The Final Shape

  Another quick reaction to some stuff in gaming today. It always feels like august is pretty action packed since we had the call of duty stuff last week, the destiny stuff is this week, and warframe will have a showcase of their own later this week. That is, of course, only talking about games I play. The month is so crazy because now is always the time for this stuff. It’s a little weird since this is the time where people should be getting back into the swing of school stuff, but no, game companies wanna squeeze that last bit of money out of younger gamers before they have no time to spend playing the stuff they buy. It’s a bit of a topic I have feelings about, but that’s not to take away from the point of today’s post.


The main event of today was bungie’s annual showcase of what’s coming in their next expansion: Lightfall. This comes at an interesting time for them as the last year of content has only shown just how many people are asking for something major to really shake up the sandbox of destiny 2. I don’t think that was what happened with the showcase, but let me clarify a little bit. I do think everything about the final shape looks good, I love the idea that the traveler will shape the silver heart to match our experiences. It gives them a good excuse to remaster old maps and repurpose them for new content as well as giving us that throwback tour vibe that really helps give us perspective on all the things that we have done in the game over the last 10 years. As a player who really only played Destiny 2, I’ll be able to experience what destiny 1 players got to with the old tower, and whatever else they plan on bringing back. Which then leads to my thoughts on what we’ll find in the campaign. It was honestly a little vague. Just that there would be a lot of consequences that we would probably defeat the witness and xivu arath in some way. Obviously I watched it live and haven’t really gone over it since so I could’ve missed something, but that was the vibe I got. I do hope nothing about the campaign leaks because I know that the actual devs would be so destroyed from it. I also like the idea that we really don’t know what to expect from fighting the witness from a place so foreign to us. I kinda wish they didn’t drop the bomb of cayde coming back so soon. Like we’ve known for basically the entire summer that Cayde will be one of the more important story npcs throughout our time in the silver heart and I have the same criticisms of showing his death in the first trailer for forsaken. Major character moments like that deserve to be found and reacted to when they happen, not something we go in fully ready for. Like just imagine the tone as we go inside the traveler only to be met by cayde, someone we long thought gone forever, greeting us as if nothing had happened. Think of the sheer buzz that would’ve generated. That’s really the only issue I have with the final shape’s story reveal. I have some faith in bungie’s narrative team to stick the landing after what I’m sure was a crazy time making lightfall into a cohesive story. For those who don’t know, leaks suggested that lightfall’s entire campaign was supposed to be the first two missions of the final shape. For a narrative team that wants time to tell a comprehensive and engaging story, having that much content to work with must’ve been an absolute nightmare. Which makes me hope that there is a good reason for it and it will make the final shape that much better of a story because I can’t imagine the insane outrage if the final shape ends up being disappointing. 


To swing it around to some of the gameplay stuff I saw, I’m excited for the new supers and the new enemy types, but wonder how much of it will actually matter when it comes down to it. New light based supers are cool, but I think the biggest grievance a lot of my friends had is that stasis and strand only have one super type each and now the light based supers just seem to be getting the lion’s share of attention from the gameplay design team. Arc Hunter has gone from basically having one super to now being able to wield three. Solar warlocks are going to need to get something really good to displace well for pve content. Void titans actually get a really interesting super so I’ll give them a pass for that. It still makes me wonder how much they intend to support the darkness subclasses outside of new fragments. Admittedly, those fragments are really sick and I’m a little excited to try them out myself. The videos I’ve seen on twitter show that there is definitely still some creativity going on there. The new tormentors are just whatever. I don’t even remember what they’re called. They just have rhulk’s face instead of nezarec’s. They use strand, but it’s whatever. I imagine they’ll be difficult to fight against, but tormentors kinda fell flat after people figured out some key weaknesses they had. So despite a bunch of things which I feel are positive, the big shakeups of the final shape won’t really matter in the long run unless my expectations are way below what will come out. I don’t want to sound like I’m hating, I’m just trying to temper my expectations knowing what has been released for the last few years.


Speaking of the last few years, let’s talk about the new season. I think a highlight of this year’s seasonal bout has been the introduction of more variety and challenge. Season of the Seraph from last year actually had a really brilliant idea of using power deltas to ensure that power grinding wasn’t the limit to how well you could do in these activities. I had friends come back from hiatuses do relatively well in higher end seasonal content despite not really being close to pinnacle/powerful caps and I think it made experiencing the content much better for people who don’t want to spend the effort turning destiny into a part time job. Season of the deep brought in even more sick ways with little mini-games and challenges to play in the deep dives to earn better loot and even though they do get genuinely difficult, even for my best setups, I had a lot of fun with them. It’s genuinely good design and I can already see the potential during my first few runs of the new seasonal activities. The card system reminds me of the old nightfall card system where you can make the difficulty as easy or as hard as you want and you will be rewarded proportionally. That layer of gameplay will make things way more interesting than just running essentially the same thing over and over again hoping for drops at a fixed rate. I think everyone is glad they did away with the seasonal 3x7 upgrade grid that they seemed to be comfortable copy pasting every season and I think a lot of people who were tired of that will be more willing to engage with this season’s systems. The whole seasonal model fatigue thing has been discusses to death so I will spare you from hearing more about it here. Paul Tassi made an excellent video which I will link below if you really want to see what everyone feels about it. I think this will be a fun season and I do think the story so far has shown me that bungie is taking the final shape seriously. I just hope that they will be able to get everyone back on board in time for it. 


So that was a pretty quick and raw reaction to everything I saw at bungie’s showcase earlier today. I wonder how much will change, especially because it was definitely made a long time ago. Joe Blackburn had a mustache back then! If you agree/disagree with any of my points I would love to talk about it. Otherwise, thank you for reading this far and I will be back tomorrow with another post.


Paul Tassi Video:

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