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When I first saw the debut trailer for Prismatic — the new, “advanced” subclass is coming fate 2 in The final form — I told my friends, “This is the most significant change they’ve ever announced for Destiny.” And after visiting Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington to take in the expansion earlier, I’m convinced I was right.

“Putting in Prismatic is likely to change Destiny on a fundamental level,” Ben Womack, fate 2the war zone leader told me at our on-site interview. “But that’s the intention of putting that kind of feature into the game.”

If you’re not familiar, Prismatic doesn’t add any new abilities to the game like the Stasis or Strand Darkness subclasses that Guardians got in previous years (although each class gets a new Super and Aspect in The final form, which is a spin-off from Prismatic). Instead, the idea is that Guardians can combine elements together from all of their subclasses to create far more complex and powerful constructs than ever before.

For example, if I currently want to use Thundercrash Super on my Titan, I need to be in my Arc subclass because Thundercrash is an Arc ability. Prismatic removes these limitations – mostly – so when The final form launches, I can use Thundercrash for boss damage while also running around with a Strand Shackle grenade and a void-throwing shield.

Then there’s Transcendence, which is a new Super-like ability that you can charge by dealing Light and Darkness damage in equal measure. Damage with light-based weapons or abilities fills the light bar, while the opposite fills the darkness bar. When you fill both bars, you can “Transcend,” which recharges all of your ability energy, temporarily increases your weapon’s damage and defense, and gives you a Transcendence-exclusive grenade.

It’s all very fascinating, but as Womack said, that’s the point.

“I think this is really us giving a big love letter to the masters of the masters of the game,” Womack said. “We’ll give you a lot to think about. And we want you to think about it because we think about it.

Catarina Macedo, Expansion Project Manager fate 2, went on to say that Prismatic works from two angles: rewarding players who already have a lot of knowledge about the games — the “master build masters” Womack mentioned — and encouraging players who have very little build experience. to join in the fun. Prismatic gives you so many more options than you’ve ever had in Destiny that it’s almost impossible to look at Prismatic’s customization screen and not think, Ok, how do I get these things to work together?

I’ve collected quite a few builds in my decade with Destiny, but during my preview I repeatedly found myself jumping into my menu and making slight changes to my Prismatic setup. Finding a way to consistently charge my Transcendence meter felt like a real dance and made me think about how well my loadout combined with the class setup. I had gotten a sweet Stasis and Strand Titan build that allowed me to freeze and suspend everything, but without any Light abilities, it was really hard for me to trigger the Light Side of my Transcendence buff bar.

Image: Bungie

To fix it, I started changing my weapons and replaced Strand melee with Arc. Now, kills with my primary and heavy weapons added to my light, while most of my abilities gave me dark energy. Every time I tried a new build I had to go through this iteration process. And each time the game rewarded me for it, as if every piece of the puzzle I managed to fit made me that much stronger. I wasn’t just crafting so I could take down a big raid boss or a tough Grandmaster Nightfall, I was doing it because it was fun.

As fun as it was, I left Bungie HQ with a few concerns about Prismatic.

First, I felt so powerful using Prismatic that I couldn’t help but wonder how Bungie even planned to challenge me again. The legendary campaign missions I played felt much easier than Svetlinka and The witch queen after figuring out how to maximize my newfound powers. But Bungie has already promised that the new Final form raid will be one of the hardest in the franchise, and after last summer’s extremely difficult Crota’s End replay, I’m willing to give Bungie the benefit of the doubt here.

My more serious concern was what abilities and aspects the developers decided to include with Prismatic, as you can currently only pair certain abilities from each item together.

The team at Bungie decided to use some of the least popular aspects of each class when making Prismatic. This meant I only had access to aspects I didn’t use very often. On the one hand, this was quite exciting as it helped the whole package feel fresh. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but wonder what builds I could do if Bungie loosened the restrictions even further.

Image: Bungie

What if I could pair the Solar Titan’s Sol Invictus Sunspots aspect with the Void Titan’s Controlled Demolition aspect so I could spread explosive, healing fire puddles around the entire arena? It would certainly be even stronger and more difficult to balance than the Prismatic I played during my preview – which is probably why both of these aspects aren’t available for Prismatic. But the new subclass is so much fun that it’s a bit of a bummer that I can’t just play whatever weird Titan fever dream my brain comes up with.

This may sound like whining because you can only eat cake or ice cream — and it kind of is — but that’s OK with the people I’ve talked to at Bungie.

“We have a lot of future plans that we hope to, you know, change and react to depending on how players respond to Prismatic on the first day, the first weekend, the raid competition, the first week,” Womack said. He told me that the developers want and expect players to think about how the non-prismatic aspects would affect their prismatic build. But the hope is that those same players will also be asking questions like, “Well, how is Bungie going to balance this?”

There are a few ways to look at Wommack’s statement there, but it’s clear to me that Prismatic is an experiment like Stasis was for the subclass 3.0 system in 2020. Before The final formlaunch, this experiment is already the most interesting thing to come to Destiny in years. But what will this experiment look like in a few months or even next year? This is the question that all Destiny fans really need to ask themselves once The final form arrives June 4th.

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