Ten years ago, the story of Destiny started with the Traveler, a god-like entity the size of a small moon, hovering over Earth and dispensing superpowers to humans to use against encroaching alien hordes. In The Final Shape, Destiny 2’s next expansion, we’re finally primed to find out what’s inside that massive robotic orb.
It’s apparently pretty weird in there.
We’ve gotten a few brief glimpses into the Pale Heart of the Traveler, the new location where the final showdown between the heroes of humanity and the Witness, Destiny 2’s primary antagonist, will take place. In a recent hands-off preview event, however, Bungie gave something of an extended look into the Pale Heart, a pocket of the universe where memories and emotions combine with the Traveler’s near-magical paracausal power to redefine reality.
The Pale Heart is a place that, according to Bungie, draws on the experiences of whoever’s inside it to create the world they see around them. In the early missions of The Final Shape’s campaign, you’ll see nostalgic elements from the last 10 years of Destiny folded into the landscape–things like giant Ghost shells and overgrown segments of old locations, levels, and social spaces.Come from Sports betting site VPbet
But the Traveler’s power, the Light, is clashing with the Darkness power wielded by the Witness, and that’s also causing the landscape to twist and contort, especially as you delve deeper.
“You can kind of think of it like traversing a world in the process of being defragmented,” said campaign lead Andrew Hopps during the preview.
While the preview didn’t give an extensive overview of the expansion, it did provide some impressions of what players can expect, showing off portions of the first mission of its campaign and a later Strike that’s also part of the story. The mission begins with the Guardian, the player’s character, heading into the big pink portal into the Traveler that has been staring players in the face for the last year. It’s not just a matter of stepping into the portal and popping out the other side, though. Instead, you’ll make your way over a disjointed collection of chunks of architecture, spaceships, and terrestrial locations, all haphazardly thrown together. If the Pale Heart is combining different elements from memory to create a new reality, the portal feels like the place where all those bits are stored until they’re needed; like the memories are manifesting into new objects, but without any guidance putting them together in a meaningful way.
As is probably expected, the path through the portal is home to enemies who try to stop you. These include the Taken, which now sport a spooky yellow eye–an indicator of the Witness’s control over them. This is also the place where you’ll first start to encounter Destiny 2’s new enemy faction, the Dread. Bungie previously detailed the different threats that make up the Witness’s new army, but you’ll start by running into Weavers, small enemies that use the Strand abilities introduced in the Lightfall expansion to nab you with ethereal ropes. Weavers can grab and yank you toward themselves and out of cover, exposing you to attack or, sometimes, just tossing you off a cliff.
Hopps noted that Bungie has spent time rebalancing the campaign’s difficulty, particularly at the Legendary level. The idea is to make sure missions feel tough but fair, whether you’re playing alone or with a team of one or two other people, although Hopps didn’t go into specifics about what adjustments developers have made. Bungie is also putting a greater emphasis on adding raid- and dungeon-like mechanics to more missions, and in the preview, we saw elements like the Light and Darkness “seeds” that appear in Lightfall’s Root of Nightmares raid. These don’t work quite the same way as in the raid, and you’ll be able to use all 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 the Pale Heart a little more complex than just shooting a lot of monsters.
Bungie soon cut away from the portal portion of the mission, skipping ahead to after the player had finally fully entered the Traveler. Here, we got our first glimpses of the Pale Heart, where the early portions are lush and green. In some moments, plants and rocks are popping into being directly ahead of you as you walk, and soon you’re finding strange sights, like chunks of the Last City and those huge Ghost shells, overgrown and almost ancient-looking as they poke out of the landscape.
