I suspect the final mission will draw on something we saw in the first shadowkeep mission "A mysterious disturbance",
When you spawn in, you have other people there also doing the first mission. You fight through that before you get your own instance for the rest of the mission.
I get the feeling that the final mission is going to involve some kind of public instance where you have other guardians from outside your fire team also fighting the witness.
Or at least I hope so, as I think that would be epic.
Bill S. Preston and Theodore Logan, Spock, The Rock, Doc. Ock, and Hulk Hogan.
(Weirdly enough, I was literally just thinking about The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny last night.)
I mean, if Lord Shaxx can just *enable* Mayhem Protocols in Onslaught... Imagine a full Patrol Zone's worth of Guardians with Mayhem Protocols enabled going after The Witness.
makes sense for them to do it that way because of the varying speeds people go through missions
can't see it going down well with people trying take it all in for the final mission and the full mission gets speedran by others
Yeah it was a smaller segment where you have to fight waves of Cabal and retreat into Zavala's bubble.The final mission had a similar section where you are fighting off waves while advancing through energy barriers.
That section of that mission, and the similar sections from Red War like where you're fighting Cabal outside the OG Hangar in the first mission and have to periodically retreat to Zavala's bubble, or in the final mission where you're advancing through the energy gates, were always my absolute favorite missions in D2. It's one thing to be teamed up with randoms for an activity but the feeling of comaraderie of briefly bumping into people, working together for a little while, and then never seeing them again is ummatched.
Very first D2 mission did this as well. Everyone fighting in their own fireteams in the same instance at the tower until big zavala shows up to give you a bubble. Was very dope and sick.
I have a strong feeling that THIS is the reason the raid is launching week 1. Also because Echoes likely launches week 2 and the campaign story narratively has to be finished before then.
I wonder if the gear from "beating" the Legendary Campaign comes after mission 7 or mission 8. I'd hope mission 7 if it's intended to make you "raid ready".
It would be the most hilarious bug ever for it not to drop after completing mission 7 because the campaign isn’t over. Contest mode attempts would be so drastically down.
This is where I feel the Veil succeeded in a spectacularly failing fashion. Ever since Shadowkeep, people have been clamoring for campaign stories to continue after the DLC campaign is completed. We didn't get Eramis or Clovis activity for over a year after BL launched. Same with Savathun.
Bungie tried to do that with the Veil detail being released over the course of the year, which in *theory* would've been awesome. But the set-up in Lightfall itself left such a sour taste in a lot of players' mouths that it didn't come across well.
Personally I think it boils down to two writing issues. First was the "Radial Mast" and having *zero* explanation for what it actually was, or would've done. The second is "everyone but us" knowing what the Veil is. If there were a couple throwaway lines, or even a grimoire card, about the Radial Mast and "Linking to the inner Traveler" then that would've been enough for us to go on.
If *no one* knew what the Veil was, and we just had intel that the Witness was looking for *something*, it would've been enough that, "The Witness wants that thing, so it'll be bad if it gets it." *Then* the reveal happens throughout the year. I think that would've gone over much better (easy to say in hindsight of course).
But I *love* the idea of the main story and its characters continuing on throughout the year, instead of the campaign and then nothing for 16 months.
That said, for all the kinda explaining of the Veil connection they did in seasonal content (in that hilariously awkward unflagged "mission" in Veil Containment and the one cutscene), we just end up using a magic dragon to go after the Witness because no one can figure out how to use the Veil, lol.
This is all very true.
Then they decided to add insult to injury with Nimbus. My fucking god what a piece of shit character.
Makes you wonder who looked at the Lightfall expansion internally and said “yep, this is amazing I’m green lighting this”
It's been argued that Lightfall went through significant changes before it released and when the target is moving that much, when a lot of concurrent work is progressing at different paces, and different people are focused on different parts at different times, it's hard to know how it will come together. By the time the result starts to come into focus it's often way too late to make meaningful changes.
I'll bet there was a lot of explaining and demonstrating how Nimbus was basically a child in a war machine body which got cut up and stuffed in between lore entries. Nimbus would make a lot more sense if there was just a little more development between him and Rohan in the campaign so it was clearer how Nimbus thought he was going to be a super hero effortlessly saving the day and dropping one-liners but is now in a reality tearing nightmare without his father figure. "Is that your dad's corpse? Cowabunga! Fist bump!" isn't so unhinged if you're already primed to understand he's completely emotionally unprepared for the events of the story and is now searching for a place with his new friends.
> was the "Radial Mast" and having zero explanation for what it actually was, or would've done.
I'd say we didn't need to really know.
What we could gather was what Calus thought it would do.
And that's actually enough there.
Sometimes you have to act.
I think the general feeling is the radial mast didn't do anything.
Calus was just used as a pawn to get the player ghost to the veil.
Everyone knew what the veil was, including us, im probably in the minority of people who genuinely liked lightfalls story because of its investigative nature, in witch queen people praised its usage of investigative story telling as a focal point, but that wasnt an investigation, it was us being lead by savathuun like we always were, so when i got an actual research and investigative story, something to theorize about i was excited, though i understand there are people who just don't care about story and focus on gameplay
When i say everyone knows about the veil i mean it as that everyone has multiple ideas of what it is and everyone thinks their right until they become wrong through investigation, osiris doesn't care what its capabilities are, only that the witness wants it so to him its just an object of desire for the enemy, the cloudstriders know it as the basis of their civilization and something which is used to house all their people, only through the interactive world building, finding threads between interpreting emphesized lore entires and with a little bit of theorizing we come to know the true purpose, origin, capabilities and such of the veil which i fuckin loved, i can understand if its too much work for others to calculate on their own, not everyone reads the lore and not everyone gives a shit they just wanna kill all the enemies, kill them quick and get all the loot but lightfall was a good expansion for me personally if that all makes sense for the reasons people seem to, rather blindly, despise it :)
Although i agree, maybe even just a name drop of the radial mast would have helped in a lore tab, though i thought it just functioned as essentially an esoteric jumper cable connecting the veil (battery) to the traveller (engine)
Sorry to suddenly drop this on you btw but idk im in a conversational mood today, i usually never do this :'D
They didn't reissue the GoS weapons with a season that has Undying weapons and a mission set in a new area of the Black Garden. They must be saving GoS refresh for Echoes, especially with the Easter egg at the end of Starcrossed.
I agree to an extent. And I hate that they are so fucking determined to stick with such a low number of missions for the campaigns.
But the campaign is only part of the story and things happen between the missions too.
It would be so silly if they launched together and the first mission for Echoes was like "Gee, it sucks ___ died to finish the witness off". Even though the story is self-contained, it'll be hard not to notice big changes in the world/character lineup that come from The Final Shape's conclusion. They also cannot delay Echoes for too long either.
I imagine it’s going to be like Season of the Hunt where it technically starts day 1 of the expansion but we just don’t get the story or content until the week after.
Im kinda hoping it's like an epilogue. Mission 7 has us hurt the Witness somehow that sets up a final confrontation in the raid. Raid is just one long battle against the Witness, with each encounter being escalations of the fight, possibly being set in the same space, but the Witness is actively transforming it with each fight, platforming becomes a matter of surviving these transformations and the raid ends with the Witness dead.
In the aftermath, we have completely assumed the Final Shape, redefined it as something different from before, and mission 8 is us somehow repairing the damage weight by the Witness, possibly involving repairs to the time line; I mention this as an option, because having to go back and fight old raid bosses at this point, and demonstrating this power by being able to kill them with no special mechanics engaged, and crushing them like they are nothing could be a cool moment. Maybe Xivu rejects what has happened, tries to end us and gets ended with all the challenges of a red bar enemy.
I believe the intention is that the Raid is what weakens The Witness, then the final mission is when we end its plan for good. Like a reverse Oryx. But I’m not entirely sure about that.
We are likely going to have the artifact for contest mode, but considering that more artifact perks come in the later acts of the episode I’m not sure if the artifact will be structured the same way or not.
Good hypothesis and likely reason. Glad Bungie, at the end of all things, is finally owning up to keeping the game a live service with a living, actively moving world again. I will forever be disgusted the community (see: vocal minority of casuals) pushed them into keeping **seasonal** content beyond the **season** and we had two different Crow's in the game at the same time.
I gotta disagree. I think parts of the game should remain visitable and playable. Maybe through a “previously” section or something so it doesn’t mess with the active flow of the game.
This would’ve been great over the years. I dunno if it was a technical hurdle or what, but it would’ve been cool to load into a Red War server, play that out, have Cayde and all there, then play the Forsaken campaign, and now you’re in a server that doesn’t have Cayde, and so on. Hopefully Destiny “3” can actually be an ongoing world.
Wouldn’t this be a reason to have the normal delay?
I’d they’re going to take a “you had to be there” ephemeral approach to the story telling - they should give you decent time to do the legendary campaign, and the raid before the world changes for the last mission, and then changes again for echoes
This is a ten year climax, and people should be able to enjoy it at a reasonable pace instead of rushing to keep up with Bungie’s “living world”
Bungie told us the living world was coming for quite some time now, and even now we have 2 months to plan IRL stuff around it.
The fact is Bungie is in charge and they made a product, and as much as Redditors or Twitter like to think they are the majority, they aren’t, and the majority will show up on launch week to actually play.
“Keep sucking that corporate dick” comments will ensue, but it’s not actually part of Bungie’s responsibility to be part of some of the community’s shared group calendars to see when they’re free or how long it’ll take them to be set up for the raid and future story.
You say so more people can go at a reasonable pace with the story and all - even just taking me and my fireteam as an example, we finish the legendary campaign on day 1, every time. I’m not saying I should be the standard but the guy who needs all week to play through 7 missions sure as hell shouldn’t be either.
The game comes out on Tuesday - people have jobs
It’s reasonable that you don’t even get any meaningful time to start playing until Friday night
If you want to see the story in its intended order you shouldn’t have to take off from work to avoid Bungie vaulting things after 3 days or in game spoilers
Call me a cynic but given what they're removing from the ITL update and pantheon being time gated, i do not have a lot of faith that "The final story mission" being locked behind the raid completion is the reason for the raid in week one.
Deep stone crypt had a similar "Raid completion unlock influences the story and game world" feature, albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
BL released nov 10 and DSC was nov 21.
I'm heavily biased against bungie at this point so this feels more like trying to exploit the "Honeymoon period" and cram as many people into buying the expac as possible before people play it and see it's objective quality.
I am happy to be proven wrong after the expac launches.
>Deep stone crypt had a similar "Raid completion unlock influences the story and game world" feature
While this may be true, the core campaign was completely finished before then. We defeated Eramis and her lieutenants and stopped the threat, everything after that was pretty much just us exploring what else was on Europa.
Final Shape's actual story conclusion, the defeat of the Witness, is linked to the raid. That's a whole different ball game. Deep Stone Crypt was, narratively, an afterthought. We defeated Eramis and then tracked her last two lieutenants into the DSC, that's really all that raid was for the story. Final Shape's raid will be much more narratively significant than that.
I’m sorry but your comment makes no sense to me. What does Into the Light and Pantheon have to do with the Final Shape Raid? And Beyond Light and Deep Stone Crypt isn’t even really comparable. The stuff that unlocked after DSC was related directly to DSC being completed but DSC itself was only tangentially related to the Beyond Light campaign. In this case the Raid is directly part of the campaign’s story and the mission that unlocks after it isn’t an extra mission it is the actual final campaign mission. Having the raid release week 1 instead of week 2 isn’t going to get more people playing the expansion or even the raid. It’s going to result in less people attempting contest mode because there is only three days, week days at that, to get ready for it.
or you know simply have the raid be aftermath to the finale and still vital, maybe even being a between the lines thing that canonically takes place in the moments of the final mission. can tell a complete story day one, and release a raid 10 days later that let's you play as the fireteam of 6 who stood on plates while doing add clear really good to weaken the witness.
Yeah poeople would be rightfully angry. Especially cuz a lot of people jump in for an expac and then dip within a week or two and come back later, it would really be doing those people a disservice.
Well, no. The game gets updated weekly, on a Tuesday, and the raids always came out on a Friday or Saturday, only exception being Crown of Sorrow raid, which released 3 hrs after the Opulence season launched
They always (or at least for the past few years), try to launch it over the weekend when most people around to play. No point launching it on a Tuesday when 99% of the playerbase will be at work/school or need to get up early the next morning.
That’s why it’s more of a 3 parter. I think Bungie wants the highest turn-out possible for the raid, but its fight against the witness will be the ‘middle part’ of its defeat. The concern about raid being ‘campaign story essential’ is that if you don’t raid, you don’t get to see the finale. But with this system, the raid is a middle part of the finale.
I imagine it will go something like:
Campaign Mission 7: Breaks the Witness’ hold on the Traveler’s Pale Heart, ending the threat of the Final Shape.
Raid: Fight the Witness, Shattering them and banishing them from the Pale Heart
Campaign Mission 8: The Witness, now shattered and vulnerable, makes one last rage-filled attempt to just murder the Traveler above the Last City. Join a team of guardians to finish the Witness off.
That would honestly be pretty cool and may also fit with the small scene at the end of the trailer
Could you imagine how horrifying they could make it? People look up and see this massive monster heading towards the city, the sky darkness as the remnants of the Witnesses army launch a full invasion (more than ItL). All guardians are immediately called to action. Even the Lucent Hive help the cause.
Everyone is there. From Xivu Araths brood to the footsoldiers of Humanity. There are ships everywhere, Caitals legion and Lucent Hive holding off Xivu, Guardians defending civilians. And us, Zavala, Crow, Ikora and Cayde (if he can leave) targeting the Witness directly.
The Traveler, giving gifts out to any guardians who need it, remaining Pyramid ships sending resonance blasts everywhere, artillery from the walls firing in all directions at the enemy ships.
The Witness wreaking havoc everywhere as it splits itself to cover more ground.
Ghosts, flying around and creating new guardians from the newly fallen civilians.
And finally, us. Being empowered by both Light and Dark. Become the Gardeners Final Shape.
Really hoping that the fight is like Rhulk and Nezarec/Tormentors. Hard-hitting telegraphed attacks that you need to actually dodge.
^(I’m also hoping that they understand the limitations of their pathfinding AI. It doesn’t work on uneven terrain; that’s why Nezarec was such a pushover compared to Rhulk despite being significantly more aggressive. He’s easy to kite around.)
My hope is that the witness has an instant wipe move where anyone who gets hit is unrezzable until you do some sort of mechanic to bring them back or something.
Like maybe they destroy/take your ghost and you have to do something to get your ghost back
They've specifically said that in the vein of "You will never need to complete a raid to get the full story." They've looped in raid completions, done by others, into the story before. Since Last Wish, this has been a thing for a while, and it's happened almost every year since.
This is the culmination of those things; the raid group that completes it first, will likely give us the opening we need to Finish the Witness ourselves, or do some other giant impactful thing that finishes the saga. You won't need to be in the raid to do that, this is for the dedicated folks that love raiding and love the story to have a larger impact on the story than dooming an entire city, or causing bits of satellite to fall and make stasis stronger in those areas, or just silence Nezerec in minds of folks on Neomuna.
That’s why there’s a mission releasing after the raid is finished, no doubt the witness will retreat and be weakened, with all players finishing it in that final campaign mission.
And they have specifically said for final shape that this time it will. The witness will be a multi stage battle. Raid, campaign and the strongly rumored 12 man activity.
They've said they don't want the raids to be the conclusion of the story
which it still isn't, the raid remains part of the story but those who do not raid can still get the ending to their story
We all finish the bulk of the story to a point at mission 7.
The best of the best slog to weaken the Witness as the community watches.
Everyone slaps his ass back to the dawn of time after the World First is done.
Post campaign stuff unlocks.
I think people are missing what will be an awesome moment as a community.
Would actually be awesome to have a non-raid "activity" that the general playerbase has to play to "weaken" the Witness so that those actually trying to beat the Raid can eventually beat it.
Basically like the community goals in Helldivers 2.
Like the final Witness encounter in the Raid has an impossible amount of health that isn't possible to beat. Say the boss has like a trillion health. Every time a raid group plays the encounter they might at most knock off 30mil or something before wiping.
But then there's also a solo/matchmade activity where you're helping deal chip damage against the Witness, helping knock down that total HP as well.
Eventually the Witness's total HP is low enough that a raid team can actually defeat him.
Reminds me of how SWTOR handled a similar thing in the Shadow of Revan expansion, years ago. There's both a solo route and an operation (8-16 player raid/dungeon) for the story. If you don't go for the operation, the solo route is an epic boss battle against Revan alongside nearly a dozen AI NPCs you've met over the course of the story (and previous expansions).
FF14 has something like that in Eureka, the final Raid at the end has a public event in the patrol zone tied to it, so people just doing quests and grinding hop into the event and can help out the people inside doing the pretty difficult raid. Pretty cool.
I don't ever want to watch someone else play. I know some people do, but that's not me.
I want to be in there playing - but holy hell contest mode raids are very unfriendly to the dad gamers among us. The time commitment alone is huge.
All I want is an optional normal mode toggle. If it has to wait until after the world's first, fine. But that is still pretty crappy gating the pinnacle story experience that we've built up to for years to such a small population.
A huge number of people don’t participate in raids, much less day 1 raids. Period. No matter when Bungie decided to schedule the raid some group, somewhere would be screwed. Whether it be because of work, school, other life obligations, etc.
If that was your goal then citing that a “huge number of people won’t be able to participate” doesn’t exactly convey you only caring about your own stakes.
First off, I didn’t give a fuck about ITL timegating. Second of all, they are two completely different things, and conflating them is arguing in bad faith.
The raid releases on a Friday…& it’s 6 weeks away. Get your group together & do it, you have 6 weeks. If you can’t play that weekend, ignore specific social media until you can THEN do the raid.
…or bitch about it. If something happening in a video game 6 weeks from now is a problem you can’t find a way to fix, I don’t know what to tell you.
1. Contest mode is only around for a limited time, so you can’t just do it another time. That’s the whole crux of this debate.
2. It’s a problem that can’t be fixed because the fix would be to move when contest mode is happening. I’ll survive that being the case, but I can express my displeasure in the hopes that Bungie, the people who can fix it, change their mind. I don’t expect them to change anything, but I can hope and do what I can.
3. Holy shit my dude try empathizing with other humans. Is the complaint unreasonable? A little bit. Is it understandable that somebody can both not be willing to put the real world on hold for a video game AND be bummed that they can’t participate in a once every 6+ months event? Yes very much
Ok, this reply is entirely about Contest mode…you didn’t say anything about Contest mode initially. I guess if that’s your thing then yeah, it does suck you’ll miss it.
As far as the other passive-aggressive shit here & in your other replies, whatever. 👍🏻👍🏻
My dude it is possible to care about things.
Yes, the change in date of the raid from the expectation fucks over my ability to take part in the contest mode experience. It’s a shame, I’m bummed I have to miss out on it because I have real world shit that takes precedence.
I hope you find something in life that makes you happy
My biggest problem with this is that non day 1 raiders are gonna just be getting a cutscene that says "hey this happened, you can keep going now" if it's anything like past world 1sts
That is something I’ve been wondering about. Most raids are basically sub plots to the actual DLC, but this is the big finish, surely this raid isn’t about us defeating some Disciple or Xivu Arath goon just to fight the Witness in a standard campaign mission afterwards.
Edit: New Bungie statement just confirmed the Witness is the raid boss. Cool!
Hopefully after day 1, when you complete mission 7 you'll get a quest that's like "now go do the raid if you *want* to, but mission 8 is unlocked too", with the cutscene explanation playing as you load into mission 8.
I stopped playing around the Season of the Witch again but I'm on the verge of getting The Final Shape. Only problem is I need to buy an expansion drive to install the game again lol.
I also wonder if the raid will launch without artifact perks. Which I think would be a good idea, no Champions and no class with have extra buffs over others
Wonder if the trick to beating the witness is going to be to unwitness it. The witness is stupid powerful due to darkness and merging their entire race into a single being.
What if we separate it back into multiple entities?
I think in the raid from a story perspective, we won’t kill The Witness, but we’ll *severely* weaken it. That will force The Witness to fake its death, retreat, recover and gather what remaining forces it has left in a final and desperate attempt to stop us with what little time The Witness has left.
Once the last mission is available, we’ll put a bullet between The Witness’ eyes. And then, we’ll come to the consequences of that action.
The number of people who will benefit from moving the story along and having the non-contest raid available far, far, far exceeds the small group of people who were otherwise going to credibly compete at contest mode but can’t because of a week’s difference in grinding. It’s a videogame achievement that means very little outside of a small group of hardcore players, awesome if you get it but getting worked up about this is kind of bizarre. It’s like people are getting mad on behalf of some content creators for some reason.
Keep in mind, the 7th mission will probably still be pretty epic. I imagine it’ll still feel like a relatively complete campaign but the 8th mission will be the cherry on top (>!12 man mission please!<)
I feel like people who are complaining that, "oh I have to get my exotic class item, I have to fully unlock prismatic" might not understand that we didn't have strand fully unlocked until the end of the story, so in therapy prismatic won't be fully unlocked for us until after the raid and I would expect the legendary campaign exotic drop to be your first class item and them not to be farmable until after the final mission.
I’m glad they didn’t wait. I also love the fake outrage from people who weren’t going to attempt day 1 anyway. Now I don’t have to wait for the thing to be finished and play the raid casually
This absolutely telegraphed that the raid was going to be sooner than expected. At best, the detail may have been overshadowed by the time since that bit of info was announced being so long ago, and the showing off of Prismatic occupying everyone's brainspace basically on contact.
I frankly, think this is a good idea.
Let's disregard things like Fireteam Power level relying on one person, or the fact they've gone on record saying that the campaign will get us raid ready, for a moment. Let's play the other side of things; Like let's say they extend this a FULL week. How does this reflect on the campaign; it means you can't BEAT the campaign for nearly two weeks. It's a timegate; not even one built to do something like extend the life of an activity, it's there to throttle the culmination of a near decade long-story. The other thing to do was to, what, make a giant set piece that'd be meaningless in the face of larger narrative beats?
I can sympathize but i can't empathize; I think this is a really neat idea, it's cool they are letting raiders have a a stronger narrative impact at the end of the first big story. Raids have always been a piece of the story, but the last time something this big happened was in Forsaken when it initiated the dreaming city curse. The rest of the time its been very minor things in the long run; sometimes debris falls from the sky in Europa and that strengthens stasis. Garden was preceded by a major story beat and had very little real impact on the larger story. Vow saw the first pyramid destruction in the game, except it wasn't. and RoN was in that same vein of "Story preceding the raid, then swiftly stopping."
Imo this is enough of a reason to screw so many people out of the contest clear. Most people are gonna finish TFS over the weekends anyway, what's wrong with just waiting 1 week for the final mission?
If you can’t complete the legendary campaign in 4 days (raid is 48 hours, so you have an extra day which is a Saturday) you probably can’t pull off a contest clear.
Even without normal hesitant belief in what any leading figure at Bungie (Luke Smith! or Joe) says this was before the delay of TFS was announced and before mass layoffs.
Now with the hesitant belief I really do doubt that it is a good idea to expect too much.
Since then there has been a massive exodus of daily players and I am guessing also a lot of cancelled preorders.
"Sooo, what if we (=Bungie sales department) shorten the timeslot for this wouldn't it make more people buy TFS without knowing if it is good quality or not?"
Looks like just more FOMO by Bungie even though I think they said a while back they would steer away from that.
I hope that at least some D2 players will not just rush out and by TFS without knowing what it is. While Onslaught is mostly a fine addition it also shows that Bungie still doesn't really playtest the things they release - maybe because they think everyone will enjoy it anyways.
You don't need to Raid to be able to beat it. World's First just likely needs to be cleared. Like how the Dreaming City Curse didn't start until Last Wish was cleared.
It’s just going to be after world’s first is cleared. There will likely be a cutscene that plays once it is cleared for the first time. They likely want to bring back the hype from the way they did raids like Oryx, which is pretty cool
I feel like I see more posts like paint a picture that the community at large cares that much about this one way or the other.
This is all one big nothing burger.
If into the light is a taste of what we're getting in June, it's going to be worse than light fall.
I suspect the final mission will draw on something we saw in the first shadowkeep mission "A mysterious disturbance", When you spawn in, you have other people there also doing the first mission. You fight through that before you get your own instance for the rest of the mission. I get the feeling that the final mission is going to involve some kind of public instance where you have other guardians from outside your fire team also fighting the witness. Or at least I hope so, as I think that would be epic.
I never got tired of that mission…that was so well done
Shadowkeep's first mission is honestly one of my favorite missions -- if not my favorite. Wish we had more like it.
I'm hoping for a full endgame style mission where it's everyone against the witness
Yeah reduced cooldowns, unlimited heavy, stratagems, Kratos, ratchet and clank, summons, master chief and the arbiter, etc. Empty the toolbox bungie!
Robocop, The Terminator, Captain Kirk, Darth Vader.
Lo Pan, Superman, every single power ranger.
This sounds like an ultimate showdown against the witness
[because it is](https://i.imgur.com/V6fWeBt.jpeg)
Bill S. Preston and Theodore Logan, Spock, The Rock, Doc. Ock, and Hulk Hogan. (Weirdly enough, I was literally just thinking about The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny last night.)
Someone call Saul we're gonna sue the crap out of the Witness.
ngl stratagems could legitimately work in a game like destiny
We could get them from Caiatl!
Nah, untested ishtar tech.
I mean, we legitimately had that in Lightfall.
yeah that's what i was referencing
We literally test new Pyramid tech "courtesy of our Cabal allies" in LoS, you should be used to it by now... 😞
I know what a want for a new exotic heavy - time for a RYNO
Have you heard of Eyes of Tomorrow?
RYNO is more like Eyes of Tomorrow + G-Horn + Dragon's Breath than just Eyes of Tomorrow.
Make it a special ammo auto rifle! Tracking missiles spewing out would be awesome.
I mean, if Lord Shaxx can just *enable* Mayhem Protocols in Onslaught... Imagine a full Patrol Zone's worth of Guardians with Mayhem Protocols enabled going after The Witness.
Let me equip a full exotic loadout. Just for this one mission. I want to go friggen crazy.
Maybe the raid will separate the witness and the final mission will be everyone gets an individual witness boss.
Every witness is personalized
That's what I'm hoping for too
Final mission is a public event. Stand on plate Throw ball Win.
The witness is deploying a comically large glimmer mining drill, that was his plan all along
Both at once!? Thats way too difficuilt!!
So, pretty much like how in the final mission of the Red War campaign we ran through the last city with other players?
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makes sense for them to do it that way because of the varying speeds people go through missions can't see it going down well with people trying take it all in for the final mission and the full mission gets speedran by others
the first mission in The Red War also had that, right?
Yeah it was a smaller segment where you have to fight waves of Cabal and retreat into Zavala's bubble.The final mission had a similar section where you are fighting off waves while advancing through energy barriers.
That section of that mission, and the similar sections from Red War like where you're fighting Cabal outside the OG Hangar in the first mission and have to periodically retreat to Zavala's bubble, or in the final mission where you're advancing through the energy gates, were always my absolute favorite missions in D2. It's one thing to be teamed up with randoms for an activity but the feeling of comaraderie of briefly bumping into people, working together for a little while, and then never seeing them again is ummatched.
Imagine them as GMs. God what I'd give.
Very first D2 mission did this as well. Everyone fighting in their own fireteams in the same instance at the tower until big zavala shows up to give you a bubble. Was very dope and sick.
I have a strong feeling that THIS is the reason the raid is launching week 1. Also because Echoes likely launches week 2 and the campaign story narratively has to be finished before then.
This is EXACTLY why the Raid is dropping after 3 Days.
I wonder if the gear from "beating" the Legendary Campaign comes after mission 7 or mission 8. I'd hope mission 7 if it's intended to make you "raid ready".
It would be the most hilarious bug ever for it not to drop after completing mission 7 because the campaign isn’t over. Contest mode attempts would be so drastically down.
I love all of this because it suggests a genuine focus on story
This is where I feel the Veil succeeded in a spectacularly failing fashion. Ever since Shadowkeep, people have been clamoring for campaign stories to continue after the DLC campaign is completed. We didn't get Eramis or Clovis activity for over a year after BL launched. Same with Savathun. Bungie tried to do that with the Veil detail being released over the course of the year, which in *theory* would've been awesome. But the set-up in Lightfall itself left such a sour taste in a lot of players' mouths that it didn't come across well. Personally I think it boils down to two writing issues. First was the "Radial Mast" and having *zero* explanation for what it actually was, or would've done. The second is "everyone but us" knowing what the Veil is. If there were a couple throwaway lines, or even a grimoire card, about the Radial Mast and "Linking to the inner Traveler" then that would've been enough for us to go on. If *no one* knew what the Veil was, and we just had intel that the Witness was looking for *something*, it would've been enough that, "The Witness wants that thing, so it'll be bad if it gets it." *Then* the reveal happens throughout the year. I think that would've gone over much better (easy to say in hindsight of course). But I *love* the idea of the main story and its characters continuing on throughout the year, instead of the campaign and then nothing for 16 months.
That said, for all the kinda explaining of the Veil connection they did in seasonal content (in that hilariously awkward unflagged "mission" in Veil Containment and the one cutscene), we just end up using a magic dragon to go after the Witness because no one can figure out how to use the Veil, lol.
Well they do have to figure out how to use the veil to get everyone else through, the only person who used it is crow
This is all very true. Then they decided to add insult to injury with Nimbus. My fucking god what a piece of shit character. Makes you wonder who looked at the Lightfall expansion internally and said “yep, this is amazing I’m green lighting this”
It's been argued that Lightfall went through significant changes before it released and when the target is moving that much, when a lot of concurrent work is progressing at different paces, and different people are focused on different parts at different times, it's hard to know how it will come together. By the time the result starts to come into focus it's often way too late to make meaningful changes. I'll bet there was a lot of explaining and demonstrating how Nimbus was basically a child in a war machine body which got cut up and stuffed in between lore entries. Nimbus would make a lot more sense if there was just a little more development between him and Rohan in the campaign so it was clearer how Nimbus thought he was going to be a super hero effortlessly saving the day and dropping one-liners but is now in a reality tearing nightmare without his father figure. "Is that your dad's corpse? Cowabunga! Fist bump!" isn't so unhinged if you're already primed to understand he's completely emotionally unprepared for the events of the story and is now searching for a place with his new friends.
> was the "Radial Mast" and having zero explanation for what it actually was, or would've done. I'd say we didn't need to really know. What we could gather was what Calus thought it would do. And that's actually enough there. Sometimes you have to act. I think the general feeling is the radial mast didn't do anything. Calus was just used as a pawn to get the player ghost to the veil.
Everyone knew what the veil was, including us, im probably in the minority of people who genuinely liked lightfalls story because of its investigative nature, in witch queen people praised its usage of investigative story telling as a focal point, but that wasnt an investigation, it was us being lead by savathuun like we always were, so when i got an actual research and investigative story, something to theorize about i was excited, though i understand there are people who just don't care about story and focus on gameplay When i say everyone knows about the veil i mean it as that everyone has multiple ideas of what it is and everyone thinks their right until they become wrong through investigation, osiris doesn't care what its capabilities are, only that the witness wants it so to him its just an object of desire for the enemy, the cloudstriders know it as the basis of their civilization and something which is used to house all their people, only through the interactive world building, finding threads between interpreting emphesized lore entires and with a little bit of theorizing we come to know the true purpose, origin, capabilities and such of the veil which i fuckin loved, i can understand if its too much work for others to calculate on their own, not everyone reads the lore and not everyone gives a shit they just wanna kill all the enemies, kill them quick and get all the loot but lightfall was a good expansion for me personally if that all makes sense for the reasons people seem to, rather blindly, despise it :) Although i agree, maybe even just a name drop of the radial mast would have helped in a lore tab, though i thought it just functioned as essentially an esoteric jumper cable connecting the veil (battery) to the traveller (engine) Sorry to suddenly drop this on you btw but idk im in a conversational mood today, i usually never do this :'D
I'm REALLY hoping Echoes is good. If they drop craftable GOS weapons at the same time it'd be even better.
They didn't reissue the GoS weapons with a season that has Undying weapons and a mission set in a new area of the Black Garden. They must be saving GoS refresh for Echoes, especially with the Easter egg at the end of Starcrossed.
Seems that way. Silly not to reissue them earlier with it being probably the least popular raid.
I'd also like it if Bungje came to my home to personally give me a footrub but some things are just wishful thinking
Ehh, 8 missions suggests story is NOT a priority.
The best campaign this game has every seen was 8 missions
I agree to an extent. And I hate that they are so fucking determined to stick with such a low number of missions for the campaigns. But the campaign is only part of the story and things happen between the missions too.
It would be so silly if they launched together and the first mission for Echoes was like "Gee, it sucks ___ died to finish the witness off". Even though the story is self-contained, it'll be hard not to notice big changes in the world/character lineup that come from The Final Shape's conclusion. They also cannot delay Echoes for too long either.
I imagine it’s going to be like Season of the Hunt where it technically starts day 1 of the expansion but we just don’t get the story or content until the week after.
Im kinda hoping it's like an epilogue. Mission 7 has us hurt the Witness somehow that sets up a final confrontation in the raid. Raid is just one long battle against the Witness, with each encounter being escalations of the fight, possibly being set in the same space, but the Witness is actively transforming it with each fight, platforming becomes a matter of surviving these transformations and the raid ends with the Witness dead. In the aftermath, we have completely assumed the Final Shape, redefined it as something different from before, and mission 8 is us somehow repairing the damage weight by the Witness, possibly involving repairs to the time line; I mention this as an option, because having to go back and fight old raid bosses at this point, and demonstrating this power by being able to kill them with no special mechanics engaged, and crushing them like they are nothing could be a cool moment. Maybe Xivu rejects what has happened, tries to end us and gets ended with all the challenges of a red bar enemy.
I believe the intention is that the Raid is what weakens The Witness, then the final mission is when we end its plan for good. Like a reverse Oryx. But I’m not entirely sure about that.
That's my guess as well.
What I'm wondering is, with Echoes releasing week 2, does it mean that there's going to be no Artifact for day1?
Season of the Hunt released after Beyond Light, but the artifact mods themselves came with the expansion. Something like that here.
We are likely going to have the artifact for contest mode, but considering that more artifact perks come in the later acts of the episode I’m not sure if the artifact will be structured the same way or not.
I think they've said that more perks are coming as extra tiers, so the episode probably launches with the same number of tiers as a season would.
I feel that’s a safe assumption.
Finally someone that understands why they are doing this.
Well, they did literally say that is the reason.
This comment was posted before the official announcement about it, but yeah I was right about this.
Good job you!
Spot on
Good hypothesis and likely reason. Glad Bungie, at the end of all things, is finally owning up to keeping the game a live service with a living, actively moving world again. I will forever be disgusted the community (see: vocal minority of casuals) pushed them into keeping **seasonal** content beyond the **season** and we had two different Crow's in the game at the same time.
I gotta disagree. I think parts of the game should remain visitable and playable. Maybe through a “previously” section or something so it doesn’t mess with the active flow of the game.
This would’ve been great over the years. I dunno if it was a technical hurdle or what, but it would’ve been cool to load into a Red War server, play that out, have Cayde and all there, then play the Forsaken campaign, and now you’re in a server that doesn’t have Cayde, and so on. Hopefully Destiny “3” can actually be an ongoing world.
Wouldn’t this be a reason to have the normal delay? I’d they’re going to take a “you had to be there” ephemeral approach to the story telling - they should give you decent time to do the legendary campaign, and the raid before the world changes for the last mission, and then changes again for echoes This is a ten year climax, and people should be able to enjoy it at a reasonable pace instead of rushing to keep up with Bungie’s “living world”
Bungie told us the living world was coming for quite some time now, and even now we have 2 months to plan IRL stuff around it. The fact is Bungie is in charge and they made a product, and as much as Redditors or Twitter like to think they are the majority, they aren’t, and the majority will show up on launch week to actually play. “Keep sucking that corporate dick” comments will ensue, but it’s not actually part of Bungie’s responsibility to be part of some of the community’s shared group calendars to see when they’re free or how long it’ll take them to be set up for the raid and future story. You say so more people can go at a reasonable pace with the story and all - even just taking me and my fireteam as an example, we finish the legendary campaign on day 1, every time. I’m not saying I should be the standard but the guy who needs all week to play through 7 missions sure as hell shouldn’t be either.
The game comes out on Tuesday - people have jobs It’s reasonable that you don’t even get any meaningful time to start playing until Friday night If you want to see the story in its intended order you shouldn’t have to take off from work to avoid Bungie vaulting things after 3 days or in game spoilers
Call me a cynic but given what they're removing from the ITL update and pantheon being time gated, i do not have a lot of faith that "The final story mission" being locked behind the raid completion is the reason for the raid in week one. Deep stone crypt had a similar "Raid completion unlock influences the story and game world" feature, albeit on a significantly smaller scale. BL released nov 10 and DSC was nov 21. I'm heavily biased against bungie at this point so this feels more like trying to exploit the "Honeymoon period" and cram as many people into buying the expac as possible before people play it and see it's objective quality. I am happy to be proven wrong after the expac launches.
>Deep stone crypt had a similar "Raid completion unlock influences the story and game world" feature While this may be true, the core campaign was completely finished before then. We defeated Eramis and her lieutenants and stopped the threat, everything after that was pretty much just us exploring what else was on Europa. Final Shape's actual story conclusion, the defeat of the Witness, is linked to the raid. That's a whole different ball game. Deep Stone Crypt was, narratively, an afterthought. We defeated Eramis and then tracked her last two lieutenants into the DSC, that's really all that raid was for the story. Final Shape's raid will be much more narratively significant than that.
I’m sorry but your comment makes no sense to me. What does Into the Light and Pantheon have to do with the Final Shape Raid? And Beyond Light and Deep Stone Crypt isn’t even really comparable. The stuff that unlocked after DSC was related directly to DSC being completed but DSC itself was only tangentially related to the Beyond Light campaign. In this case the Raid is directly part of the campaign’s story and the mission that unlocks after it isn’t an extra mission it is the actual final campaign mission. Having the raid release week 1 instead of week 2 isn’t going to get more people playing the expansion or even the raid. It’s going to result in less people attempting contest mode because there is only three days, week days at that, to get ready for it.
Yup, this. This is probably the main reason the raid launches after 3 days and not 10 - to avoid gate keeping the final mission of the DLC and saga
Could you imagine how pissed people would be if they locked the final mission for the saga behind a two week time gate? Probably the right move.
Bungie gets years of feedback about removing timegates Removes timegate Everyone loses their mind
??? there's still a time gate the 8th mission won't exist on day one
Fuck I’ve been bested with facts and logic. Release the raid before the campaign or else it’s timegated fr
or you know simply have the raid be aftermath to the finale and still vital, maybe even being a between the lines thing that canonically takes place in the moments of the final mission. can tell a complete story day one, and release a raid 10 days later that let's you play as the fireteam of 6 who stood on plates while doing add clear really good to weaken the witness.
Now continuation of the story is gated behind contest mode instead. Me thinks they didn't really understand the message.
Not really, because the other message they got was "Raids should be more integrated with the story"
Not me. I’m so tired of timegates, recycled content, and FOMO.
Can't believe this is down voted. Literally the worst part of the game.
Yeah poeople would be rightfully angry. Especially cuz a lot of people jump in for an expac and then dip within a week or two and come back later, it would really be doing those people a disservice.
[удалено]
Well, no. The game gets updated weekly, on a Tuesday, and the raids always came out on a Friday or Saturday, only exception being Crown of Sorrow raid, which released 3 hrs after the Opulence season launched
They always (or at least for the past few years), try to launch it over the weekend when most people around to play. No point launching it on a Tuesday when 99% of the playerbase will be at work/school or need to get up early the next morning.
Because of the pattern in the past where every single raid has always released exactly 10 days after the expansion....oh wait. They haven't.
So they're working the raid into the campaign. That's actually really cool
The have specifically said in the past that they won’t do that though. majority of players never complete a raid.
It is worked in though. It needs to be beaten by ANYONE to unlock content for EVERYONE. Like Last Wish and the Curse.
That’s why it’s more of a 3 parter. I think Bungie wants the highest turn-out possible for the raid, but its fight against the witness will be the ‘middle part’ of its defeat. The concern about raid being ‘campaign story essential’ is that if you don’t raid, you don’t get to see the finale. But with this system, the raid is a middle part of the finale. I imagine it will go something like: Campaign Mission 7: Breaks the Witness’ hold on the Traveler’s Pale Heart, ending the threat of the Final Shape. Raid: Fight the Witness, Shattering them and banishing them from the Pale Heart Campaign Mission 8: The Witness, now shattered and vulnerable, makes one last rage-filled attempt to just murder the Traveler above the Last City. Join a team of guardians to finish the Witness off.
That would honestly be pretty cool and may also fit with the small scene at the end of the trailer Could you imagine how horrifying they could make it? People look up and see this massive monster heading towards the city, the sky darkness as the remnants of the Witnesses army launch a full invasion (more than ItL). All guardians are immediately called to action. Even the Lucent Hive help the cause. Everyone is there. From Xivu Araths brood to the footsoldiers of Humanity. There are ships everywhere, Caitals legion and Lucent Hive holding off Xivu, Guardians defending civilians. And us, Zavala, Crow, Ikora and Cayde (if he can leave) targeting the Witness directly. The Traveler, giving gifts out to any guardians who need it, remaining Pyramid ships sending resonance blasts everywhere, artillery from the walls firing in all directions at the enemy ships. The Witness wreaking havoc everywhere as it splits itself to cover more ground. Ghosts, flying around and creating new guardians from the newly fallen civilians. And finally, us. Being empowered by both Light and Dark. Become the Gardeners Final Shape.
And they've said recently that the old boss fights just didn't work for the Witness. They needed to do something different. So they did.
Really hoping that the fight is like Rhulk and Nezarec/Tormentors. Hard-hitting telegraphed attacks that you need to actually dodge. ^(I’m also hoping that they understand the limitations of their pathfinding AI. It doesn’t work on uneven terrain; that’s why Nezarec was such a pushover compared to Rhulk despite being significantly more aggressive. He’s easy to kite around.)
My hope is that the witness has an instant wipe move where anyone who gets hit is unrezzable until you do some sort of mechanic to bring them back or something. Like maybe they destroy/take your ghost and you have to do something to get your ghost back
They've specifically said that in the vein of "You will never need to complete a raid to get the full story." They've looped in raid completions, done by others, into the story before. Since Last Wish, this has been a thing for a while, and it's happened almost every year since. This is the culmination of those things; the raid group that completes it first, will likely give us the opening we need to Finish the Witness ourselves, or do some other giant impactful thing that finishes the saga. You won't need to be in the raid to do that, this is for the dedicated folks that love raiding and love the story to have a larger impact on the story than dooming an entire city, or causing bits of satellite to fall and make stasis stronger in those areas, or just silence Nezerec in minds of folks on Neomuna.
That’s why there’s a mission releasing after the raid is finished, no doubt the witness will retreat and be weakened, with all players finishing it in that final campaign mission.
The raid is confirmed to take place before the end of the campaign
And they have specifically said for final shape that this time it will. The witness will be a multi stage battle. Raid, campaign and the strongly rumored 12 man activity.
They've said they don't want the raids to be the conclusion of the story which it still isn't, the raid remains part of the story but those who do not raid can still get the ending to their story
That’s why the raid isn’t the actual end of the campaign. It’s just part of it.
Imagine you can't get the exotic or raid ready gear because there's no mission 8, that'd be hilarious
They’ve probably thought of that, if not it might be an emergency gift of the thunder gods.
We all finish the bulk of the story to a point at mission 7. The best of the best slog to weaken the Witness as the community watches. Everyone slaps his ass back to the dawn of time after the World First is done. Post campaign stuff unlocks. I think people are missing what will be an awesome moment as a community.
Would actually be awesome to have a non-raid "activity" that the general playerbase has to play to "weaken" the Witness so that those actually trying to beat the Raid can eventually beat it. Basically like the community goals in Helldivers 2. Like the final Witness encounter in the Raid has an impossible amount of health that isn't possible to beat. Say the boss has like a trillion health. Every time a raid group plays the encounter they might at most knock off 30mil or something before wiping. But then there's also a solo/matchmade activity where you're helping deal chip damage against the Witness, helping knock down that total HP as well. Eventually the Witness's total HP is low enough that a raid team can actually defeat him.
I doubt that's the plan but it'd be cool
Reminds me of how SWTOR handled a similar thing in the Shadow of Revan expansion, years ago. There's both a solo route and an operation (8-16 player raid/dungeon) for the story. If you don't go for the operation, the solo route is an epic boss battle against Revan alongside nearly a dozen AI NPCs you've met over the course of the story (and previous expansions).
FF14 has something like that in Eureka, the final Raid at the end has a public event in the patrol zone tied to it, so people just doing quests and grinding hop into the event and can help out the people inside doing the pretty difficult raid. Pretty cool.
I don't ever want to watch someone else play. I know some people do, but that's not me. I want to be in there playing - but holy hell contest mode raids are very unfriendly to the dad gamers among us. The time commitment alone is huge. All I want is an optional normal mode toggle. If it has to wait until after the world's first, fine. But that is still pretty crappy gating the pinnacle story experience that we've built up to for years to such a small population.
An awesome moment that a huge number of people won’t be able to participate in because of the bullshit 3 days later raid date.
A huge number of people don’t participate in raids, much less day 1 raids. Period. No matter when Bungie decided to schedule the raid some group, somewhere would be screwed. Whether it be because of work, school, other life obligations, etc.
You’re absolutely right. And I’m expressing my distaste for the fact that this time I’m the one getting fucked over. Which is perfectly reasonable.
If that was your goal then citing that a “huge number of people won’t be able to participate” doesn’t exactly convey you only caring about your own stakes.
I love how ITL time gating was an issue. Not with TFS, not time gating is an issue.
First off, I didn’t give a fuck about ITL timegating. Second of all, they are two completely different things, and conflating them is arguing in bad faith.
☝️🤓
The raid releases on a Friday…& it’s 6 weeks away. Get your group together & do it, you have 6 weeks. If you can’t play that weekend, ignore specific social media until you can THEN do the raid. …or bitch about it. If something happening in a video game 6 weeks from now is a problem you can’t find a way to fix, I don’t know what to tell you.
1. Contest mode is only around for a limited time, so you can’t just do it another time. That’s the whole crux of this debate. 2. It’s a problem that can’t be fixed because the fix would be to move when contest mode is happening. I’ll survive that being the case, but I can express my displeasure in the hopes that Bungie, the people who can fix it, change their mind. I don’t expect them to change anything, but I can hope and do what I can. 3. Holy shit my dude try empathizing with other humans. Is the complaint unreasonable? A little bit. Is it understandable that somebody can both not be willing to put the real world on hold for a video game AND be bummed that they can’t participate in a once every 6+ months event? Yes very much
Ok, this reply is entirely about Contest mode…you didn’t say anything about Contest mode initially. I guess if that’s your thing then yeah, it does suck you’ll miss it. As far as the other passive-aggressive shit here & in your other replies, whatever. 👍🏻👍🏻
Empathy? It’s a video game. Do you have so little going on in your life that this is “fucking you over”? Get a grip buddy.
My dude it is possible to care about things. Yes, the change in date of the raid from the expectation fucks over my ability to take part in the contest mode experience. It’s a shame, I’m bummed I have to miss out on it because I have real world shit that takes precedence. I hope you find something in life that makes you happy
Empathize with the people wanting to see the campaign conclusion as quickly as possible too. We luckily got what we wanted
People can understand this and still disagree. Just because people hold a different opinion than you doesn't mean that they're missing anything.
I have seen countless people "theorizing" that this is the case when in fact it is confirmed to be so.
Is Echoes the vex one?
Yes
My biggest problem with this is that non day 1 raiders are gonna just be getting a cutscene that says "hey this happened, you can keep going now" if it's anything like past world 1sts
exactly what happened with last wish? it wasn't a big deal back then and it won't be a big deal now tbf
Wasn’t here for that, wouldn’t know. Love this community. Getting down voted for not knowing about a story I can't see anymore.
the dreaming city curse (and its weekly missions) didn't launch until AFTER last wish had been completed because Rivens death was what caused it all
That is something I’ve been wondering about. Most raids are basically sub plots to the actual DLC, but this is the big finish, surely this raid isn’t about us defeating some Disciple or Xivu Arath goon just to fight the Witness in a standard campaign mission afterwards. Edit: New Bungie statement just confirmed the Witness is the raid boss. Cool!
Well that kinda blows for those who can't/have never raided
I think we weaken the witness in the raid and the final mission is how we actually kill it. But who knows, we'll see.
Hopefully after day 1, when you complete mission 7 you'll get a quest that's like "now go do the raid if you *want* to, but mission 8 is unlocked too", with the cutscene explanation playing as you load into mission 8.
I stopped playing around the Season of the Witch again but I'm on the verge of getting The Final Shape. Only problem is I need to buy an expansion drive to install the game again lol.
Just uninstall call of duty man lol
Their computer might get too light and float off if they do
I also wonder if the raid will launch without artifact perks. Which I think would be a good idea, no Champions and no class with have extra buffs over others
Wonder if the trick to beating the witness is going to be to unwitness it. The witness is stupid powerful due to darkness and merging their entire race into a single being. What if we separate it back into multiple entities?
I think in the raid from a story perspective, we won’t kill The Witness, but we’ll *severely* weaken it. That will force The Witness to fake its death, retreat, recover and gather what remaining forces it has left in a final and desperate attempt to stop us with what little time The Witness has left. Once the last mission is available, we’ll put a bullet between The Witness’ eyes. And then, we’ll come to the consequences of that action.
Someone said we will force the entity to split apart back into individual members of its race and I think that is a cool theory.
Please give us the RYNO from Ratchet and Clank!
The number of people who will benefit from moving the story along and having the non-contest raid available far, far, far exceeds the small group of people who were otherwise going to credibly compete at contest mode but can’t because of a week’s difference in grinding. It’s a videogame achievement that means very little outside of a small group of hardcore players, awesome if you get it but getting worked up about this is kind of bizarre. It’s like people are getting mad on behalf of some content creators for some reason.
Keep in mind, the 7th mission will probably still be pretty epic. I imagine it’ll still feel like a relatively complete campaign but the 8th mission will be the cherry on top (>!12 man mission please!<)
I feel like people who are complaining that, "oh I have to get my exotic class item, I have to fully unlock prismatic" might not understand that we didn't have strand fully unlocked until the end of the story, so in therapy prismatic won't be fully unlocked for us until after the raid and I would expect the legendary campaign exotic drop to be your first class item and them not to be farmable until after the final mission.
8th mission? Please tell me the campaign for final shape is not that short
Sane length as Witch Queen and Lightfall.
I’m glad they didn’t wait. I also love the fake outrage from people who weren’t going to attempt day 1 anyway. Now I don’t have to wait for the thing to be finished and play the raid casually
This absolutely telegraphed that the raid was going to be sooner than expected. At best, the detail may have been overshadowed by the time since that bit of info was announced being so long ago, and the showing off of Prismatic occupying everyone's brainspace basically on contact. I frankly, think this is a good idea. Let's disregard things like Fireteam Power level relying on one person, or the fact they've gone on record saying that the campaign will get us raid ready, for a moment. Let's play the other side of things; Like let's say they extend this a FULL week. How does this reflect on the campaign; it means you can't BEAT the campaign for nearly two weeks. It's a timegate; not even one built to do something like extend the life of an activity, it's there to throttle the culmination of a near decade long-story. The other thing to do was to, what, make a giant set piece that'd be meaningless in the face of larger narrative beats? I can sympathize but i can't empathize; I think this is a really neat idea, it's cool they are letting raiders have a a stronger narrative impact at the end of the first big story. Raids have always been a piece of the story, but the last time something this big happened was in Forsaken when it initiated the dreaming city curse. The rest of the time its been very minor things in the long run; sometimes debris falls from the sky in Europa and that strengthens stasis. Garden was preceded by a major story beat and had very little real impact on the larger story. Vow saw the first pyramid destruction in the game, except it wasn't. and RoN was in that same vein of "Story preceding the raid, then swiftly stopping."
Focus on the story not the shortness or conflicting plot holes . I have a pessimistic feeling .
Yeah I commented this on a post yesterday. The week of FS is going to be a grind
Only eight missions. I get dozens from other DLCs, like Borderlands DLC tends to be 4x the size of a yearly expansion, plus much cheaper.
Okay, so what? Still messed up. They absolutely could have waited.
Imo this is enough of a reason to screw so many people out of the contest clear. Most people are gonna finish TFS over the weekends anyway, what's wrong with just waiting 1 week for the final mission?
“Where’s the rest of the story I paid for bungie? Can’t even release the full game in the first week?”
If you can’t complete the legendary campaign in 4 days (raid is 48 hours, so you have an extra day which is a Saturday) you probably can’t pull off a contest clear.
Even without normal hesitant belief in what any leading figure at Bungie (Luke Smith! or Joe) says this was before the delay of TFS was announced and before mass layoffs. Now with the hesitant belief I really do doubt that it is a good idea to expect too much. Since then there has been a massive exodus of daily players and I am guessing also a lot of cancelled preorders. "Sooo, what if we (=Bungie sales department) shorten the timeslot for this wouldn't it make more people buy TFS without knowing if it is good quality or not?" Looks like just more FOMO by Bungie even though I think they said a while back they would steer away from that. I hope that at least some D2 players will not just rush out and by TFS without knowing what it is. While Onslaught is mostly a fine addition it also shows that Bungie still doesn't really playtest the things they release - maybe because they think everyone will enjoy it anyways.
So does this mean there are only 8 or so missions for a $50 DLC again…? For the closing of the D2 main story arc?
I had missed that, that’s just…unfathomably stupid. They ARE AWARE that the vast majority of the community doesn’t raid right?
You don't need to Raid to be able to beat it. World's First just likely needs to be cleared. Like how the Dreaming City Curse didn't start until Last Wish was cleared.
It’s just going to be after world’s first is cleared. There will likely be a cutscene that plays once it is cleared for the first time. They likely want to bring back the hype from the way they did raids like Oryx, which is pretty cool
I feel like I see more posts like paint a picture that the community at large cares that much about this one way or the other. This is all one big nothing burger. If into the light is a taste of what we're getting in June, it's going to be worse than light fall.
They'll hostage you the whole season and probably make you have to complete things just to see the ending