The Final Shape, the highly anticipated Destiny 2 expansion that’s set to end the game’s main plot and start a new era for the franchise, has been delayed. This announcement comes weeks after layoffs at Bungie and a Bloomberg report about an impending delay.
Bungie announced the delay on Monday, just ahead of the release of the game’s next season — Season of the Wish. The Final Shape was originally slated for a Feb. 27, 2024 release date, and will now launch on June 4, 2024.
The studio published a small blog announcing the delay, which also spoke to a few new content items coming to the game between now and The Final Shape. Destiny 2’s game director, Joe Blackburn, also posted a video discussing the next seven months of the game’s life.
First, Blackburn revealed the title for the upcoming dungeon, Warlord’s Ruin, which launches on Friday, Dec. 1. There was also a brief Crucible update, where Blackburn revealed that the paired down Checkmate mode is going to influence the game’s core PvP identity, creating a more strategic Crucible environment in the future.
As for new content, once the Season of the Wish story content runs out in February, Bungie will launch a new weekly story event (with some rewards) called Wishes. The studio is also revitalizing the Guardian Games holiday event and moving it to March.
In April, Bungie will re-emerge with some Final Shape updates, showing off some details they’ve been keeping secret from players since the expansion’s announcement earlier this year. That announcement teased some new enemies, three new Supers (one for each class) and a destination set inside The Traveler that’s unlike anything Guardians have ever seen before.
April will also see a new update called Destiny 2: Into the Light, which is a two-month content drop that will include some unique rewards for both the lapsed and hardcore Destiny fans.
Finally, Bungie will drop its first Destiny 2 map pack in May, just before The Final Shape’s new release date. The pack will include three maps, set on Europa, Neomuna, and the Terraformed Pyramid.
While Bungie’s developers are clearly making an effort to close up the content gap as much as possible, this is still a huge shift for the Destiny 2 community. D2 players have grown accustomed to getting new content every three months or so since 2019, when the seasonal model launched alongside the Shadowkeep expansion.
A content gap that spans over six months is a hard pill to swallow for any Guardian, and it will be interesting to see if Wishes and Into the Light are able to keep players excited for The Final Shape during Destiny 2’s long winter.
