The Destiny 2: The Final Shape Developer Gameplay Preview was released last night and it seems to have hit the mark with fans. Destiny 2 is a game that’s been going a long time, a long time. The game’s fortunes have gone up and down over the years. There has been really bad spells and really good spells. However, overall the game is one of the few console examples of a stable and active GAAS game. Hence why Sony bought developer Bungie.

Yet most recently, things have been on a slight downturn. Lay-offs kicked in, plus a lengthy delay for The Final Shape, which releases worldwide June 4th now. However, the main source of the bad blood right now is that previous expansion Lightfall was a bit meh! The story was pretty poor. The majority of the campaign itself was just accessing the new Strand subclass. Whilst Strand was well received, the story and campaign was not. It felt like this was the minimum they could get away with calling a full expansion. 

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I’d say since Lightfall‘s poor reception Bungie has made a lot of improvements to the game overall. However, those are mostly QOL updates or balancing changes, though  the Seasonal stories have also improved. Ultimately though, Bungie was in trouble because pre-orders for The Final Shape were way lower than expected and Sony was worried. 

So all eyes were on this Developer Gameplay Preview. Last full trailer for The Final Shape Bunge claimed they were holding a lot back. As you can see from the footage below, they were not lying.

I won’t describe everything in this footage and this does not really get into the story of the expansion. However, the key points here are New Subclass option, Exotic Class Items and New Enemy Race. I’ll summarise as best as I can.

New Subclass

Many fans were hoping that a new third darkness subclass would be coming in TFS. We are not getting that, but I’d say 80% of the fan base think what we are getting sounds more fun. There is a new subclass called Prismatic. and it combines the other subclasses in unique ways. You can have Darkness and Light subclasses kinda running at the same time. Therefore a Stasis Hunter with abilities a Solar Hunter should have. There will be many possible combinations and there are new Aspects and slots to enable this new subclass. The build potentials should be much greater here than there would be for a new Darkness subclass. 

We still don’t have all the facts, or know what aspects we can use yet. However, some of what we see on show in the footage above was pretty…broken. In a good way, and the developers themselves say they may have gone too far with some of this, Hopefully the challenge is elevated within The Final Shape to accommodate, but it could means trivializing some of the older content, which I doubt anyone will moan about. 

Exotic Class Items

Another additional tool in our TFS arsenal is a new set of exotic armor. Specifically, we are finally getting Exotic Class Items in Destiny 2 for the first time. They briefly appeared in Destiny but were not all that. However these new Class Items sound very interesting. They only work with Prismatic Subclass for now. However, they combine the exotic abilities of two other armor pieces. For example on a Titan, Synthoceps and Hoarfrost would have aspects of the exotics combined into one package.

These Class Items are randomly rolled. Therefore, players will have to grind out many different drops to get some of the more desired combinations. Some of them based on what was shown above are extremely powerful. However, we do only have what was shown above to go on so far, which is not much. There could be some absolutley crazy broken options in there. Another interesting aspect of these Exotic Class Items is cross class swapping. In other words, a Titan could get one that awards Invisibility after a powered melee kill, an ability previously only seen on the Hunter and vice versa.

Added to the new subclass options above and you can see why players are salivating over some of the broken builds they’ll be able to create. 

New Enemy Race

In the previous Lightfall expansion we got one new enemy called a Tormentor. Prior to this video above Bungie had revealed one other new enemy type alongside the Tormentor. However, in this video they reveal this is actually a whole new enemy faction called the Dread. The Dread like other factions have various different class of enemy type, though these guys seems a bit more lethal than we are used to. For a start we have Destiny‘s first flying enemies with wings. Previously Harpies and Shanks have floated, but only 3 feet off the ground.

Based on what was shown, I think we can see that the new content coming in The Final Shape will be more challenging to test our new builds of doom. 

Overall I’d guess Bungie, and Sony got a lot more pre-orders in the last 24 hours than they have since the last trailer and pre order launch. Of course there are some players who are resolute in waiting to see what fan feedback is like before purchasing. Hey, that’s a valid consumer choice to make, I can’t fault that. 

Any Destiny 2 fans? What do you think of Destiny 2: The Final Shape Developer Gameplay Preview? Thoughts below. 

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