The first major release to hit this summer is Destiny 2: The Final Shape, an expansion of the free-to-play multiplayer looter-shooter Destiny 2, originally launched in 2017. The online game from the developers at Bungie (creators of Halo) is a cooperative sci-fi epic whose ongoing story has evolved a lot over the last eight years to create a pretty dense mythology. For the uninitiated, it can be a little daunting to fully grasp the lore, but with the base game and, now, all previous expansions made available for free, there’s plenty of opportunity to learn the story so far.
The game has seen its ups and downs with its previous expansion, last year’s Lightfall, arriving to a tepid response and widely accepted as a step backward from 2022’s acclaimed reinvention, The Witch Queen. Now, just under two years into their acquisition by Sony, the studio is looking to bring players back to the world of Destiny 2 in a big way. As a paid expansion to the free-to-play base game, it offers new locations, enemy types, and subclasses to once again reinvigorate its gameplay for older players while remaining accessible to newbies.
Online multiplayer shooter games like Destiny 2 live and die on these kinds of updates, and the team at Bungie has recalibrated its model to move away from seasonal releases (every three months) that most live service games follow. Instead, The Final Shape will see episodic updates more akin to the major PC game expansions of old, providing major shakeups to the game every few months rather than the slow trickle of continuous updates. The first of the three episodes, Echoes, will drop just a week after the initial launch of The Final Shape, giving players an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the world and new mechanics to catch up before the next big three-act story kicks off.
For fans of online PvE (player-vs-enemy) and PvP (player-vs-player) shooters, this expansion may prove to be the magic bullet that brings players new and old into the fray. As the supposed final expansion of the “Light and Darkness Saga,” it’s the culmination of the entire 10-year Destiny journey thus far and will determine what’s next for the series’ future.