When does The Final Shape raid release in Destiny 2?

The Final Shape raid is coming to Destiny 2, and it’ll pit you against The Witness as a capstone to what Bungie calls the Light and Darkness saga. But why is the raid releasing two weeks earlier than normal in The Final Shape?

In this Destiny 2 guide, we’ll tell you when you can play The Final Shape raid and explain why Bungie is breaking convention with its release date.

When does The Final Shape raid release in Destiny 2?

In one of the studio’s weekly Destiny blog posts, Bungie announced that The Final Shape raid will launch on Friday, June 7, at 1 a.m. ET, just three days after the expansion’s June 4 release date.

Here’s when the raid launches in your time zone:

• 10 a.m. PDT for the west coast of North America
• 1 a.m. EDT for the east coast of North America
• 6 p.m. BST for the U.K.
• 7 p.m. CEST for western Europe/Paris
• 2 a.m. on Saturday, June 8, for Tokyo

Bungie has yet to reveal the name of The Final Shape raid, and likely won’t until the day before its release, June 6. It’ll be available for all players who own The Final Shape expansion and have beaten the first seven missions of the expansion’s campaign, as well as the “Wild Card” mission.

Why is the Final Shape raid launching early?

If you’re a Destiny 2 veteran, you may be a little confused by the timeline here. Typically, Bungie gives players a little less than two weeks — 10 days or so — to finish a the campaign of a new expansion and prepare for the raid. However, most raids involve an end boss that is only tangentially related to the main boss of the expansion, rather than the primary antagonist themselves.

Since Bungie announced The Final Shape, the studio has made it clear that The Witness will be the raid’s final boss. This is a huge step for Bungie, and something its developers have wanted to do for a long time. In a Polygon interview for Destiny 2’s 2022 Witch Queen expansion, I spoke to Joe Blackburn, now-former Destiny 2 game director, about if we’d ever see an expansion’s big bad in the raid again. Blackburn expressed a desire to do that eventually, but said the studio first needed to bring more players into raids. Two and a half years later, it seems Bungie is now confident enough to make that move — likely because of the new in-game Fireteam Finder the studio recently added to the game.

With the raid being such a big cog in The Final Shape’s story, Bungie has clarified that it didn’t want players to have to wait nearly two weeks to finish the story and play the campaign’s eighth mission, which only becomes available once players (presumably) defeat The Witness in the raid. The completion of the raid will also lead to the release of Destiny 2’s first episode — Bungie’s replacement for seasons — which will hit the game on Tuesday, June 11.