Ten years ago, Destiny’s story began with the Traveler, a god-like being the size of a small moon who orbited Earth and bestowed superpowers on humans to use against invading alien hordes. In The Final Shape, Destiny 2’s next expansion, we’re finally set to find out what’s inside that massive robotic orb.
Apparently it’s pretty weird there.
We’ve had a few sneak peeks at the Voyager’s Pale Heart, the new location where the final battle between humanity’s heroes and the Witness, Destiny 2’s main antagonist, will take place. However, at a recent preview event, Bungie gave something of an extended look at the Pale Heart, a pocket of the universe where memories and emotions combine with the almost magical paracausal power of the Traveler to redefine reality.
The Pale Heart is a place that Bungie says draws from the experiences of everyone inside it to create the world it sees around it. In the early missions of The Final Shape campaign, you’ll see nostalgic elements from the past 10 years of Destiny folded into the landscape—things like giant ghost shells and overgrown segments of old locations, levels, and social spaces.
But the power of the Traveler, the Light, collides with the power of Darkness possessed by the Witness, and this also causes the landscape to twist and distort, especially as you go deeper.
“You can think of it as going through a world in the process of being defragmented,” campaign manager Andrew Hopps said during the preview.
While the preview didn’t give an extensive look at the expansion, it did give some impressions of what players can expect, showing parts of the first campaign mission and a later Strike that is also part of the story. The mission begins with the Guardian, the player character, heading towards the big pink portal in the Traveler that has been staring players in the face for the past year. It’s not just about entering the portal and popping out the other side. Instead, you’ll make your way through a disjointed collection of pieces of architecture, spaceships, and ground locations, all haphazardly thrown together. If the Pale Heart combines various bits of memory to create a new reality, the portal seems like the place where all those bits are stored until they’re needed; with memories manifesting in new objects, but without any guidance to bring them together in a meaningful way.
As you’d probably expect, the path through the portal is home to enemies that try to stop you. These include the Taken, who now have a ghostly yellow eye – an indicator of the Witness’s control over them. It’s also where you’ll first start encountering Destiny 2’s new enemy faction, the Dread. Bungie previously detailed the various threats that make up the new Witness army, but you’ll 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 just throw you off a cliff.
Hopps noted that Bungie has spent some time rebalancing the difficulty of the campaign, particularly at the legendary level. The idea is to make sure 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-like mechanics to more missions, and in the preview we saw items like the Light and Dark “seeds” appearing in Lightfall’s Root of Nightmares raid. They don’t work quite the same way as in the 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 complicated than simply shooting a lot of monsters.
Bungie soon broke away from the portal portion of the mission, skipping ahead after the player finally fully entered the Traveler. Here we got our first glimpse of Pale Heart, where the early parts are lush and green. At some points, plants and rocks pop up right in front of you as you walk, and soon you’ll find strange sights like pieces of the Last City and those huge ghost shells, overgrown and almost ancient looking, as they pop out onto the landscape.
Gallery
“It was something we did from the very beginning in the concept of 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 go through. So we had this idea that when you go into the Traveler, everything around you is shaped by these memories of being a Guardian, places you’ve been, things you’ve seen, scenes you’ve experienced.”
The level sends the player through these overgrown parts of the city where he encounters more Dread enemies. These include the “gun bats”, the Grim, who have a stunning screeching ability that can be particularly dangerous if it pins you down while you’re attempting something excruciating like leaping across a gap. Grim are also the first flying enemies in Destiny 2 to have wings, meaning they bob up and down as you fight them, adding a slightly different wrinkle to combat. Even further in, players encounter the Harbinger, a new Dread enemy that ranks in the same spot as the Tormentor in terms of danger presented to opponents. While the Tormentors feel like smaller versions of the Root of Nightmare boss Nezarec, the Harbingers are more akin to Rhulk, the raid boss of Vow of the Disciple.
The Harbinger also possesses Strand abilities, turning some of the player’s powers back against them. The Harbinger can stop you with Strand in exactly the same way opponents can in PvP battles, locking you in place and exposing you to serious damage. Harbingers are generally less mobile than tormentors, but rely on ranged combat rather than melee attacks.
The landscape of the Pale Heart responds to the presence of the Guardians, filling the world with elements of their memories and experiences. But the Witness also has the same effect, and things will get more corrupt and darker as you get closer to him.
Gallery
“We’re doing this sort of thing for the first time, where we’re telling a lot of stories through the environment,” said game director Tyson Greene. “You travel 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 proximity to the Witness. It’s really a very striking environmental journey that we haven’t done with any of our previous expansions.”
After the first mission, Bungie showed off a new Strike that takes place around the middle of the campaign. Here we have ventured deeper into the Pale Heart in pursuit of the Witness and the landscape has changed dramatically, becoming more rocky, desolate and barren. It’s themed after Destiny’s ‘wish dragons’, the Ahamkara, with players facing off against a massive Tormentor boss known as the ‘Mormentor of the Ahamkara’.
“One of the things that we’ve seen even in previous versions, especially when we started going into the pyramids and seeing what their architecture looked like, we saw a lot of reformatting of normal objects. I’m sure everybody remembers the horse with a lot of bums and all that,” Macedo said. “Because the Witness is trying to play the final form [and] reshaping everything to perfect silence, one of the big things we wanted to do, as the Keeper gets closer to the tower where the Witness is at the center of the Pale Heart, we wanted to bring in more of that warping and reformatting and more anxiety and the feeling that that’s not quite right.”
“So that was the big inspiration behind it: take that language and basically turn the knob up to 100 and see how distorted we can get,” continued Macedo.
Gallery
The Strike features Dread and Taken enemies, while also introducing other enemies that players will face: the Lucent Brood, the Hive controlled by Savathun, the Witch Queen. Savatun and her forces are also trying to oppose the Witness, Green noted, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on your side. In Strike, you’ll fight the Lucent Hive on several different occasions.
Like the campaign, Strike also works in new mechanics that are a bit more comparable to dungeons or raids than we’ve seen in previous strikes. You pursue the tormentor through Strike, working your way through gaping caverns and barren valleys. As you fight in large Strike battles against enemies like Harbingers, you’ll find a strange slime of Darkness flooding the area, as well as large opponents with unbreakable shields. To clear them, you’ll need to search for the nearby Ahamkara skulls. Finding an item called Taken Essence allows you to empower the skulls, breaking the shields. It is receiving Taken Essence though, that’s the hard part.
You’ll usually venture into a side room in search of what you need to power up the Ahamkara skulls. In the sections we saw, the rooms are full of walls and platforms, and when you get the Taken Essence at the far end, you have to run back as the sludge of darkness fills in around you. In one room, the walls close in on you like a trap in an Indiana Jones movie, forcing you to jump and duck under obstacles as you make your way out. In another, sludge 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 to 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 of reality in The Pale Heart. In another section, you’ll go through a corridor full of giant hands made of stone. The statues serve as platforms and take the form of human hands and hives, as well as Ahamkara tentacles.
Gallery
Also among the locations in Udara was a city built from the same architecture we’ve seen in the pyramid ships of the Black Fleet – suggesting that this 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 Horror,” Green said. “So there’s going to be some deep lore in there that I can’t wait for people to tease out and bring to light.”
Bungie ended the preview shortly before the end of Strike, leaving us guessing as to where else The Final Shape’s campaign will take players, or what else the world has to offer. But we do know that, like Neomuna and the Throneworld of Savatun, the Pale Heart of the Traveler is a new location that you’ll be able to explore freely. The story will also extend beyond the first week, according to Hopps.
“I would say this is our biggest campaign to date,” Hopps said. “It doesn’t just end with the attack.”
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.