Disclaimer: This is a spoiler-free discussion exclusively about Destiny 2’s Update 8.0.0.1, which contains only patch notes for bug fixes and balance changes. No references are made to The Final Shape’s story in this article or the linked patch notes.

Destiny 2: The Final Shape released on June 4, and with developer Bungie’s conclusion to the Light and Darkness Saga came an all-too-familiar sight in an MMO’s big expansions: a hefty update and a novel’s worth of patch notes.

There won’t be any discussion of The Final Shape as an expansion or as a story in this article, but as a longtime fan of the franchise, it’s worth exploring a related topic: why does Destiny 2’s final expansion completely transform the sandbox of a game it’s spent seven years trying to carefully balance?

What’s in the 8.0 Patch Notes?

Most of the changes that come from The Final Shape’s 8.0 patch notes are buffs to player abilities. Not all of them, but most of them. And by a lot.

The short version: forgotten Supers have been dusted off and refreshed with new secondary effects. Grenade damage has been boosted. There are more knives, and your hammers have bigger explosions. You can cover yourself in ice now. There were also positive adjustments to exotic armor and to weapons very nearly across the board.

In fact, the only true outliers among these global buffs are nerfs to Super abilities that defined a stationary tank-the-boss strategy to the majority of the game’s toughest encounters. It’s a marked shift in the way the high-tier endgame has always been played: focus is now pushed towards active, damaging Supers. And, yes, flying around with a flaming sword on phoenix wings is just more awesome than standing in a glowing circle, no matter how powerful that circle might be.

How the Meta Turns

To someone that’s been playing the game since launch, the balance changes in the 8.0 update puzzled me a little on my first reading. On launch and in its early years, Destiny 2 could be conservative, even outright stingy with how often you could dole out flaming knives, lightning grenades, and Nova Bombs. In high-tier strikes and raids, it felt like you were always dying for lack of ammunition, abilities, and, well, fun.

There was always certain logic behind that caution; in a game with PvP elements, those powers can feel particularly oppressive to fight against. That’s to say nothing of high-tier endgame content, like raids and Grandmaster strikes, which were designed to feel like uphill battles. We know from the first Destiny that these challenges could often be subverted by meta-breaking weapons, like, say, a sniper with unlimited ammunition. Other times, they were rendered impotent by abilities that outright break the game’s encounters, like, say, self-resurrection after a scripted party wipe.

Bungie has steadily reversed this mindset in recent years, slashing ability cooldowns and ratcheting their damage output up a notch. During The Witch Queen expansion and the following year, the game’s original Light subclasses were brought to parity with new, powerful Darkness subclasses, massively expanding player agency in choosing their powers. While awesome to wield, the difficulty of Destiny 2’s high-tier endgame has steadily grown with these powers, creating a landscape that, while challenging and demanding, no longer felt oppressive and oft-devoid of cool space magic the way it used to.

The Final Shape (Of Subclasses)

So then– if a balance was finally struck, why do The Final Shape’s 8.0 balance changes feel like such a dramatic boost to a player’s capacity to whip out the cool paracausal powers that have defined the franchise?

A large part of why the changes were made were because of the expansion’s new Prismatic subclass, which allows players to mix and match their favorite abilities as they please, as opposed to using a specific set of abilities within a single elemental subclass. Now, Light and Darkness can be employed at the same time. Subclass-specific restrictions have been completely lifted even from the oldest exotic items to accommodate this massive addition to the game. The elemental subclasses, once binding a given Guardian to a sole purpose, have lent each of their disparate abilities to a single awesome power. Yes- the Prismatic subclass is basically Voltron.

This isn’t to say the old subclasses are defunct, of course. But if you can flex any elemental ability at once, there truly are no limits. This, more than anything, is what really made me reflect on what exactly this new game balance entails: player freedom and a power fantasy bound only by the abilities you choose to arm yourself with. Our new sandbox, incorporating newfound independence from subclasses and sprawling ability buffs, may be chaotic, and it might even feel messy in comparison to the measured meta changes of the past. As of writing, it’s too early to tell where things will land in terms of balance.

But this approach doesn’t feel like embracing a formless madness. It feels like saying “goodbye, and enjoy the playground”.

The Destined Sandbox

The Final Shape is the last expansion for Destiny 2. The game is an MMO, and I could not name a single game in the genre with a definitive ending. It just doesn’t happen; typically, they last as long as the money does, and then they get shut down with a salute and, in the best cases, a fond farewell update. I have gone into great detail about the topic before, but to release an ending to an MMO feels antithetical to the very concept. Can you really roll credits on what is, by definition, a living world that plays host to hundreds of thousands of players?

In Destiny 2’s case, we’ll find out in about a year. The Final Shape is the last expansion, but not the final content update to the game, as seasonal Episodes will fill in the blanks left in the Light and Darkness Saga. Until that time, the players will indulge in as much paracausal power as they like. And why shouldn’t they? If this is the last great hurrah for ten years’ worth of story, characters, lore, and worlds, then it should be cheered with the combined force of all the space magic Destiny can possibly muster. In the final months of content for a franchise that’s truly bloomed over the years, the limits have vanished and the restrictions have fallen away.

In the year of The Final Shape, Guardians make their own sandbox. And I can’t think of a finer way to end an MMO.

How do you feel about the expanded sandbox going into The Final Shape? Are you thrilled to dust off your Arc Staff for the first time in two years, or are you busy mourning Well of Radiance? This Hunter main just wants as many knives in her arsenal as possible- flaming, threaded, frozen, or otherwise. Let us know in the comments below what your thoughts are, or hop onto the Boss Rush Discord.

Source: Bungie

Featured Image: Bungie

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