The latest trailer for Destiny 2: The Final Shape takes players on a tour of the Pale Heart, a lush paradise plagued by corruption fans have been waiting a decade to visit. The trip is narrated by Nathan Fillion, who’s reprising his role as the wise-cracking cyborg Cayde-6, except this time he’s deadly serious. The whole thing is a bit of a mind-fuck for players who have grown up alongside Bungie’s loot shooter over the last decade.
“The ground beneath my feet is a memory,” Cayde-6 says. The trailer, which Bungie scrambled to release early after it was accidentally leaked by the PlayStation YouTube account yesterday, shows the inside of the Traveler and it looks at times like a cross between The Dreaming City and the surreal puzzle-scapes of the Prophecy Dungeon. “So is the grass, and the sky. The warmth of the sun on my face. Around every corner, every familiar hallway, I keep expecting to see you.”
It’s still unclear if Cayde-6 is actually coming back in some form, or if what players encounter in the Pale Heart will just be echoes of him brought to life by players’ own memories. And Destiny 2 players have a lot of memories, especially those who have stuck with the game since its first beta in the summer of 2014. I know people who haven’t played in years and still recite random lines they’ve heard a hundred times while grinding through missions and raids.
The latest trailer pitches The Final Shape as a mashup of past and present, playing off fans’ longtime love for Nathan Fillion’s Guardian and newfound allies like Mithrax, Caiatl, and Savathun who appear to be fighting alongside players and against The Witness and the new Dread faction forces. You’ll also notice that the point-of-view keepings flipping, showing Guardians not just walking on the ceiling but the entire orientation of the screen moving, blurring the lines between reality and Traveler-fueled hallucination. The Tormentors appear to have new armor as well.
The comments on YouTube are full of people marveling at how many years of their lives they’ve invested in Bungie’s live service game to get to this point. “I played Destiny 1 with my son, who was in elementary school. Now, he’s an adult, making his way in the world,” one player wrote. “10 years flew by and was an eternity at the same time.” “I was 16,” wrote another. “Now I am 27. This game has been a decade of my life. So much hardship it’s helped me through.”
Fans on Reddit have been sharing why they’ve stuck with the game for so long, through the good times and the bad. The feeling of six friends working in sync to pull off exciting and fun mechanics will forever bring me back to Destiny,” wrote one user. “I am so grateful for the friends I’ve played the game with, the raids we’ve run, the fun we’ve had.” Another wrote, “It’s been my comfort game, one constant amongst so many life events. A friend and I have been a tight fireteam since the original beta. The gameplay always felt solid but I think it’s the narrative that’s actually kept me the most interested.”
The Final Shape won’t be the end of Destiny 2, but it will certainly be the end of an era. Fortunately no matter how it delivers, the journey up to this point has been incredible in its own right.
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