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Destiny 2 players have spent years watching, romanticizing and slowly approaching the horizon.
It’s time to stop asking questions and start answering them.
We’ve reached the horizon.
The Final Shape needed to be epic, climactic, specific.
This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine.
But this is the end of Destiny 2 as we’ve known it for years.
Both are here to stay, and both have been a long time coming.
We don’t want to make a new unit and then have you never see it again.
“The difference now was a few crystallizing factors.
From there, the gangly Grim, stocky Husk and other Dread enemies were easier to bring to life.
“The Dread are definitely in the Destiny universe to stay,” Wommack affirms.
Compared to traditional subclasses, Prismatic can sometimes feel peerless, especially when you first get a taste.
Wommack reckons that’s just fine, and even good, as long as it isn’t actually game-warping.
“We don’t want to break the game,” he says.
“That’d be bad for everyone.
But it’s great when someone feels like they’re breaking the game.
And some of the time we even design it to be intentional like that.
“Once this idea of Prismatic, this earliest form, started, there was a lot of doubt.
It was just so fun.
That’s when we knew the kernel of all these ideas coming together actually had something going.
And we also knew that it was going to be very unexpected.
Because we didn’t expect it.”
The Dread have moved in permanently, and Prismatic is likewise here for the long haul.
In fact, he says, “we discovered that we could do more than we originally thought.”
These two elements have given Destiny 2’s core action a welcome, refreshing bite.
But, of course, that won’t last forever.
More pertinently, it won’t last a year.
“These seeds of power, they’re pretty terrifying,” Stevens adds.
“These are seeds that anyone can claim, leaving a lasting impact on the world.
And ultimately they can break the rules of the universe.
So year 10 is really all about the consequence of that conflict.
It’s a bridge into the next era of Destiny.
But, at the same time, we wanted to start doing new things, right?
It’s a new beginning.”
How can we build an activity punch in that actually can be longer than the traditional Strike or Battleground?
Namely: a better, meaningfully different version of Seasons.
The seasonal model was getting harder and harder to adjust.
I want to better understand when new and awesome things are coming'.
“We’re going to do our best to still keep surprise and delight in the game.
Acts Two and Three will add rewards, activities, meta-defining Artifact mods, and more.
They just want new things coming to Destiny at a slightly faster cadence.”
And Act Three contains a bigger surprise still.
“We have an Exotic mission coming in Echoes Act Three,” Stevens says.
Because a lot of us, with Destiny, we think of it as a living world, right?
A world that is expanding and changing throughout time.
And we would not have been able to expand Nessus in this way without the Episode.”
He points to the Exotic mission rotator and to Onslaught going into Vanguard Ops.
“We have a lot of ways that we’re considering doing this.
A lot of it is building on the Coils and the Onslaughts.”
Episode One sets the pace for a suite of stories that are coming in year 10.
If it sounds like an epilogue, that’s because it kind of is.
But Stevens doesn’t love the word ‘epilogue’ because it “can feel small”.
He prefers words such as ‘fallout’, ‘consequence’ and ‘aftermath’.
These aren’t footnotes in the Destiny chronicles.
“Ultimately, that will come.
He leans back, and then in.
This is the big one.
We’ve been dealing with Fikrul since Forsaken.
Destiny 2 isn’t slowing down, and neither is Stevens.
“The events of the Episode are going to send shockwaves through the Hive pantheon.
You’ve seen us doing things with Savathun and Xivu Arath for a while now.
With the end of the Witness, Bungie’s thrown a meteor into the ocean of Destiny lore.
Now come the resulting waves.
“And some of those threads will carry forward into the future.
“And I think that’s as much as I should probably say about it.”
