Is Destiny 2: The Final Shape the franchise renaissance we’ve been waiting for, or just another outlier?

The Final Shape, eh? It’s pretty good, right? All jokes aside, Destiny 2: The Final Shape is genuinely solid. And that’s coming from someone who was deeply disappointed with the prior Lightfall DLC and, in particular, its seasonal offerings. So, has Bungie kickstarted a renaissance of Destiny 2?

To explain where this is all coming from, it helps to be aware of the leadup to The Final Shape‘s release, and of the general history of Bungie’s Destiny 2 offerings. Two things to talk about before we get to discussing the very crux of the issue, then. You’ll thank me later!

The Final Shape and the problems that helped shape it

The Final Shape is, in many ways, an all-encompassing response to issues that Destiny 2 had been having well in advance of its release. A few weeks ahead of the expansion pack’s release, I wrote about how strangely at ease the community was with what Bungie’s been doing as of late. In hindsight, it feels obvious that the players might not have actually been at ease, but silently anxious about whether The Final Shape really would be the slam dunk that Bungie needed it to be.

Certainly, the timely release of the free Into The Light content drop helped a lot in tiding people over, but it’s difficult to overstate just how poorly the year of Lightfall was rolled out. Not only was Lightfall itself rather middling in the grand scheme of things, but there were a number of other disastrous events preceding the release of Into The Light:

• A surprisingly tone-deaf State of the Game blog post
• The reveal that a beloved legacy IP was being turned into a hero-based extraction shooter
• A poor seasonal send-off for the Lightfall DLC
• A devastating series of staff layoffs at Bungie
• Reports of “soul-crushing” atmosphere at Bungie’s studios

There was more, mind – these are just the most troubling reports we caught a whiff of in time. Overall, though, in and out of the game, Destiny 2 has gone through one of its roughest patches yet, and Bungie had lost almost all the goodwill it had managed to claw back after the grand sunsetting event of the Beyond Light DLC.

Looking back further still, it’s easy to forget that The Final Shape was originally supposed to be released a year before it actually came out: the Lightfall DLC was envisioned as a stop-gap for Bungie to have more time to get The Final Shape out of the door in a presentable state. This helps explain some of the DLC’s faults, of course, but it also contextualizes the situation Bungie found itself in while setting up The Final Shape.

Remember: back in 2020, Bungie announced the Beyond Light, Witch Queen, and the Lightfall DLCs as the up-and-coming chapters in the Light and Dark saga of Destiny 2. The Final Shape DLC was revealed two full years later, as the actual grand finale. Lightfall was, in the interim, relegated to the status of a kind-of-sort-of interlude ahead of the real deal.

One might argue, then, that the problems that came about during the year of the Lightfall DLC had been years in the making. It’s a gross oversimplification, yes, but it’s not hard to imagine the butterfly effect of separating the conclusion of the Light and Dark saga into two mostly standalone DLCs might lead to problems for Bungie down the line. Indeed, that’s precisely what happened as we cruised along towards The Final Shape.

Thankfully, the team over at Bungie turned things around in time. Will it stay that way, though? Well, that’s the bit I’m interested in, myself.

The history of Destiny at large

Now that we’ve gone over the microcosm of problems that led to the release of The Final Shape, it’s time to look at the broader picture of Destiny‘s history with Bungie.

It’s a bit of a meme in the community by now that the franchise simply cannot go through a full DLC cycle without having one good expansion pack followed up with one bad or, at best, middling DLC. This “rule” is played with loosely, to be sure, but you can see a rough pattern if you look at the franchise’s history. Here’s the timeline:

• September 2014 – Destiny (baseline)
• December 2014 – The Dark Below
• May 2015 – House of Wolves
• September 2015 – The Taken King
• September 2016 – Rise of Iron
• September 2017 – Destiny 2 (baseline)
• December 2017 – Curse of Osiris
• May 2018 – Warmind
• September 2018 – Forsaken
• October 2019 – Shadowkeep
• November 2020 – Beyond Light
• February 2022 – The Witch Queen
• February 2023 – Lightfall
• June 2024 – The Final Shape

So, generally speaking, on the “good” side of things we’ve got The Final Shape, Witch Queen, Forsaken, Rise of Iron, and The Taken King. Everything else is either middling or an acquired taste, in a broad sense. Two things to keep in mind here, then:

• Bungie has historically not had a solid, repeatable track record of continuously releasing genuinely great Destiny content
• The Final Shape isn’t the first time Destiny has enjoyed this level of acclaim

Indeed, The Taken King, Rise of Iron, Forsaken, and Witch Queen – just off the top of my head – have all felt like the pinnacle of Destiny in some key ways. Most of these, then, were followed up on with something lesser and, in some ways, wholly disappointing. Is that what awaits us next?

The new Frontiers

Here’s the thing: I’m absolutely enjoying Destiny at this time. I also remember very vividly being able to say the same thing time and again over the years, only for the feeling to fall off as Bungie fumbles things time and again.

Personally, the last time everything felt this good was back in the Shadowkeep era, just before a humongous chunk of the game got permanently taken out of the equation with the release of Beyond Light. Yes, I am still salty about Black Armory content being spliced out of the game, and yes, I most certainly am still using the old, sunset Ringing Nail I kept around for nostalgia’s sake.

My point, then, is that The Final Shape isn’t necessarily a sign that all is well in Destiny land. We’ve been here before, time and again. And do keep in mind that even the Ligthfall DLC felt mostly fine early on. It wasn’t until the upcoming seasons that Bungie drove home all of its problems, and something similar may well happen to The Final Shape, too.

More importantly, we’ve got precisely no idea what to expect out of the mysterious “Codename: Frontiers” project that’s slated for 2025. My advice? Enjoy Destiny 2 for what it is in this moment in time, but keep its history in mind. Y’know, just in case.