Eurogamer’s review of Destiny 2: The Final Shape expansion, where Bungie finally sticks the landing.
After a storytelling exercise spanning ten years, two enormous games, and one paracasual Starhorse (don’t ask), Bungie has finally concluded its first Destiny saga with Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion. The result is a surprisingly lovely experience that manages to balance the hefty demands of nostalgia, lore, and novelty.
There’s a lot to get through here, as the first week-and-a-bit since release has included the main story campaign, a raid, a 12-person conclusion mission, a new subclass (Prismatic), a 2-person secret exotic activity, and the first part of a three-act episode called Echoes (episodes being the replacement for seasons – the packages which keep players going between expansions). Let’s start with… story?
As the expansion opens, a universe-ending crisis looms. A host of familiar faces must set aside their differences and come together to repel the story’s Big Bad and save their way of life. In this instance, the Big Bad is The Witness; a huge triangular being with silently screaming smoke for hair. The Witness embodies the consciousnesses of an entire civilisation and is trying to do away with suffering and chaos by using the Traveler to reshape reality, freezing the universe into a perfect unchanging tableau.
Summaries of the events which led to this point will vary according to the teller. Players who are mostly here for the guns and the achievements might shrug and say “Erm, it’s about light versus dark?” A more advanced recap might add, “And the Light – note the capital L – is represented by a big circle, and the Darkness is represented by a big triangle. Well, it’s more of a sphere and a pyramid, but I’m trying to keep it simple. Anyway, the sphere is called the Traveler and-” The most dedicated lore-keepers might sit you down for the best part of a day and talk you through every single main character as well as abstract concepts like Sword Logic.
I tend towards the simpler end of the spectrum. Individual characters or seasons might pique my interest (ask me about the guy whose soul got put into an insect and who now lives out his days inside his favourite machine gun, exacting vengeance on his foes and enjoying what I assume is Gregor Samsa’s ultimate power fantasy), but I’m usually happy to follow waypoints instead of storylines, getting my kicks from the gunplay and the comfort of rerunning familiar activities once a season hits its stride. As a result, I’m a ten-year Destiny veteran, I play end-game content most seasons, yet my saga knowledge is… patchy at best.
It’s very helpful, then, that The Final Shape is essentially a simple tale of good versus bad, where lore knowledge adds texture and depth instead of being vital to the experience. Instead of feeling like a test for which I had not adequately revised, The Final Shape generally does a good job of reintroducing characters, situating them in the narrative, and letting these appearances accumulate to form the sense of a disparate group banding together. Total newcomers will still struggle (after all, it’s trying to gloss ten years of space wizard shenanigans), but there’s more than enough to orient the story ignorers (hi!) while also catering to the hardcore lore explorers.
Dialogue helps land some of the emotional beats, but the real star of the campaign is the art direction. The Traveler’s inner landscape (where you’ll be playing out the missions) manifests as an amalgamation of places from all over the solar system. These are the spaces where regular players will have rinsed and repeated content for hours, days, or perhaps even weeks. The little nudges of memory I got from dialogue were nothing compared to the unexpected punches of nostalgia I got when encountering familiar sights in a new location. There’s a version of the giant vent fans I associate with the original game’s Cosmodrome which really caught me off guard in terms of the wave of emotion it provoked, same with a particular neon sign – one which we used to use as a marker in a now-retired raid – appearing in a new context.
