Despite being an expansion, Destiny 2: The Final Shape is the year's highest-rated release so far.
28.05.2024 - 16:09 / polygon.com / Joe Blackburn
Destiny 2’s raids have always been the best thing about the game. Unfortunately, only a fraction of Guardians ever attempt them. The developers at Bungie have tried a number of different tactics over the years to fix this, the most notable being an attempt to inject some difficulty into the campaigns in order to help reduce the complexity gap between raids and the rest of the game. But the studio has never quite hit the right balance there, even in some of its best campaigns, like The Witch Queen.
Thankfully, as a long-time Destiny raider myself, I finally feel like Bungie is making good on that “raid-lite” promise with The Final Shape. I visited Bungie HQ to check out a few missions from the upcoming expansion, and I was satisfied with the raid-lite mechanics I saw.
Back in 2022, I spoke to former game director Joe Blackburn about if we’d ever see the expansion’s big bad in the raid again. While you could argue that Riven (the final boss of the Last Wish raid) was the true puppet master in Forsaken, raiders haven’t battled the baddy on the box since we took out Oryx in King’s Fall back in the 2015 Taken King expansion. That’s been a bit frustrating for my Fireteam as it makes the epic conclusion of the expansion feel more like a side quest. Blackburn told me putting a boss the caliber of Savathun in the raid is something the studio wanted to do again, but first it needed to get more players into the raid — otherwise, a good chunk of the community wouldn’t get a satisfying story conclusion.
Blackburn hinted that we’d see more puzzles and mechanics in the campaign for Witch Queen. And while there are certainly some objectives that are a bit more complex than “kill every enemy in this room; OK, now do it again,” it never gave me raid vibes. It just felt like an excellent Destiny campaign.
A little over two years later, I found myself sitting in a Bungie test lab in Bellevue, Washington, failing to perform and identify mission mechanics in my preview of The Final Shape campaign. And I was thrilled about it.
After playing a few Final Shape missions, I sat down with Catarina Macedo, project lead for all of Destiny 2’s expansions, and Ben Wommack, Destiny 2’s combat area lead, to talk about this change in philosophy when it came to making the campaign feel like “baby’s first raid.”
“One of the things that we knew that The Witness as a villain would be worthy of, it’s like, ‘Yep, this is gonna have to be our raid boss. It just is. It warrants that challenge to players,’” said Macedo. “With the campaign, because we knew that The Witness was going to be the raid boss, we were like, ‘Hey, it would be really cool to introduce all these different mission mechanics that do [make it] feel like there’s a little bit
Despite being an expansion, Destiny 2: The Final Shape is the year's highest-rated release so far.
One of the new missions in : is called Iconoclasm and it can be a challenge to finish. The goal is to find the Witness, but to do so you will have to go through several bosses and solve a puzzle or two. You can do this solo, but it might be easier to face with friends that you can coordinate with.
A Destiny 2 clan has heroically cleared The Final Shape expansion's raid, unlocking the game's true final mission for all players to undertake. The 12-player Excision mission is now live, which can be accessed by opening the Pale Heart destination from the director screen and scrolling over to the right.
Destiny 2’s latest expansion, The Final Shape, is finally closing the chapter on its Light vs. Dark saga that has been stewing for nearly 10 years. Destiny’s story of The Traveler and the Guardians’ fight against the Darkness first began in September of 2014, and although the seemingly eternal war has gone through several iterations (and much sidetracking) we are – at last – getting the opportunity to finish it once and for all.
Let’s not beat around the bush, The Final Shape is exactly the finale that Destiny 2 deserves. Almost a decade on from the original game’s release, and with many players having sunk thousands of hours into the science fantasy shooter over the years, The Final Shape had a lot of expectations and pressure heaped upon it to deliver the satisfying ending for all the characters we’ve come to know and love. They took a little while longer to make sure they got it right – especially after Lightfall’s disappointment – but Bungie has absolutely nailed it.
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Indy’s upcoming FPS adventure game, has a new ‘Official Showcase Reveal’ trailer, officially showcasing and revealing basically nothing about the game except that it features some pretty and decently acted cutscenes, which we already knew from the previous reveal. It does have snow nazis in however, possibly the rarest flavour of Nazi after Cookies n’ Cream and Original. You’ll find the trailer below. Be careful: it’s official. Also, it’s mainly just one very long cutscene, so if you want to save that stuff for when the game’s out, maybe don’t bother.
The launch of Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion was highly anticipated by the player base, but it didn’t go smoothly. Its developer, Bungie, has apologized for all the interruptions, which have included skipped cutscenes, the inability to access the game’s servers, and more.
Bungie’s latest expansion for Destiny 2, The Final Shape, is finally available and off to a strong start. Its peak concurrent players on Steam in the past 24 hours totalled 314,634, nearly beating its lifetime record of 316,750 (the launch of Lightfall).
Bungie has apologised to Destiny 2 players for connection issues following the release of The Final Shape.
I've set aside some time this evening for Destiny 2's latest expansion The Final Shape, which launched last night. My pal Liam suggested we play this evening because Bungie's servers would inevitably go up in flames the moment it launched. And what do you know? The right decision was made. Are we smug about it? Yes. Anyway, the good news is that Bungie have put out a few of those fires, though there are still a few bugs to fix.
Destiny 2 developer Bungie has issued an apology to disgruntled fans who struggled to play The Final Shape expansion at launch.
Destiny 2, Bungie's long-running live-service FPS, may be getting its "final shape" today, but that shape appears to not include servers that are ready for the clamoring playerbase.