Ten years ago, Destiny’s story began with the Traveler, a god-like entity the size of a small moon, hovering above Earth and granting superpowers to humans to use against the encroaching alien hordes. In The Final Shape, Destiny 2’s next expansion, we’re finally ready to find out what’s inside this massive robotic sphere.
Apparently it’s pretty weird there.
We’ve gotten a few glimpses into the Pale Heart of the Traveler, the new location where the final showdown between humanity’s heroes and the Witness, Destiny 2’s main antagonist, will take place. as memories and emotions combine with the almost magical paracausal power of the Traveler to redefine reality.
The Pale Heart is a place that, according to Bungie, draws from the experiences of whoever is inside it to create the world they see around them. In the first missions of The Final Shape campaign, you’ll see nostalgic elements from the last 10 years of Destiny folded into the landscape – things like giant ghost shells and overgrown parts of old locations, levels and social spaces.
But the power of the Wanderer, the Light, collides with the power of Darkness, wielded by the Witness, and this also causes the landscape to twist and turn, especially as you delve deeper.
“You can think of it as going through the world in the process of defragmentation,” campaign manager Andrew Hopps said during the demo.
While the trailer didn’t provide a comprehensive overview of the expansion, it did give some impressions of what players can expect, showing off parts of the first mission of its campaign and the later Strike, which is also part of the story. The mission begins with the Guardian, the player character, heading into a large pink portal to the Traveler that has been staring the players in the face for the past year. But it’s not just about entering a portal and jumping out the other side. Instead, you make your way through a disparate collection of bits of architecture, spaceships, and earth locations, all thrown together randomly. As the Pale Heart combines various elements from memory to create a new reality, the portal acts as a place where all of these pieces are stored until they are needed; as if the memories were manifesting into new objects, but without any guidance being meaningfully put together.
As you probably expect, the journey through the portal is home to enemies who try to stop you. These include the Taken, which now have a ghostly yellow eye – an indicator that the witness is controlling them. This is also where you first encounter Destiny 2’s new enemy faction, the Dread. Bungie has previously detailed the various threats that make up the Witness’ new army, but you start off by encountering Weavers, small enemies that use the Strand abilities introduced in the Lightfall expansion to trap you with ethereal ropes. Weavers can grab you and pull you towards them and out of cover, exposing you to attack or sometimes throwing you straight off a cliff.
Hopps noted that Bungie spent time re-balancing the difficulty of the campaign, particularly at the legendary level. The goal is to make the missions feel tough but fair whether you’re playing alone or with a team of one or two other people, though Hopps didn’t go into detail about what tweaks the developers have made. Bungie is also putting more emphasis on adding raid and dungeon mechanics to more missions, and we previewed elements like the Light and Darkness “seeds” appearing in Lightfall’s Root of Nightmares raid. These don’t work quite the same as in a raid, and you’ll be able to use all of these mechanics as a solo player, Hopps said. But in both the campaign mission and the Strike shown during the presentation, there were additional mechanics that should make progressing through Pale Heart a bit more difficult than just shooting a bunch of monsters.
Early on, Bungie branched out from the portal portion of the mission, skipping forward only after the player finally fully entered the Traveler. Here we got our first glimpse of the Pale Heart, where the early portions are fresh and green. At some points, plants and rocks appear right in front of you as you walk, and soon you find strange sights like pieces of the Last City and those huge ghost shells, overgrown and almost ancient as they jut out. landscape.
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“It was something we did from the beginning in the concept for The Final Shape that we really wanted this big moment after 10 years of the Light and Dark saga to evoke a lot of nostalgia for players,” said expansion project lead Catarina. Macedo. “And one of the ways we wanted to do that was the environment you walk through. So we had this idea that when you step into the Traveler, everything around you is shaped by these memories of being a Ranger, places you’ve been, things , which you have seen, the scenes you have experienced.”
The level sends the player through these overgrown chunks of the City where they encounter more Dread enemies. These include the “weapon bats”, the Grim, who have a stunning screeching ability that can be especially dangerous when it nails you when you’re attempting something harrowing like jumping across a gap. Grimms are also the first flying enemies in Destiny 2 to have wings, meaning they bob up and down when you fight them, adding a slightly different wrinkle to combat. Even further, players will encounter the Harbinger – a new Dread enemy that takes the same place as the Tormentor in terms of danger posed to opponents. Where the Tormentors feel like smaller versions of the Root of Nightmare boss Nezarec, the Harbingers are more like Rhulk, the Vow of the Disciple raid boss.
Harbinger also controls Strand’s abilities, turning some of the player’s powers back against them. Harbinger can suspend you with Strand in exactly the same way opponents can in PvP battles, locking you in place and opening you up to serious damage. Harbingers are generally less mobile than Tormentors, but rely more on ranged combat than melee attacks.
The landscape of the Pale Heart reacts to the presence of the Guardians and fills the world with elements from their memories and experiences. But the Witness also has the same effect, and things get more corrupt and darker as you get closer to him.
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“We’re doing this thing, kind of for the first time, where we’re doing a lot of storytelling through the environment,” said game director Tyson Green. “You’re traveling from a place where you know where you are and what’s going on, and you feel relatively safe, to a place of increasing danger and the proximity of a witness. It’s really a very remarkable ecological journey that we haven’t really taken.” any of our previous extensions.”
After the first mission, Bungie showed off the new Strike, which takes place about halfway through the campaign. Here we ventured deeper into the Pale Heart in pursuit of the Witness and the landscape changed drastically, becoming more rocky, desolate and barren. This one is themed around Destiny’s “wishing dragons”, the Ahamkara, with players facing a huge Tormentor boss known as the “Tormentor of the Ahamkara”.
“One of the things that we’ve seen in previous versions as well, especially when we started getting into the pyramids and seeing what their architecture looked like, we saw a lot of normal objects being reshaped. I’m sure everyone remembers the horse with a lot of butts and stuff ,” Macedo said. “Because the witness is trying to enact the Final Shape [and] reshaping everything into perfect stillness, one of the big things we wanted to do as the Guardian approached the tower where the Witness is at the center of the Pale Heart, we wanted to bring more of that distortion and reshaping and more of the restlessness. and that feeling that it’s not quite right.”
“So that was a big inspiration behind it: Take that language and basically turn the knob all the way to 100 and see how we can get twisted,” Macedo continued.
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The attack includes the Dread and Taken enemies, while also introducing other enemies that players will face: the Lucent Brood, a Hive controlled by Savathuna, the Witch Queen. Savathun and her forces also try to resist the Witness, Green noted, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on your side. In Strike, you will fight the Lucent Hive on several different occasions.
Like the campaign, Strike works in new mechanics that are a little more comparable to dungeons or raids than we’ve seen in previous strikes. You pursue the Tormentor with Strike, working your way through gaping caverns and desolate valleys. As you fight large Strike battles against enemies like Harbingers, you’ll find a strange darkness pouring into the area, as well as major opponents with unbreakable shields. You’ll need to search for nearby Ahamkara skulls to clear them out. Finding an item called Taken Essence allows you to power up skulls and shatter shields. His getting Taken Essence, however, is the hardest part.
You’ll usually head into the next room and look for what you need to power up the Ahamkara Skulls. In the sections we’ve seen, the rooms are full of walls and platforms, and when you grab the Taken Essence at the far end, you have to run back as the mire of Darkness fills up around you. In one room, the walls close in on you like a trap in an Indiana Jones movie, forcing you to jump over and hide under obstacles as they rush out. In another, mud fills the room from the floor up, so you have to climb platforms to avoid it on your way out.
In a later area, you jump through a hole in the wall and find yourself in an environment similar to the interior of Riven, Ahamkara, who serves as the final boss of the Last Wish raid, further cementing the strange architecture and reshaping reality. in the Pale Heart. In the next part, you will pass through a corridor full of giant stone arms. The sculptures serve as platforms and have the shapes of human and Hive hands, as well as Ahamkara tentacles.
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Among the locations in Strike was also a city modeled after the same architecture we saw inside the Black Fleet’s pyramid ships – suggesting that the location may have manifested from the witness’s memories.
“We don’t want to go into spoilers, but a lot of what you’re going to see is not just your memories, but memories of other things that are in the Pale Heart — so the Witness, even the Dread,” Green said. . “So there’s going to be some deep accounts of the lore that I can’t wait for people to pull out and bring to light.”
Bungie ended the preview shortly before the end of Strike, leaving us guessing where else The Final Shape campaign will take players or what else the world will offer. But we do know that, like Neomuna and Savathun’s Throne World, Pale Heart of the Traveler is a new location that you’ll be free to explore. According to Hopps, the story will also stretch beyond the first week.
“I would say this is our biggest campaign to date,” Hopps said. “It doesn’t just end with the raid.
For more from the preview event, check out what we saw of the new Prismatic subclass in action.
The Final Shape is due out on June 4th.