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fate 2Raids have always been the best thing about the game. Unfortunately, only a minority of Guardians ever attempt them. The developers at Bungie have tried a number of different tactics over the years to fix this, most notably trying to inject some difficulty into campaigns to reduce the difficulty gap between raids and the rest of the game. But the studio never got the balance right there, even in some of its best campaigns, such as The witch queen.

Fortunately, as a long-time Destiny raider myself, I finally feel like Bungie is delivering on that “raid-lite” promise with The final form. I visited Bungie HQ to check out a few missions from the upcoming expansion and was pleased with the Raid-Lite mechanics I saw.

In 2022, I spoke with former game director Joe Blackburn about whether we’ll ever see the raid expansion’s big flaw again. Although you could argue that Riven (the final boss of the Last Wish raid) was the real mastermind in Abandonedraiders haven’t fought the bad guy in the box since we took down Oryx in 2015’s King’s Fall. Take a king extension. This was a little disappointing for my Fireteam, as it makes the epic conclusion of the expansion feel more like a side quest. Blackburn told me that putting a boss of Savathun’s caliber in the raid is something the studio wants to do again, but first it needs to get more players in the attack—otherwise much of the community would not have received a satisfactory conclusion to the story.

Blackburn hinted that we’ll see more puzzles and mechanics in the campaign for The witch queen. And while there are certainly some objectives that are a bit more complicated than “kill every enemy in this room; Okay, now do it again,” never got me in the mood to attack. It felt like an excellent Destiny campaign.

A little over two years later, I found myself in Bungie’s test lab in Bellevue, Washington, unable to execute and identify the mission mechanics in my preview of The final form campaign. And I was excited about it.

After playing a few Final form missions, I sat down with Catarina Macedo, Project Manager for All fate 2extensions of and Ben Womack, fate 2of combat zone leadership to talk about this shift in philosophy when it comes to making the campaign feel like “baby’s first assault.”

“One of the things that we knew The Witness as a villain was going to be worthy of was like, ‘Yeah, that’s going to have to be our raid boss. It just is. It guarantees that challenge to the players,” Macedo said. “With the campaign, because we knew The Witness was going to be the raid boss, we were like, ‘Hey, it would be really cool to introduce all these different mission mechanics that [make it] I feel like there’s a bit of a learning curve.”

Image: Bungie

The first mission in the campaign starts out pretty simple mechanically, as it’s mostly there to introduce the new Prismatic ability set and the special enemies you can only defeat while using it. Unfortunately, this is also the only mission I’m allowed to talk about in real detail. But I can at least say that the later missions I played had me doing much more interesting mechanics than I’m used to finding in fate 2 campaign.

Without going into details or the mechanics themselves, I found that each mission built on itself – much like the raids. The first arena can teach one mechanic, while the second arena teaches another. And on the third, the game asks you to do both at once. This is how Bungie has structured raids for years, where the mechanics are building blocks that start small before becoming very complex.

That being said, it’s not like seasoned Destiny raiders are showing off their Microsoft Paint skills for the campaign. Instead, the experience simply emulates a raid, giving you a different objective than “kill” during combat. And if you fail a certain mechanic, in-game notifications will help guide you to the solution – something raids usually don’t do.

Macedo told me that the developers want players to feel comfortable living in this raid-light space. It’s the Destiny team that gets players into the habit of fighting and solving at the same time, so when the new raid comes out and The Witness needs its win, it won’t just be players like me diving in to do it .

Image: Bungie

One unfortunate side effect of this shift to deeper mechanics, however, is that the actual combat challenge of the legendary campaign has diminished quite significantly since the last two editions – at least in the version of the game I reviewed. I was able to solo the missions I played on max difficulty without any real struggle, despite playing with a different mouse sensitivity than I’ve aimed for in years. I’ve played solo in the other legendary campaigns as well, but there are some peaks in some of these missions that made me sweat, even in the comfort of my own home. It feels like Bungie has taken some of that combat difficulty and injected it into the puzzles instead — which is great for non-raiders, but may frustrate some players in the end game.

Overall I was very impressed with The final form missions i played. In fact, as I write this, I find myself eager to both replay what I’ve already seen and delve into new areas of The Pale Heart on launch day with my friends. But more important than a single Guardian’s experience is the fact that Destiny’s developers have finally found a way to bring the game’s most interesting and well-designed activities to the masses by injecting just a little bit of that special raiding sauce into the campaign.

Disclosure: This article is based on a Destiny 2: The Final Shape preview event held at Bungie headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, May 14-17. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.