With The Final Shape looming on the horizon of Destiny 2, Bungie has released a new story trailer setting the stakes for the final chapter in the story the developer began with the original release of Destiny in 2014. It also suggests new twists in the story of the expansion: the temptation of one of Destiny’s most notable characters, Commander Zavala.
Destiny 2 players have known that the Witness, the antagonist operating from the shadows for the last 10 years of the Destiny Light and Darkness Saga, has designs to end the world, but the story trailer finally shows us what that might look like. The “Final Shape” the Witness wants to bring about is a reshaping of reality that locks the universe into a perfect stillness, which the Witness believes will bring an end to all suffering. In practice, that means turning everyone and everything into taxidermy-like statues, and when the trailer shows that applied to the people of Earth, it hits pretty hard.
You can check out the trailer yourself below. It includes the reunion of Cayde-6, who was killed in the Forsaken expansion but has returned in The Final Shape for reasons even he doesn’t understand, with his buds Zavala and Ikora. It seems like Destiny 2’s major characters will see a fair amount of action in The Final Shape, too; the trailer suggests a similar number of story cutscenes to what Bungie put in Destiny 2’s vanilla campaign.
Most notable, though, is where the story seems to be headed, with the trailer teasing that Commander Zavala might be tempted by the Darkness. If you’ve been following the story for the last few years, that makes a lot of sense. Zavala has been struggling with a crisis of faith for a while now, especially after the events of The Witch Queen expansion when the Hive, a group of genocidal aliens and basically humanity’s greatest enemies, were gifted with the same physics-breaking superpowers, the Light, as Zavala and the rest of us Guardians.
Zavala has seemed like he’s been having a hard time for the last few years, and after the Lightfall campaign, one of his close friends and lieutenants, Amanda Holliday, was killed. That loss hit him very hard, and you can see early in the trailer that Zavala is wearing Amanda’s scarf tied around his arm. So when the Witness suggests that maybe Zavala might get everything he wants if he helps enact the Final Shape, there are some good reasons why Zavala might consider the offer.
It’s worth noting that the trailer is among the first times we’re hearing actor Keith David in the role of Zavala, who he plays throughout The Final Shape. David is taking over the role from Lance Reddick, who’d played Zavala since 2014 and was a regular Destiny 2 player himself, died in 2023.
The Final Shape launches on June 4, so we’ll have to wait until then to see how things shake out. In the meantime, check out our previews of The Final Shape, including a look at the new destination, the Pale Heart of the Traveler, and the expansions story campaign, and its new Prismatic subclass.
