It’s impossible to think about The Final Shape without considering the context of the past decade, the seven other Destiny 2 expansions, and the four original Destiny expansions, plus the vanilla campaigns that came with both games. This eighth Destiny 2 expansion is, in some ways, the culmination of the somewhat haphazard decade-long journey that gave birth to the first game. In it, Bungie continued to try one experiment after another with gameplay, tweaked and retuned storytelling, changed its approach to the game, and ran revised and revised live service games. The additions didn’t always consistently work toward a story conclusion or an ultimate vision for the game, but at every one of these steps, there was a clear, mostly positive development that informs what The Final Shape is for Destiny as a whole.

I’ve noted in the past that the expansions were the highlights of Destiny 2 as a game, but this is something different. “The Final Shape” is not just a step on a long road of progress, it’s a leap in every respect. With a campaign, new objectives, new activities, and a post-campaign story continuation, The Final Shape comes ever closer to the game’s original promise when Bungie first introduced it as a sci-fi fantasy shooter set in a single, second-hand, distant future. This isn’t just the best Destiny 2 ever. This is Destiny 2 as it should always have been.

It all starts with a story campaign that hurls you into the pale mind of the Traveler to stop Destiny 2’s long-standing ultimate villain, the Witness, from using the game’s complex, physics-defying powers to rewrite reality. It’s immediately clear that developer Bungie is taking an unusual approach, with lessons learned from a consistently strong seasonal story that typically prioritizes the humanity of its characters over confusing sci-fi concepts.

A coherent and captivating campaign

The Final Shape avoids the pitfalls of the past by bringing together the best elements of all of Destiny 2’s stories, establishing clear stakes and motivations for the antagonists while keeping the focus tightly on Destiny 2’s major characters as they move towards a potentially suicidal and potentially earth-shaking conflict. Control. The Final Shape is the best story Destiny has ever unfolded. It clearly lays out what’s at stake and how it all plays out, at least emotionally. It sends players on a straight journey from point A to point B, leading to a final showdown with the Witness.

A big plus for this story and the campaign as a whole is that the Pale Heart itself always brings a new destination to Destiny 2. Usually it’s a new planet or moon with a bunch of cool places for events to take place, but in Traveler, the Pale Heart is a magical robot space god that has been the focus of the series for a decade. The emphasis on the magical aspects of the game gives you a place that is strange, familiar, eerie, and often remarkable in its artistic design.

The idea is that the reality of the place emerges from the memories and emotions of the people who are there, creating a mixture of familiar places throughout Destiny history, but often recombined in strange ways or distorted by corruption. Pale Heart is a beautiful and fascinating place to explore, both the heavens and the hells of the Destiny universe. It leans fully into the strange side of the game, which is some of the best things about Destiny 2, with a ton of different locations to fight, run, and climb. It uses this variety to deliver new gameplay scenarios and combat encounters that feel fresh and interesting, despite being things players have more or less been doing for the past decade.

The campaign combines many of the best elements from years of Destiny 2 gameplay to create an experience that is outstanding, especially on the challenging Legendary difficulty. Firstly, it is the most mechanically complex campaign ever. Nearly every major encounter has an extra layer to deal with, like toxic air that requires you to periodically shoot a specific object you’re standing next to to gain a protective buff, or enemies that drop “runes” on death that correspond to locked states, or opening doors requires you to remember an image you’ve seen previously in order to activate the correct key.

Typically, these elements are reserved for Destiny 2’s more difficult, teamwork-heavy raids and dungeons, which are the game’s best and most entertaining content. Here they’re simpler, so one player can tackle them, but they’re still more complex and exciting than what Bungie typically presents in its campaigns. This adds an intelligent layer to defeating alien hordes, heightening the chaos without becoming overwhelming or frustrating. The sheer number of new and fascinating mechanics sprinkled within the campaign and throughout Paleheart itself is notable, with nearly everything you do in The Final Shape looking interesting and different from what players are used to.

Survival of the fittest

The second major addition is an all-new enemy faction called the Dread, which adds several new enemy types to combat and significantly rewrites the math of Destiny 2’s gunfights. Destiny has added new enemies to long-standing factions in recent expansions, or slightly changed the approach of some enemies to force tactical adaptation. These are minor tweaks compared to the tactical changes that the Dread can bring to a fight, especially on higher difficulties. The most common and hardest of these powers are ones that were previously reserved primarily for players. These focus on debuffs that slow players down, freeze them in place, launch them into the air and make them unable to maneuver for a few seconds, or grab them and drag them out of cover and into danger. Bungie’s emphasis on Dreads disrupting players’ positions and forcing them out of safe spaces makes fighting these enemies hectic. They’re a phenomenal addition to the Destiny 2 combat landscape, changing the makeup of combat in important and surprising ways and allowing for a variety of new challenges.

The level design throughout the campaign and Pale Heart is also strong overall, though Bungie has opted for smaller, tighter arenas than in the past, which can feel a bit restrictive. These rooms feel more often designed to get you closer to the Dreads, making their ability to block areas or loosen cover more dangerous. But there are also times when you’re stuck shoulder to shoulder with an army and it feels like a firefight has turned into a firing squad. Speed ​​and movement are as much a part of Destiny 2’s shooter DNA as gunfights, and small-scale battlefields can test players in different and more interesting ways than open battlefields, but when you combine these with a legendary campaign, it starts to become over the top. It limits the most interesting elements of Destiny 2’s combat.

The last big addition that The Final Shape brings is Prismatic, a new subclass available to players. The last two subclasses had specific focuses: Stasis was to slow, freeze and shatter enemies, while Strand was to bind, hang and shred them. Prismatic gives you a wide range of options from each of the other subclasses, allowing you to combine skills to create new synergies. While it’s not as dramatically new or exciting as Strand was when it was fully unlocked in the last expansion, it feels great to reassemble the lego blocks of Destiny 2’s various powers and abilities in the right combinations from skills, weapons and armor. Work together to maximize building efficiency.

Bungie has been improving the abilities of subclasses for a long time, making them different and unique in their playstyles and uses. So combining all these elements in different ways opens up new possibilities for clever and creative. There are already a lot of great tools to play with in the sandbox of Destiny 2. There aren’t any major changes to Prismatic; Final Shape adds new “mini-supers” that give you things like new perks in Buildcrafting and Transcendence, a cool new grenade, and a few new super abilities that can be used together. There are other smaller perks as well, but just having access to combinations like freezing or setting enemies on fire, or closing the distance with a burst of electric speed, is a great way to create exciting new moments.

Character building

But what impressed me most about this campaign is how it tells its story. While the seasonal story between each main chapter had enough space and depth to tell a powerful and moving story, Destiny 2’s expansions are utterly bogged down with poorly told and confusing stories featuring monsters we’ve never heard of before that appear out of nowhere to threaten the sun. They build their systems in vague ways with undefined proper names. Because the expansions are a key entry point for new, former, or casual players, Bungie often seemed to avoid getting too involved in stories that require a deeper understanding or involvement in the world they created. Bungie was focused on telling a more compelling, continuing story that culminates in The Final Shape, but still, the campaign seemed unwilling to rely too much on the game’s characters and broader lore. The result is a mishmash of campaign stories that generally don’t appeal much to casual or dedicated audiences, making even the best Destiny 2 expansion stories a bit difficult to understand and, worse, barely interesting.

The Final Shape completely bucks this trend. No matter how knowledgeable you are about space magic, it helps that the deal with the Witnesses is clear, and that Bungie is exploring a wild new place where everyone can invent new rules to learn at the same time. But what makes the campaign’s story is the characters and The Final Shape’s willingness to focus on them, dig into them, and engage with them. Never before has a Destiny 2 campaign been so participant-focused. Radio wasn’t just about what characters should shoot, but how they feel, how they deal with them, and the conflicts they have with each other. As a result, the mission feels important and meaningful every step of the way. Not just because there’s a massive threat that will eventually destroy the universe, but because everyone involved is affected by that threat in the here and now.

Most importantly, with The Final Shape, Bungie trusts its own world and audience, which isn’t the case with a normal expansion. You’re expected to know enough about these characters to understand them, or be able to figure out their dynamics from context. But it’s important that the campaign is willing to simply pause between missions and use cutscenes, monologues, or campfire conversations to bring this characterization to the forefront. These elements have been there before, but previously you had to do your homework by reading flavor text on weapons or consulting in-game lore books, and I always felt like they would be really good if Bungie actually incorporated them into the game.

In The Final Shape, Bungie puts them into the game. This is an expansion story for Destiny 2, and they actually care about what it represents, and they expect you to care about it too, instead of giving the impression that the player might get bored and quit the game if you talk for too long without shooting anything. This is far better than almost every other Destiny 2 campaign, and makes you wonder what the game would have been like if Bungie had treated the rest of the story this way for the last decade.

Gameplay evolution

The emphasis on character building continues after the campaign with additional story missions and activities exploring the Pale Heart. In fact, some of the most interesting and moving story moments occur after the campaign, but Bungie doesn’t skimp on the quality of these missions. Some hint at specific new threats or create additional mystery tied to long-standing antagonists like Savathûn, but they all utilize Destiny 2 characters in a specific way. You advance individual stories with key companions, further fleshing out their positions and personalities as you work your way through The Final Shape’s raid, Salvation’s Edge. All of this is not only fun from a story perspective, but also challenging.

And many of them are a lot of fun. The Pale Heart is a phenomenal location because of its variety, but it also takes advantage of Destiny 2’s longstanding reveals and looting of enemy groups in clever new ways. As with the campaign, Pale Heart focuses on additional puzzles and mechanics. The location’s largest area contains a special activity called an “Overthrow” – a multi-stage, escalating battle against enemy forces, consisting of a series of smaller, objective-based activities. There are a lot of them, but they’re all different from each other, specific to both the area you’re working on and the “level” of the overthrow. As the difficulty increases, they get harder and harder. Each one requires a different combat approach or target focus, making an Overthrow feel like a combination of 10 or 15 public events played back-to-back. Although an Overthrow is a solo challenge event by default, it feels like a public event, but it works equally well with a team or alone. There’s no element of an inexperienced teammate ruining it for you, and the game is dense. The elements allow you to play an Overthrow alone or in a group while still having fun. This is a very exciting and challenging activity that is so varied that it’s great fun to play again and again.

The added mechanical focus throughout the expansion places a much greater emphasis on collaboration than Destiny has previously built into lower-level activities. Once you unravel the hidden secrets of the Pale Heart, you’ll gain access to Dual Destiny, a special exotic mission that can only be played with two players. It can’t be accessed or played alone; in a standard three-player fireteam. Dual Destiny is fantastic, perhaps the best single mission in Destiny 2 history. It’s packed with difficult, tricky puzzles, and requires the kind of communication and teamwork that Destiny 2 typically reserves for its three-player dungeons and six-player raids. Playing it, I felt like I was playing a Destiny raid for the first time, something I previously thought would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To say any more would be to spoil an incredible and unexpected experience that I absolutely love and that has secured a place in my personal hall of fame of the best video game moments.

There are some other pieces that are unexpectedly great. No fuss about that, but The Final Shape includes some “co-op focused” campaign missions that change the experience by adding harder mechanics, relying on your best raid and dungeon instincts. These aren’t just campaign missions that have been scaled more difficult to accommodate three players. Elements that require teamwork and communication have been added, such as enemies that can only be defeated by attacking from two different sides at the same time, and debuffs that kill you if your teammates don’t inflict it at the last moment. And sentence yourself to death if no one intervenes. It’s a fun and challenging series of additions that build on the best elements of Destiny 2. As with Dual Destiny, perhaps the best part is that these excellent design changes were discovered unexpectedly.

A satisfying shape

Finally, we have The Final Shape’s raid, Salvation’s Edge. Some raids are better than others, but there is no bad raid in my opinion. Salvation’s Edge is another in this long tradition of great gaming experiences. It requires a high degree of collaboration and communication between a team of six people, but it’s simply fun with clever (if puzzling) new mechanics, tough combat, and beautifully crazy locations that even surpass the already impressive art direction of Pale Heart. Salvation’s Edge is also significantly longer than recent raids, making it a better fit for high-level players who are raiding every week and looking for an extra challenge.

In short, it’s fun. Destiny 2 players expect a lot from Bungie’s raid team, but even Salvation’s Edge surprises with how well it turns out, thanks to the depth of gameplay on display. While I don’t think it’s necessarily my favorite raid, it’s a very solid, exciting, and intense climax to the story. Bungie managed to make the final showdown with the Witness feel like the massive, complex, and dangerous battle with the near-god that the story demands.

But a great and very entertaining addition was turning the final climax of this battle into a special mission called Excision. This is the game’s first 12-player PvE activity that can be accessed even by players who haven’t completed the raid. This mission gives the story’s climax an appropriate atmosphere of excess, with 12 players providing the absurd scope it deserves, but you don’t have to be the kind of person who raids to experience it fully. Excision is its own kind of unique and surprising moment in an expansion that has proven to be absolutely jam-packed with them.

The new Pathfinder system also improves small things like the interface, making it easier to keep track of everything that’s going on in the game and complete the usual MMO tasks. The game now contains less currency and objectives are now clearer. Many things that were previously scattered or hidden behind different activities have been added to the merchant menu, making activities easier to track and complete.

Aside from a few minor quibbles over minor details like arena size, it feels like what Destiny 2 always wanted to be. The Final Shape takes everything good about Destiny, from great combat design and inventive enemies, to puzzle and platforming elements, creative encounters and fun abilities, to cool worldbuilding and great art direction, and brings it all together in a way that… has generally been difficult to play up until now. The best characters are the focus of the campaign, and there’s a reason to care about the war they’re fighting and what it’s bringing to them.

But The Final Shape often goes beyond these improvements and great ideas. Elements like Dual Destiny raise the bar for what Destiny 2 can be at its best. It brings the curtain down on a decade of Salvation’s Edge and Excision, and sets up a future for Destiny 2 that looks just as exciting and intriguing as anything that’s come before, with additional story missions and character hits waiting for you after you complete the campaign — and all the more exciting thanks to what Bungie has learned on this journey. The future of Destiny 2 may never be as clear-cut, but if Bungie can maintain the stellar design quality and clarity of focus of The Final Shape, that future could never be more exciting.