Destiny 2’s upcoming Glaive weapon archetype highlighted in new Witch Queen trailer

Get up close and personal.
Image via Bungie

We’re just one week and one day out from the impending arrival of The Witch Queen expansion for Destiny 2. Developer Bungie has been keeping its cards close to the chest with small teases over the last few months, but players have finally gotten to know more about what the new DLC has in store this month. A trailer released Monday shows the development process behind the glaive, a new weapon archetype coming to the game with The Witch Queen.

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New additions to the sandbox are something of a rarity in Destiny, with the last major one being the introduction of bows back in 2018’s Forsaken expansion. The video gives players a small behind-the-scenes look at the development process behind the glaive, a hybrid between a polearm-styled melee weapon and a projectile launcher with special abilities related to your Guardian’s class.

Hardcore Destiny fans have been waiting a long time for more melee options beyond swords, and the glaive seems poised to fill that niche while having an identity all its own. “Adding something new to the sandbox is never not going to be difficult,” Bungie designer George Kokoris says in the video, “and when we first started running playtests with it, they were way too strong, which is a good thing. That’s a good problem to have.”

One of the biggest differentiation points for the glaive is staying in Destiny’s usual first-person while hacking away at enemies, giving its animations and combat an up close and personal feel that’s very different from the distant third-person view players are used to from swords. “The glaive is a much more focused, much more directed thing. It’s a polearm, you’re very clearly holding it in a certain direction,” Kokoris says. “We wanted to keep that experience in first-person. It has an immediacy that I think would’ve been lost if we were exclusively in third-person.”

Bungie’s previous pre-release material for The Witch Queen let players know the special properties each class can make use of through the glaive. Warlocks get healing turrets to go alongside them as they fight, while Titans can summon a shield to soak up enemy fire and Hunters get a flashy chain lightning effect in the vein of Riskrunner and Trinity Ghoul. The weapon crafting system coming to Destiny 2 will introduce players to the archetype, and Guardians should be able to tailor their Glaives to focus on the traits that fit their playstyles best.


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Author
Tre Lyerly
Tre is a Contributing Writer for Gamepur and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has a B.A. in journalism from the University of Kentucky, makes music and DJs under the name Trevor Whatevr, plays a lot of Destiny 2 and might or might not actually be a robot.