discord server if you need some additional information. Just remember that when starting a new game for the first time, no question is a stupid question.

Eyes up guardian!

Destiny Item Manager [destinyitemmanager.com] (An easy way to transfer items between characters and the vault without going to the tower)

https://www.light.gg A website that lets you check what perks a weapon can roll with.

Destiny Sets [destinysets.com] A website that lets you check what mods/armor perks you have unlocked

Braytech [braytech.org] An AMAZING website that lets you check triumphs, collections, etc.

Where is Xur [whereisxur.com] Tells the location of Xur each friday and what he’s selling.

Menagerie Chalice Recipes [docs.google.com] A spreadsheet with the rune recipes for all items.

And finally, my Discord [discord.gg]