The Final Shape’s campaign finally makes good on Bungie’s ‘raid-lite’ promise

Destiny 2’s raids have always been the best thing about the game. Unfortunately, only a fraction of Guardians ever attempt them. The developers at Bungie have tried a number of different tactics over the years to fix this, the most notable being an attempt to inject some difficulty into the campaigns in order to help reduce the complexity gap between raids and the rest of the game. But the studio has never quite hit the right balance there, even in some of its best campaigns, like The Witch Queen.

Thankfully, as a long-time Destiny raider myself, I finally feel like Bungie is making good on that “raid-lite” promise with The Final Shape. I visited Bungie HQ to check out a few missions from the upcoming expansion, and I was satisfied with the raid-lite mechanics I saw.

Back in 2022, I spoke to former game director Joe Blackburn about if we’d ever see the expansion’s big bad in the raid again. While you could argue that Riven (the final boss of the Last Wish raid) was the true puppet master in Forsaken, raiders haven’t battled the baddy on the box since we took out Oryx in King’s Fall back in the 2015 Taken King expansion. That’s been a bit frustrating for my Fireteam as it makes the epic conclusion of the expansion feel more like a side quest. Blackburn told me putting a boss the caliber of Savathun in the raid is something the studio wanted to do again, but first it needed to get more players into the raid — otherwise, a good chunk of the community wouldn’t get a satisfying story conclusion.

Blackburn hinted that we’d see more puzzles and mechanics in the campaign for Witch Queen. And while there are certainly some objectives that are a bit more complex than “kill every enemy in this room; OK, now do it again,” it never gave me raid vibes. It just felt like an excellent Destiny campaign.

A little over two years later, I found myself sitting in a Bungie test lab in Bellevue, Washington, failing to perform and identify mission mechanics in my preview of The Final Shape campaign. And I was thrilled about it.

After playing a few Final Shape missions, I sat down with Catarina Macedo, project lead for all of Destiny 2’s expansions, and Ben Wommack, Destiny 2’s combat area lead, to talk about this change in philosophy when it came to making the campaign feel like “baby’s first raid.”

“One of the things that we knew that The Witness as a villain would be worthy of, it’s like, ‘Yep, this is gonna have to be our raid boss. It just is. It warrants that challenge to players,’” said Macedo. “With the campaign, because we knew that The Witness was going to be the raid boss, we were like, ‘Hey, it would be really cool to introduce all these different mission mechanics that do [make it] feel like there’s a little bit of a learning curve.’”

Image: Bungie

The first mission in the campaign starts pretty simply from a mechanical perspective, as it’s mostly there to introduce the new Prismatic ability suite and the special enemies that you can only defeat while using it. Unfortunately, it’s also the only mission I’m allowed to talk about in any real detail. But I can at least say that the later missions I played had me performing far more interesting mechanics than I’m used to finding in a Destiny 2 campaign.

Without getting into specifics or the mechanics themselves, I found that each mission built upon itself — much like raids do. The first arena might teach one mechanic, while the second arena teaches another. And by the third, the game is asking you to do both at once. That’s how Bungie has structured raids for years, where the mechanics are building blocks that start out small before becoming very complex.

That being said, it’s not like seasoned Destiny raiders will be breaking out their Microsoft Paint skills for the campaign. Instead, the experience merely emulates a raid by giving you a different objective than “kill” during combat. And, if you fail at performing a particular mechanic, the in-game notifications will help nudge you in the direction of the solution — something raids tend not to do.

Macedo told me that the developers want players to get comfortable living in that raid-lite space. This is the Destiny team getting players in the habit of fighting and solving at the same time so that when the new raid comes out, and The Witness needs its ass beat, it won’t just be players like me who dive in to do it.

Image: Bungie

One unfortunate side effect of this shift into deeper mechanics, however, is that the actual combat challenge of the Legendary campaign has gone down rather significantly from the past two releases — at least in the version of the game I previewed. I was able to solo the missions I played on the max difficulty without any real struggle, despite playing at a different mouse sensitivity than I’ve been aiming with for years. I’ve soloed the other Legendary campaigns as well, but there are some spikes in a few of those missions that had me sweating a bit, even in the comfort of my own home. It feels like Bungie has taken some of that combat difficulty and injected it into the puzzles instead — which is great for non-raiders, but might disappoint some endgame players.

Overall, I was very impressed with The Final Shape missions I played. In fact, as I’m writing this, I find myself eager to both replay what I’ve already seen and push into new areas of The Pale Heart on launch day with my friends. But more important than one Guardian’s experience is the fact that Destiny’s developers have finally found a way to bring the game’s most interesting and well-designed activities to the masses by injecting just a little of that raid special sauce into the campaign.

Disclosure: This article is based on a Destiny 2: The Final Shape preview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from May 14–17. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.