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

polygon.com:

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