Destiny 2 - The Final Shape Showcase Reveal! My thoughts on the Story reveals & Lore! Is it good?

Biggup for the devs recognizing and acknowledging your hard work

Honestly, Hive Witch Eris terrifies me. She is almost exactly the person she became in The Dark Timeline but, instead of allying with Xivu Arath, she's fighting against her.

Another interesting point to go with your note on the word choice of Cayde as our “Virgil”, and your question of whether we’d be seeing Heaven or Hell. If I’m not mistaken, they actually compared the starting point of the Tower as Heaven-like, and the ending point of the Monolith as a sort of Hell. So it does seem the Dante references are quite intentional.

I feel the campaign is gonna be a storm the tower where every little area reveals details about the destination we are in. Like the 14th wish in the dreaming city for example

I'm guessing that the Witness is going to work similarly to how Oryx worked in the Taken King expansion. The end of the campaign will feature a boss fight against the Witness where we defeat him temporarily and stop him from enacting the Final Shape, but the Raid is where we fight him at full power to kill him for good.

My guess about the "Virgil" thing, is that because The Pale Heart is "Linear", like a typical story, such as the Divine Comedy. I think it'll be the reverse order of the Divine Comedy, where in it it goes Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso, rather it'll go Paradiso-Purgatorio-Inferno since the destination becomes more dangerous (hellish) as we progress. Which reminds me of the Heaven/Hell location in Prophecy, which the order of the words being Heaven then Hell feels deliberate, as well as the boss room resembling the Traveler with the Triangle Portal on it.

now i can kinda see how Eris managed to become the big bad boss even above Savathun in one of Elsie's timeline loop jumps. i would love to see her appearance grow more and more with time in future seasons to show how much she has been being fed with fury by guardians.

I think my absolute favorite part of this reveal is how brilliant the premise of S22's story is. We've been tithing to xivu for years now, simply by fighting her hive. How do you fight a god who becomes stronger every time you clash with her? I thought it would be by wholeheartedly embracing the gentle city ringed in spears ideology, staying ever on thr defense and never directly fighting her to starve her of tribute. But no. No no no. We're making our OWN hive war god to tithe to. Actually brilliant

I feel like at the end of the campaign we might destroy the Witness's physical form and then in the raid they will have become a being of pure darkness. Sort of what Ghaul became at the end of the red war.

I really hope the Io section in the inside of the Traveler is a desert environment. It would be such a cool easter egg. For those who don’t know, the Pyramidion on Io was originally planned to be a location on Mars for a cut Destiny 1 expansion. You can see it in the background of the crucible map Crossroads.

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"... not literally... no one claimed the taken king" It would be cool if this set it up for Eris to become the taken king and not only bring the hive in as an ally, but the taken as well.

If we beat the witness they better be ridiculously creative because I don’t see us beating the witness without breaking all logic. Against Crota we had to shattered his way into the physical world while he was making the transfer, leaving him super weak and incomplete. Still eris needed to fully guide us and we needed the sword and 5 other guardians to even have a chance. Against Oryx we broke his tithing system and his worm consumed him. We killed Crota which starved him of tribute and then we kept killing the rest of his Court. By the time we fought him in the raid, he was on his deathbed. Even then we did very little direct damage to Oryx. We killed him by setting off massive explosions of corrupted Light. So we technically drew upon a much greater resivoir of power when we fought him, much greater than our own. Even after that we needed a whole raid, guardians getting us on the dreadnaught and a lot of lucky to pull it off. Xol let us kill him and we needed the power of Rasputin. Rhulk didn’t take us serieus at all and could have wiped us a million time until we used the upended as our own power was worthless against him. Nezarec only held a fraction of the power he used to hold before his death and he was just testing his new powers like a curious scientist rather than focus on fighting us. The witness thought of all of them as fodder, and that fodder at the peak of their powers thought of us as fodder. the amount of tiers we are below the witness by lore is like not countable on 2 hands.

The whole time I was watching the live stream I thought “I can’t wait to have byf explain all this to me”

I think the most interesting part about Eris is her apparent title. She has taken the mantle of being the Hive God of Revenge. This would put Xivu into a situation similar to the one we are currently in given her whole conquest is motivated by a very strong lust for revenge for both Oryx, and Savathun.

I really loved how well recognized you are within this community

Honestly, the relationship I wanna hear most about is us and our ghost. I love hearing him talk about his experiences and why he rezzed us.

At first I was a bit underwhelmed, but the more I watched and reflected on it, the more hype I got! Can't wait for Final Shape!

the time line missions are a really cool concept and i like the way they delivered the prison break mission, but there needs to be more of them not just one mission. i want to be able to fully experience all of the missions in each expansion

The most encouraging thing I heard from the showcase was "Linier Campaign". That means they can focus the narrative experience down to the simplest, and hopefully strongest, form. We'll have to see about what they do with the story within that narrative structure, but I feel like if you're telling an important story you need that kind of structure. Also, something I noticed during the pre-show cut scene countdown was the value of a "set the table" scene (I'm calling it that because in Destiny those scenes mostly take place around or near a table). It's a scene where the stakes are clearly laid out. Here's what's happened, here's what we have to do, here's what happens if we fail. My favorite expansions have them, the not so great ones, don't.