What Is Destiny 2: Into The Light?
Bungie’s next expansion for Destiny 2, The Final Shape, has been delayed until early June 2024, and players are wondering what new content will arrive long after Season of the Wish reaches its narrative epilogue. Ever since the massive employee layoffs at Bungie, the future seems uncertain for Destiny 2’s future, especially with the announcement of their new project, Marathon, and many former Destiny 2 staff working on the project. However, Destiny 2’s current director, Joe Blackburn, released a video revealing their plan to introduce new players into the game’s story and gameplay due to much of the narrative being rendered unplayable as part of Bungie’s decision to vault all old content.
Table of Contents
Vaulted Content and Narrative
It’s difficult for new players to keep up Destiny 2’s story and characters as it requires prior knowledge of vaulted storylines like the Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken expansions, as well as old seasonal content that is now unavailable. Bungie has attempted to remedy this issue by introducing the New Light update, which provides a tutorial experience similar to Destiny 1’s beginning. Though the gameplay experience for New Light is solid, players still find the narrative transition from New Light to the current seasonal story jarring. Many vital characters, such as Mara and Uldren Sov a.k.a Crow, Riven, Caiatl, Mithrax, etc., may be unfamiliar to new players as they are thrust into the new seasonal story.
Reprising Seasonal and Raid Weapons
Another an issue with Destiny 2’s time gating is the seasonal loot that is made unavailable. Ever since the game introduced its crafting system in The Witch Queen expansion, every gun found in the seasonal loot table is craftable, and some weapons have been highly sought out by players for their craftable god rolls. New players will miss out on seasonal weapons considered meta in the current sandbox of the game. According to community leaks, Into The Light will reward players with crafting patterns of old seasonal weapons, which allows new players to catch up with veterans in the endgame by crafting the best weapons in the game. Bungie is hoping to expedite the endgame journey for new players by providing an activity that aids in catching up to veteran players.
As you may know, Destiny 2’s API is open for everyone to see, and Bungie allows the community to leak some parts of a new content update or expansion. Story beats, cutscenes, and other game files are often leaked, and Into The Light’s content is no exception. According to Bungie, this content update will drop 2 months before The Final Shape is released. Leaks say that this activity will not only drop seasonal weapon patterns for crafting but may return some old Destiny 1 weapons on the loot table. Destiny 2 has made efforts to reprise old raid weapons and give them a fresh coat of paint to match in the modern-day sandbox. Some old exotics that will drop include the Dreg’s Promise, to be converted to a Special Rocket Frame Sidearm, Patience and Time as a Void sniper rifle with invisibility on crouch, and potentially, the famous Icebreaker Solar sniper rifle, which ignites killed targets whenever they’re scorched. These reprised exotics will likely function differently from their original counterpart, much like the current Dragon’s Breath exotic rocket launcher.
Another part of the Into The Light update is the introduction of Raid Mastery. Thanks to the introduction of the Fireteam Finder, this has spurred Bungie to give raid content more attention than ever before. These are challenges that reward weapon patterns of missing reprised raid weaponry. For example, the legendary Black Hammer sniper rifle, initially dropped in Destiny 1’s Crota’s End raid, was missing in the Destiny 2 reprised variant of the raid, but with Raid Mastery, it will be given to all players that complete that raid’s challenges. With Raid Mastery, players can now complete raid-specific quests to receive their crafting patterns.
Preparation For The Final Shape
Joe Blackburn quotes “This is really built not only for the folks that have played Destiny 2 for 5000 hours, but also for your friends, your family, for people who are just getting into Destiny and want to prepare for The Final Shape.” As revealed during a livestream anniversary, The Final Shape will be seeing a new enemy type and is Destiny 2’s most expansive raid yet. As the last expansion to the Light and Dark saga of Destiny, Bungie is making big preparations to send off the story with the biggest bang. This expansion includes a new miniboss race called the Subjugators, which, like the Tormentors of Lightfall, have crowd-control capabilities using Stasis and Strand powers. As for their unnamed raid, it will have a total of 6 encounters, the highest amount in any raid, matched only by the legendary Last Wish raid.
Bungie has always looked to improve the new player experience, and with the Into The Light update, they have provided the means to keep up in terms of gear. By the end of the Season of the Wish, we hope to hear more about what this update will bring soon.
