He was condemned
I’ve done a lot of reporting on Bungie layoffs this week, as the studio is reeling from more than 100 sudden job losses. But to bring the focus back to the game itself for a minute, both privately and publicly Bungie has been talking non-stop about Final Shape, and how they want it to deliver on par with or better than all the high quality expansions they’ve made. .
In Bungie’s brief public statement about the state of the game after the layoff, they said they wanted Final Shape to reach the level of The Taken King, Forsaken and The Witch Queen, arguably the best expansion in the series’ history. . I think you could make a case that Forsaken itself was much better, given its quality and the volume of what was changed and added to the game.
Secretly, the thought is that the Final Shape needs to be balanced better above all that, even if it takes a long delay and unfortunately a wrap to make that happen. Indeed, Final Shape was already delayed a year when Bungie decided to include Lightfall as a prequel expansion. After that new reports say that it may be delayed for another four months, although Bungie has not confirmed that yet.
Destiny 2
However, if the bar is Abandoned, I’m worried that from what we know about Final Shape and what’s to come, it’s already kind of…lost? Damn, back in the Activision-backed days, it was expansive in a way that I don’t think modern expansions for Destiny 2 can match. Remember that Forsaken brought the game:
- Two new locations – The Tangled Shore and The Dreaming City
- Dungeon Raid – Last Wish and Shattered Throne
- 10 exotic weapons, 12 exotic war pieces
- Four new PvP maps
- Four new strikes
- Nine new subclasses
- A class of bow weapons
- A new Gambit mission
- A new enemy race for the Scorn
Looking back now, it’s just an amazing amount of content compared to what we get now. I mean like the seasons they have started to give us a lot more than we are used to in general, the expansion did not happen.
Lightfall, for example, had one new location, five unknown weapons, six rare war pieces, one strike, PvP maps, and one new enemy type, Tormentors (not counting the backpacking Cabal as a new enemy type).
While we still don’t know the full extent of The Final Shape, I think we can safely bet on a few things from what we do know:
One location, one attack, almost no new PvP maps, an unknown number of strikes (not four), one super per class (three total), new weapon sub-archetypes, new mini-Tormentor units and… ? The rest is unclear. It sounds like us already know that we definitely get less than Forsaken, because Bungie told us not to expect anything on the same level as Forsaken again.
Destiny 2
But if that’s true, how do you create that ultimate stretch, what you want if that’s the case not better than all that came before it, including Forsaken? It seems that then you will be completely relying on the narrative or the creation of the campaign. That would not seem to be enough. Part of why Forsaken did so well was the quality, but an equally important part was the volume. And to me it doesn’t seem like the volume is there, from what Bungie has told us about the expansion so far. And I mean, they released all of Vidoc so it’s not like we’re completely in the dark here. Even Lightfall adding Strand as an entirely new subclass is more than the three new TFS gives us.
Also, my reporting stated that internally, Final Shape is pretty good, even early on, but trying to match something like Abandoned feels like an impossible task, and one that TFS probably can’t realistically achieve, given what we already know. so. But we will see.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, again Instagram.
Take my sci-fi novels Herokiller series again The Earthborn Trilogy.
