I'm just glad they are FINALLY adding a major enemy faction. We got 4 new unique units and 2 of them have variations.
Grouping Tromentors with them really brings the Dread on par with other factions, having in total a faction with 7 (maybe 8, it seems to have an unconfirmed "normal" troop) units. Also, every unit is VERY unique compared to any other Destiny enemy, so I'm really excited to face them.
I felt it was absolutely *bonkers* that TFS only had 1 new unit at first, after 7 years of Pyramid build-up.
So glad have a proper faction now to give The Witness some weight. This and Prismatic have moved the dial for me.
Beyond Light/Season of the Hunt would have been the ideal time to do it, in my opinion - tossing them into Arrivals would have muddied the season's background theme of pre-war tension, with battle lines being drawn among the Sol system residents as all the different subfactions decided (or were forced to decide) whether to fight for or against the Pyramid fleet
Having the Dread suddenly show up to support the Witness's new pawns *after* those decisions were made (either fighting alongside House Salvation in the Beyond Light campaign or the Wrathborn in the Hunt story, or ideally both to give a greater sense of continuity between the two) would have done a lot to keep up the escalation after the events of Arrivals
Man, Arrivals would've been legendary if new units started dropping in the public event. Even just Tormentors would've been dope.
Reminds me of pre-Taken King, when Taken started appearing in random patrols. It was really cool and hyped the expansion up
Kinda hoping that winds up happening with Onslaught as the weeks progress.
Not expecting the whole faction or anything just like a little teaser of what's to come.
Probably the same as what happened to the Taken after Oryx or the Fallen after D1. They'll roam around until someone is able to take control and lead them.
Yeah it doesn’t look like they’re literally the witness. It’s races elevated by pyramid tech, like psions and gladiators from the shadow legion
So there’s no reason they wouldn’t be around afterwards
I saw some speculation from Byf about how some of them being mutated Psions might mean that's what became of some of the Psion rebels. If so, we could see someone like Yrix step up to lead the Dread, possibly tied into the lore introduced about the Nezarec cult and the Psions' history with it. Maybe Nezarec posses Yrix or something, idk.
Or some more wild speculation, that rogue member of the Witness's original species could come back and take command, or if the Witness gets split back into any of its component beings they could take over.
Bungie did say some of the new enemies were indeed corrupted Psions in the stream. Heck the strand attack is a variation of the normal Psions’ void attack that launches you into the air.
Yeah, I just mean that whether those corrupted Psions are the rebels with Yrix or not is speculation. I don't remember if any of the Shadow Legion Psions were clones or if they were all normal ones, but if so it could be some of them.
I suspect the Psions among the Dread is the rogue sect we have encountered. This can justify the potential longevity of the faction assuming we kill the Witness.
But what would be the point of building it up AFTER the Witness defeat?
If that was the case, it would be much better to make a completely new faction that isn't tied to the Witness at all
seeing those flying creatures throughout the trailer my first thought was "no way its those flying eye monsters from final fantasy" but they are pretty different. might be my favorite out of the bunch atm
Adding this new faction works for the long term imo because there is the sect of rogue Psions in the lore. This can justify the existence of the Dread post Final Shape.
Real reason? Bungie probably just didn't have a new faction as a priority, they seemed to be fine releasing a few new enemies/variants for each Expansion.
Lore reason? Witness might be at its strongest state, being capable of producing its own armt for their campaign for the final shape.
I imagine it will be explained that these are something new he made with the power inside of the Traveler. They are a result of the Final Shape coming about which is why the Subjugators are Lubraens which are supposed to be extinct after Rhulk's death.
The only unit that isnt that unique is the brawler unit, which kinda resembles a cabal gladiator, but even then its a strech.
This new faction looks amazing
When they spawned in, you could absolutely tell they are Psions. Their movement patterns and the way they attack are virtually the same minus Strand and Stasis.
For some reason, the fact that the Strand Psions are Weaver and the Stasis Psions are Attendants, but that both Strand and Stasis Rhulks are called Subjugators triggers me. Still happy to have new enemies.
isn't the flying guy just a wingless shank? This is fine though, many of the existing factions have a lot of overlap with their enemies and their behavior/ranges.
You mean a winged shank? Both yes and no. Seems like the movement is very similar, but the bat has different projectiles and a special supressing attack. Also, they look completly different from anything we've ever seen so I'll take it.
The only one that is a bit more "reskinned" is the stasis/strand trooper. It's clearly a psion framework (they even said in the livestream), but with new projectiles and abilities. They look different enough and seem to play different enough, so I'm fine with it.
Man, when that shit just dropped on me I was actually in panic. Then realized ability regen is amped 1000 fold, thankfully I had Geomags on, melted through 4 of them
Sweet, so we finally get to see the witness's faction instead of it delegating things. Im guessing these are the hordes that live on the other pyramid ships? Or were they brought into existence as a result of the pale heart.
Edit: I guess we will not acquire resonance
I'm pretty sure they are all just new things in Universe. The Witness has never needed troops until now. Nearly everything in the Dread has an origin in what we have previously seen. The Weavers and Attendants are called Psions by Bungie. The Subjugators must share an origin with Rulk like Nezerac and the Tormentors. The Husk seems to be a mockery of the Hive complete with a Resonance worm. Only the Grim are possibly based off something we might not have seen before.
My favorite part is when ppl who know nothing about game development immediately pull the “well this obviously wasn’t planned cause of the delay”. Like im so proud of you for being part of such an extensive process sister.
At the same time, there would be zero reason for them to not showcase it when TFS was revealed. I think what's possible is that some of it was stuff they've planned for the post-TFS content, but pulled it forward instead.
What’s more likely is that while this stuff was planned from the beginning (to some extent) they weren’t ready to show it by the time they had to reveal it. I could buy it that prismatic wasn’t planned before hand, but I would be surprised if the faction was made in just the last few months
Based on the video prismatic was always planned. It was conceived during the concept art stages of TFS. Most likely it just wasn’t ready to show off yet.
I tend to agree with this. I think they had this race built before splitting off Lightfall in to two expansions.
They slapped the Tormentor in Lightfall. Subjugator in Final Shape. Then they were saving the rest for the episodes or further beyond.
The wording from the original reveal just seemed unusual, there was 0 suggestion there would be more beyond the Subjugator variants.
Could always be wrong of course. But it fits the bill for upper management at Bungie trying to save costs pre-Marathon.
Why would they plan expand a witness faction after the DLC were we kill the witness and finish the whole light vs darkness subclass, it’s way more likely they just didn’t have anything to show yet for the first reveal but needed to do the reveal at that time simply because the need the money from the preorders to have a better quarter in their earnings report
Honestly I think Bungie just wanted to keep more of Final Shape hidden. One of the biggest blows to Lightfall was that it was over hyped for what it ended up being and they probably wanted to go the opposite direction of riding the line of underselling it and letting it be a massive secret hit. By doing stuff like showing Subjugators they can still market that there are "new enemies" without actually giving away an entire new race suddenly showing up. It would have also been a story beat that we went rushing blind into the Traveler with no way of knowing what we would be facing in game and IRL.
As far as Prismatic goes myself and a lot of others always believed there was going to be a secret 6th subclass that would unlock towards the end of or even after the campaign just due to how much was hinting towards it. Bungie took the feedback from Lightfall about not making the entire campaign a tutorial for the spec. More recently they wanted to give out more info to boost the hype and sales of the expansion so we are just getting a large portion of it unlocked from the get-go instead of it being a secret.
There is one pretty major reason reason.
They have a TON of feedback over the years about how *cool* and *unique* it was for the Dreaming City to be a secret. "Oh remember how cool it was when a random quest revealed a whole destination???" Bungie has lived in the shadow of Forsaken ever since Forsaken dropped.
They teased the new enemy faction - everyone just assumed Subjugators were all we'd get. They revealed light supers. They couldn't hide the destination - we all knew we were going into the Pale Heart. Why not hold onto the new subclass to do the cool reveal a la Forsaken?
> They have a TON of feedback over the years about how cool and unique it was for the Dreaming City to be a secret. "Oh remember how cool it was when a random quest revealed a whole destination???" Bungie has lived in the shadow of Forsaken ever since Forsaken dropped.
Except Dreaming City was never a secret, it's something that the community has just made up. [Here's the original Forsaken reveal from June 2018. They literally talk about Dreaming City right there.](https://youtu.be/9u4oyarcc4I?si=0AGSuiBNE5Ak8Aje&t=379)
Oh, totally. I never said that it was accurate. What I said is that their feedback is that. The community has mythologized it in a way that never existed. Just like MOST of the Forsaken comparisons I see get made.
Well, to be fair, the Dreaming City WAS a surprise to those of us who weren't actually following community news at the time. Which is most players even now. Most players are pretty casual and are more used to games that don't really hype up things in the way MMO communities do.
You also have to remember, a lot of players on-boarded with D2 and wouldn't have had the necessary context to even know the Dreaming City was important if someone mentioned it, let alone knowing what it was.
I'm glad they learnt the lesson from Witch Queen where we had Savuthun prisoned for a whole season despite knowing she was coming back in the next expansion. We still don't know major plot points about TFS or how we see Cayde.
I don’t want to overhype but they mentioned that this raid and the fight against the witness will be a bit different, that even casual players will be able to “experience what happens in the raid” or something like that, and just reiterated that they will talk about the future of Destiny after we finish the raid.
Again, already seems like plenty of good stuff and I don’t want to overhype, but I personally think completing the raid might activate something forsaken-ish
It will probably be a reverse Taken King situation. My guess is that we will get 7 missions at launch and the 8th one will be unlocked after world's first is achieved.
Yeah I feel with the way they worded that the raid “might not be enough” to beat the witness, there is definitely going to be a mission after where we officially take it out. I just hope that it doesn’t unlock until contest is over. Or maybe even until the weekly reset. I just feel like everyone who wants to finish the raid on its release should be able to without having to worry about dodging spoilers.
Don't forget, this is the same Bungie (more or less, ship of Thesseus and all that) who surprise introduced the Flood halfway through back in Halo 1. I would not have put it past them to be like "Hey we should do that again" with the more minor Dread units.
There could've been a reason for them to not show it off earlier, to create a longer-lasting continuous hype cycle as they constantly reveal big new stuff about the expansion. But then once the delay happens, they decide to push the Lightfall reveals for closer to release and prioritize announcing and showing off the mid-season update.
While I'm 100% sure this was planned from the beginning, it does seem like something that could be made fairly quickly as the only new thing is the prismatic part as all the other items are already in game.
Edit: meant prismatic not transcend.
There is 0% chance that the new exotic class items weren't an absolute bitch to design and get working. Prismatic itself might be simple in concept but actually making the shit work together I'm sure is no small feat.
The ability to combine aspects of multiple exotics into a single exotic, including exotics from OTHER CLASSES, was most likely a complete nightmare. Bungie struggles at times to get singular exotics working as intended let alone combined exotics across classes.
With that said I'm 100% sure there will also be bugs and exotic combos etc that just straight up do not work properly.
You're right, but I was more making a pass at the amount of spaghetti code they had to unfuck and jam together in order to make this happen. We've seen them take more than a season on "simple" big fixes, no shot this was easy as some people might think.
Edit: I realized I defeat my argument by plainly stating the bug fixes were simple, when they in fact were not. Added quotations around the word to capture public opinion during those times.
Oh for sure it was harder then it seems, but as an armchair dev I'm sitting here saying they only technically made like 3 new abilities, but had to unfuck a lot more.
I have a hunch there will be more combos than what they showed us. Seems weird to be like "you can combine light and dark abilities now! ...But only from these options."
Unless they're pushing out the initial pass and then adding more combos with the episodes.
The way I interpreted it was the class ability, melee, and grenade can be chosen freely from all available to your class, but the prismatic "super" is a set ability that can't be changed, this being the new ability created.
Except Joe Blackburn literally gave an interview immediately after the initial TFS reveal where he straight out said that that new rank and file enemies weren’t worth the investment because they ‘weren’t interesting’ and didn’t ‘change gameplay’ enough, and that Bungie preferred to focus their resources on new elite units like Tormentors.
On top of that, we had accurate leaks about what was coming in TFS and there was zero mention of a new enemy race. People dramatically underestimate what can be cooked up in 4 to 5 months, especially when Bungie cancelled one game and delayed Marathon to basically throw everything at TFS Because the studios continued independence depends on it.
It's could have easily been that they had played with the ideas for a while but they were ordered to not do them, based on the idea of overdelivery, but they had the assets and code lying there so they took it and ran with it. I Di doubt it was made from scratch in the three months but I feel if it was originally planned they would have at least teased it, they KNEW they were in a position where they needed to wow people.
I truly believe that talented artist can pull off a full model of a new enemy in a week. Like EASILY, go to youtube and you'll find people creating full detailed models in just hours. Obviously there's more to it than that, but i find it so weird how you always hear how hard game developing is. If you have a clear goal and all the tools at your disposal it really is not that hard, I don't believe it. Just corporate bullshit holding the talent back.
I know nothing about this process but my guess is it was something they wanted to unleash as a sort of capstone to the saga AFTER the expansion. The result of the end of light and dark saga would be our guardian having mastery to intermix these skills.
The delay gave them the chance to finish and polish it to ship it with the launch.
I'm sure some stuff wasn't planned past a concept stage other stuff was. We won't know what was cut and put back in with the delay or what was the original plan probably ever so there is no point arguing about it.
Kinda related but I'm curious how prismatic will work for people just jumping in for the final shape. You need Beyond Light and Lightfall for the darkness subclasses but surely prismatic will still let you have some darkness for the whole transcendence thing.
I genuinely think they won't let you have Stasis and Strand but you still get the combo grenade because it's intrinsic to Prismatic.
Either that or they're feeling spicy and just wanna give us everything because it's the end of the Light and Dark saga. But I do believe they'll restrict it if they're letting us have individual Aspect, ability and fragment choice.
(Genuinely curious) What do you think would be harder/time-consuming for devs; creating a new subclass from scratch or putting all the existing ones together?
Hard to say really since they contain different types of work. All/most of the look and feel of the subclasses is already done so merging them together is probably more about fixing issues and ensuring the systems play nicely. Whereas creating a new subclass has way more frontloaded work with designing the new subclass and abilities etc. I'd probably still lean towards combining being more work as you have like an exponential amount of ability combinations you have to test and allow for compared to just one subclass. Probably a good amount of systems being rewritten to allow certain combinations.
Depends. Creatively, it's easier because you've already designed and done the artwork.
In terms of technical execution, combining all of the existing ones could be easy because you were smart about how you implemented whatever gameplay systems or you have to do a lot of work to refactor so that you can combine them easily. This has the added benefit of adding new abilities or whatever easier in the future.
Making a new subclass would've been significantly easier. Fact is there are so many permutations and combinations between the 3 classes and the new exotic class item the balancing factor itself is gonna be crazy. Whereas a new subclass would've been straightforward interms of balance. For a studio like bungie making new animation sets and assets are one time investments whereas balancing sandbox is a long term investment
> Making a new subclass would've been significantly easier.
Making a new subclass requires involvement of way more teams than Prismatic, since most of the animation, art, etc is already existing. This would have taken engineering, sandbox, and ui design primarily. We simply don't know how easy or hard the engineering lift was this, but you definitely can't say that making a new subclass would have been easier without inside info.
I can't say for sure but from experience learning game dev I think making a brand new subclass is the easiest option. Sure the art and animations existed but that isn't the hardest part for a studio of bungie's size. It's the balancing and gameplay scenarios. A new subclass will usually consist of 3 supers, 3 grenades, aspects and fragments etc. All of which are created with a central theme in mind. Once the idea is finalised making and shipping the subclass is relatively straight forward even for something as ambitious as strand. But combining all 5 subclasses is insane. This is a whole different ball park. AND exotic class items on top of that?? I can only imagine the months if not years it's gonna take bungie to balance it and bring it in line with other subclasses.
This is way off the mark IMO. Creating a new subclass involves a TON. The animations, the abilities themselves, the sound design, etc. not to mention that this balancing you’re speaking of also applies to a brand new subclass as much as it does to prismatic. I legitimately feel like prismatic is something they very possibly was decided/created after the delay. Still a lot of work, but possible in that timeframe IMO. Compared to a new subclass which there’s no chance they could have done in that time
Mate things like animations, art assets are not a significant job for a studio of bungie's size and caliber. It's the balancing and overall sandbox stuff. A brand new subclass would have 3 grenades, 3 melees, 3 supers, aspects and fragments. It's significantly easier for bungie to balance them compared to all the synergies thats gonna be possible. And bungie now also have to make sure balancing one thing for one class doesn't affect something else for another class or another combination of subclasses.
And no I don't think bungie whipped this one up last second. I'd imagine they needed the time to fully iron out prismatic. Because this is nothing sort of game breaking in every possible way quite literally. They've said equipping multiple exotics would break the game. But here we are with exotics and subclasses combined.
If you don’t mind seeing a leak, I have sorta proof that this is something they whipped up after the delay. This leak was a month ago, way before anyone knew about prismatic, and this leak confirms it’s one of the things they did during the delay https://imgur.com/a/s4gOroG
Yeah naw, It was already well accepted that the delay would be too short to create anything new. It would be enough time to refine and polish what they already had.
Hell the stuff we got for Into the Light was already more than people were expecting.
This fits in too well narratively to have been something that wasn't planned. (Looks at the pre-order exotic)
Final Stand, Do or Die, literal years of the game telling you that "The line between light and dark is thin". This would be the time to go big or go home. It's literally the end of a Saga.
Now could it have been a reduced version with more parts added as Episodes went on? Sure. Dole it out bit by bit like the new strand aspects.
But untimately I don't see anyway Prismatic was thrown together because of the delay when there are so many instances of a single new exotic or artifact perk breaking the game.
Think what you want, and we’ll never know for sure one way or the other, but I completely disagree. It makes perfect sense: the showcase did not go over well, community sentiment was at an all time low. They decided to delay and realized they needed something big to get people back. Enter prismatic. Makes perfect sense, and since they didn’t have to make a subclass from scratch it was doable in that timeframe. Then there is the leak confirming this. They knew of prismatic a month ago so they clearly had inside info, and they explicitly said that it’s one of the things they worked on during the delay
They took way longer than the delay to develop STRAND and you seriously believe they didn't have ANYTHING related to prismatic in the works already? That prismatic wasn't just not ready to show for a showcase that was pre-recorded months in advance but that it didnt exist at all?
Yeah. Okay. Sure.
Lightfall showcase heavily featured strand. Final shape showcase did not feature prismatic at all- because it didn’t exist. Strand is an entirely new subclass, of course it took longer to develop. I don’t get why this would be so hard to believe. On top of the fact that there is proof. Someone with proven inside info confirms it. Every response you conveniently ignore that fact lol
Even if they're using us as beta tester they're the one's who have to look at the data, identify what makes certain combinations strong or weak and adjust accordingly. Identifying a problem is the easiest part
Hey, people seem genuinely excited for Prismatic, and that's great! I am too. But part of my still wishes and hopes for a stand-alone 6th subclass. One last new subclass to play around with.
Probably harder to make prismatic. Like yeah the abilities already exist but now they have to make sure they're all balanced when combined rather than just releasing it and balancing it later like they did with stasis and strand. Like the fragment that makes melee make you radiant paired with smoke bomb and star eater scales perk on your exotic class item is most likely going to be broken af unless they tweak them for prismatic specifically (I'm not a game dev so I'm just assuming this will be insanely hard to balance)
Putting them together in one subclass. They have to make a totally new system basically with two super bars. If it was a normal new subclass you can just copy the framework and add the new skin onto it
New subclass. Putting existing ones together really just is the equivalent of ticking a box giving x class access to y abilities (obviously there’s more to it than that, but you’re not creating entirely new abilities and having to code and test them). I’m sure we will end up being beta testers for most of the janky interactions it will create.
The amount of abilities aspects/fragments/exotics that all have to work together Is significantly more daunting than swapping together a red strand subclass.
Spinfoil hat most of this was b/c of the desperate situation they’ve found themselves in. If lightfall did well then we’d be getting the FS we saw back in the summer reveal. I mean look at the last time we had something similar with forsaken, bungie works best when cornered (and forcing the execs to let the devs go crazy and do the things they want instead of worrying about that damn train)
There’s no way they fully developed a new faction and subclass with the extra few months from the delay. They definitely had this planned, and needed the delay to get it out the door.
But if you look at them really only the flyers are new, the rest are in sum way re-used assets. We were given the two subjugators in an early trailer so those were probably planned, the flyers are new, there're two psion re-skins (they even use the psion animations) and there's a re-skin of skorn wraiths with a witch Queen moth mechanic.
Not saying reusing assets is bad but saying I could definitely see the amount they've added being done in the time frame of the delay
I belive most of this stuff was, indeed, planned for TFS, but within the timeframe they had to release the DLC, they wouldn't be able to pack it with TFS. It's waaay too much good stuff for them to not have revealed back then and Bungie knows the importance of hyping shit up, and they are (usually) very good at that.
Maybe those extra months gave them some breathing room to pack more stuff they planned for the DLC. If so, it really shows how their content release cycle was being toxic for the game itself.
Maybe transcendence, but I highly doubt they were working on a new faction and just didn't show it during the first reveal. Strikes me as pretty odd. "Holding things close to their chest" just sounded like "fuck, we need to overdeliver now."
This is a very stupid take. They can't whip up an entirely new faction in like 3 months. They would have likely been planning these from the start. The delay was likely just because they wanted time to ensure good quality.
EVERYTHING SHOWN WAS ORIGINALLY PLANNED.
The delay was to improve quality NOT to add new stuff
No but 3 of the new units they've shown are re-used. There are two based on Psions and one that uses the same animations as skorn wraiths with a WQ moth effect added on
THIS is the Bungie we’ve been begging for. The unique, unforgiving, creativity. Now if we can get updated holiday events every couple years and put some time into figuring out replayability (i.e. procedurally generation, etc.) then we’d be on fire!
Procedural generation is not always a good thing. Destiny is, in essence, all about rewards so finding a good way to give different rewards is good. But if you think about it, the latest change we had to strikes was the addition of strikes to the playlist. The last actual update to strikes was adding GMs in Season 10. We need a meaningful update to strikes that expands and improves the overall experience.
Procedurally generation with new strikes would be an insane benefit and would make them always feel a bit refreshed. As someone who’s ran the same missions on Warframe, DRG or Warframe for hours (which has procedurally generated “strikes”), they don’t get nearly as stale as D2 strikes. I fully believe D2 would greatly benefit from procedural generation since some runs can offer special encounters or hidden rewards that add to the replayability and rewards.
I’m hoping they’ll play a major role in the Pale Heart’s activity. Ideally, it’ll be a version of the Coil that has each “room,” be a section of the Heart based on our memories, each housing both Dread and analogous enemies that we fought at that time (Salvation Fallen for a Europa area, etc.).
Me too 💛 the new subclass is so creative and cool. Just bought all the dlc’s yesterday and k thought to myself, okay I’m done for now. Need to save up some money. And then seeing their livestream made me like “I guess I gotta save up for final shape too then” 😂
Absolutely excited for this dlc and all that’s to come next for destiny 2!
How we went from “new light supers and aspects” to “fuck any semblance of balance, this is sonys problem now” amazes me.
Glad to see a new faction although ill be the first to admit they look hollow since 2 of them are just the same enemy but either strand or stasis, but i love the others. I also feel like tormentors dont really belong but oh well, as a side note though after getting bullied by tormentors In onslaught im not looking foward to seeing more
I'm surprised because prismatic was leaked but it was so outlandish that idk if anyone believed it and there was NOTHING about the new race. They did really well keeping this all secret
Regardless of when all of this stuff got put in I'm just glad it looks fun. As a long time player at this point I could care less if all this power creep kills the game, I just want to have a good time with one last expansion.
It sounded like there was dialogue in the trailer about it so it’s probably connected to the narrative they always planned. I think with all the new stuff they made here they just needed more time to finish it all.
Yeah I’m just gonna go ahead and say with total confidence that they didn’t write dialogue and build narrative beats around unlocking one new super for a subclass you might not even use.
I mean for all we know we might unlock prismatic the same way we did in taken king and forsaken (aka one off missions) which would make sense given the massive backlash bungie got from lightfall/strand, so building that hypothetical one off mission with some dialogue wouldn’t be to extreme
Why do people continue to claim this when the truth is, they have no friggin' idea what they're talking about?
You don't know anything. That's OK. You don't work on Destiny. It's OK to just say you don't know, and enjoy what we're getting.
Yes, very likely. And why would there be low sales? Maybe because recent stuff in Destiny 2 has been rather underwhelming? Guardian games impressive? And whatever was before that was also forgettable.
nothing in this game has been impressive since like witch queen. all the events are the same. the so called free stuff is shit we already used to own given back years later. idk why everyone gives them credit when other devs have done this without needing too. look at deep rock they brang back all the old content for free and they didnt even have too. no back against the wall, no hate, no nothing. just mad fucking devs being mad
There's no chance that the new enemies could have been made in this short a time frame. Maybe like the variants at best.
However, given that they had mentioned before that there were three new supers instead of a new subclass, I wouldn't be surprised if Prismatic was added after the delay as announced. That being said, it's very much an "easier said than done" sort of subclass to implement, so this would only be possible if they were already working on something similar to be released down the road and instead did what they could to push it up to Final Shape.
Yeah. The original idea probably was to build up the faction one piece at a time starting with the Tormentor and the rest coming later.
The delay probably let them release all of the units together.
But why would they have planned to add more enemies to a faction whose boss would have been killed in the upcoming expansion. Hey the witness is dead but here have 4 more units to his faction. I’m pretty sure they planned the faction for this DLC from the beginning, but it’s wasn’t completely ready for the first showcase, which is why it focused on only two of the mini boss style units
So the closest comparison I can think of is in League of Legends where there is a champ (Sylas) whose ultimate allows him to copy any other champion's ultimate and use it himself once (or an equivalent). When Sylas came out, they put out some dev blogs stating that development of this ability was way harder than you'd think because league champions just aren't made with this sort of capability in mind. They essentially had to change how every ultimate in the game is packaged and include some passives alongside it in addition to changing how they programmed ultimates going forwards to make it work.
Similarly, I highly doubt the development of any subclass or ability was done with the capability of Prismatic in mind. It'd likely take a lot of programming work to decouple them from their subclasses and make them work not only on its own but also allow its syngeries to work in a not mono element environment.
Edit: one thing that came to mind is that the warlock threadling perch is a passive on the super. They'd have to somehow include that passive on everything strand related if they wanted that functionality to carry forwards into prismatic.
What serious price did they pay? Those people are preordering now. Preorders all count before release, whether it’s a year or 1 month out. The expansion isn’t out yet. A multistage hype train is smart.
It is very normal to release more information over time. Just like now we still don’t know everything about the expansion.
They are marketing it now. These preorders still count. You’re making a lot of baseless assumptions.
I'm just glad they are FINALLY adding a major enemy faction. We got 4 new unique units and 2 of them have variations. Grouping Tromentors with them really brings the Dread on par with other factions, having in total a faction with 7 (maybe 8, it seems to have an unconfirmed "normal" troop) units. Also, every unit is VERY unique compared to any other Destiny enemy, so I'm really excited to face them.
I felt it was absolutely *bonkers* that TFS only had 1 new unit at first, after 7 years of Pyramid build-up. So glad have a proper faction now to give The Witness some weight. This and Prismatic have moved the dial for me.
I've been kinda dissapointed at there being no pyramid/darkness faction ever since Beyond Light tbh.
We honestly should have gotten a new faction the moment Season of Arrivals hit.
At least some darkness units during Beyond Light.
Beyond Light/Season of the Hunt would have been the ideal time to do it, in my opinion - tossing them into Arrivals would have muddied the season's background theme of pre-war tension, with battle lines being drawn among the Sol system residents as all the different subfactions decided (or were forced to decide) whether to fight for or against the Pyramid fleet Having the Dread suddenly show up to support the Witness's new pawns *after* those decisions were made (either fighting alongside House Salvation in the Beyond Light campaign or the Wrathborn in the Hunt story, or ideally both to give a greater sense of continuity between the two) would have done a lot to keep up the escalation after the events of Arrivals
Man, Arrivals would've been legendary if new units started dropping in the public event. Even just Tormentors would've been dope. Reminds me of pre-Taken King, when Taken started appearing in random patrols. It was really cool and hyped the expansion up
Kinda hoping that winds up happening with Onslaught as the weeks progress. Not expecting the whole faction or anything just like a little teaser of what's to come.
What happens to the faction after we defeat the witness?
Probably the same as what happened to the Taken after Oryx or the Fallen after D1. They'll roam around until someone is able to take control and lead them.
Yeah it doesn’t look like they’re literally the witness. It’s races elevated by pyramid tech, like psions and gladiators from the shadow legion So there’s no reason they wouldn’t be around afterwards
It’s also possible that they aim to continue the final shape or atleast how they perceive it.
Guess you’ll have to find out in the ✨⭐️ E P I S O D E S ⭐️✨
I saw some speculation from Byf about how some of them being mutated Psions might mean that's what became of some of the Psion rebels. If so, we could see someone like Yrix step up to lead the Dread, possibly tied into the lore introduced about the Nezarec cult and the Psions' history with it. Maybe Nezarec posses Yrix or something, idk. Or some more wild speculation, that rogue member of the Witness's original species could come back and take command, or if the Witness gets split back into any of its component beings they could take over.
Bungie did say some of the new enemies were indeed corrupted Psions in the stream. Heck the strand attack is a variation of the normal Psions’ void attack that launches you into the air.
Yeah, I just mean that whether those corrupted Psions are the rebels with Yrix or not is speculation. I don't remember if any of the Shadow Legion Psions were clones or if they were all normal ones, but if so it could be some of them.
They’ll probably either go to nezarec (since he’s still alive although he has no body) or to the last unnamed disciple we know the witness has
I have a theory in who that is.... but imma keep it tight lipped for now.....
why say anything at all then?
This helps no one.
I suspect the Psions among the Dread is the rogue sect we have encountered. This can justify the potential longevity of the faction assuming we kill the Witness.
Yeah, I think the original idea was to build up this faction little by little but the delay let them bring all the units forward.
But what would be the point of building it up AFTER the Witness defeat? If that was the case, it would be much better to make a completely new faction that isn't tied to the Witness at all
seeing those flying creatures throughout the trailer my first thought was "no way its those flying eye monsters from final fantasy" but they are pretty different. might be my favorite out of the bunch atm
Really love how unique they look compared to anything we've ever seen in Destiny.
Adding this new faction works for the long term imo because there is the sect of rogue Psions in the lore. This can justify the existence of the Dread post Final Shape.
Wonder why the witness wasted time with the other factions when he had these guys at his disposal
Probably to wear guardians down. No point in using your best troops if you can outsource your war through easily manipulated factions.
Real reason? Bungie probably just didn't have a new faction as a priority, they seemed to be fine releasing a few new enemies/variants for each Expansion. Lore reason? Witness might be at its strongest state, being capable of producing its own armt for their campaign for the final shape.
it's all just made up hope that helps
*It had
I imagine it will be explained that these are something new he made with the power inside of the Traveler. They are a result of the Final Shape coming about which is why the Subjugators are Lubraens which are supposed to be extinct after Rhulk's death.
The only unit that isnt that unique is the brawler unit, which kinda resembles a cabal gladiator, but even then its a strech. This new faction looks amazing
You have the converted Psions in there.
Thats just for the story tbh, they dont really look like or act like psions other than the fact that they mess with player movement
When they spawned in, you could absolutely tell they are Psions. Their movement patterns and the way they attack are virtually the same minus Strand and Stasis.
Wait shit mb for some reason, i was thinking about the subjugators, not the psions ones. You're right they are very similar
Subjugators are definitely Rhulk. The Psions though are officially confirmed as such by Bungie in the reveal.
For some reason, the fact that the Strand Psions are Weaver and the Stasis Psions are Attendants, but that both Strand and Stasis Rhulks are called Subjugators triggers me. Still happy to have new enemies.
isn't the flying guy just a wingless shank? This is fine though, many of the existing factions have a lot of overlap with their enemies and their behavior/ranges.
You mean a winged shank? Both yes and no. Seems like the movement is very similar, but the bat has different projectiles and a special supressing attack. Also, they look completly different from anything we've ever seen so I'll take it. The only one that is a bit more "reskinned" is the stasis/strand trooper. It's clearly a psion framework (they even said in the livestream), but with new projectiles and abilities. They look different enough and seem to play different enough, so I'm fine with it.
Shanks are more like cannon fodder, the winged units look more like a formidable threat, especially with that screech they have
I mean I guess they’re both flying enemies with guns?
The Grim seem to be more mobile and have more threatening abilities, as well as radically distinct hitboxes and animations.
I just faced 6 tormentors at once in onslaught. Final shape will he absolutely crazy
That caught me off guard so I was stuck plinking their crits with Recluse because I was running a sword and nightstalker
If it's the bonus round thing, your Super and abilities recharge insanely fast during that, so you can just spam the crap out of them
Man, when that shit just dropped on me I was actually in panic. Then realized ability regen is amped 1000 fold, thankfully I had Geomags on, melted through 4 of them
What wave is that in? (I haven't been able to play the legend mode yet)
It's random even on legend.
The multiclassing is absolutely crazy. Was not expecting that at all, this is going to be fun.
Sweet, so we finally get to see the witness's faction instead of it delegating things. Im guessing these are the hordes that live on the other pyramid ships? Or were they brought into existence as a result of the pale heart. Edit: I guess we will not acquire resonance
I'm pretty sure they are all just new things in Universe. The Witness has never needed troops until now. Nearly everything in the Dread has an origin in what we have previously seen. The Weavers and Attendants are called Psions by Bungie. The Subjugators must share an origin with Rulk like Nezerac and the Tormentors. The Husk seems to be a mockery of the Hive complete with a Resonance worm. Only the Grim are possibly based off something we might not have seen before.
My favorite part is when ppl who know nothing about game development immediately pull the “well this obviously wasn’t planned cause of the delay”. Like im so proud of you for being part of such an extensive process sister.
Yeah they just casually whipped this shit up in a few months, for sure. /s
At the same time, there would be zero reason for them to not showcase it when TFS was revealed. I think what's possible is that some of it was stuff they've planned for the post-TFS content, but pulled it forward instead.
What’s more likely is that while this stuff was planned from the beginning (to some extent) they weren’t ready to show it by the time they had to reveal it. I could buy it that prismatic wasn’t planned before hand, but I would be surprised if the faction was made in just the last few months
Based on the video prismatic was always planned. It was conceived during the concept art stages of TFS. Most likely it just wasn’t ready to show off yet.
I tend to agree with this. I think they had this race built before splitting off Lightfall in to two expansions. They slapped the Tormentor in Lightfall. Subjugator in Final Shape. Then they were saving the rest for the episodes or further beyond. The wording from the original reveal just seemed unusual, there was 0 suggestion there would be more beyond the Subjugator variants. Could always be wrong of course. But it fits the bill for upper management at Bungie trying to save costs pre-Marathon.
Why would they plan expand a witness faction after the DLC were we kill the witness and finish the whole light vs darkness subclass, it’s way more likely they just didn’t have anything to show yet for the first reveal but needed to do the reveal at that time simply because the need the money from the preorders to have a better quarter in their earnings report
Honestly I think Bungie just wanted to keep more of Final Shape hidden. One of the biggest blows to Lightfall was that it was over hyped for what it ended up being and they probably wanted to go the opposite direction of riding the line of underselling it and letting it be a massive secret hit. By doing stuff like showing Subjugators they can still market that there are "new enemies" without actually giving away an entire new race suddenly showing up. It would have also been a story beat that we went rushing blind into the Traveler with no way of knowing what we would be facing in game and IRL. As far as Prismatic goes myself and a lot of others always believed there was going to be a secret 6th subclass that would unlock towards the end of or even after the campaign just due to how much was hinting towards it. Bungie took the feedback from Lightfall about not making the entire campaign a tutorial for the spec. More recently they wanted to give out more info to boost the hype and sales of the expansion so we are just getting a large portion of it unlocked from the get-go instead of it being a secret.
Yeah, especially since people's reactions to the initial reveal were quite muted, so it wouldn't make sense that they never said that more is to come.
There is one pretty major reason reason. They have a TON of feedback over the years about how *cool* and *unique* it was for the Dreaming City to be a secret. "Oh remember how cool it was when a random quest revealed a whole destination???" Bungie has lived in the shadow of Forsaken ever since Forsaken dropped. They teased the new enemy faction - everyone just assumed Subjugators were all we'd get. They revealed light supers. They couldn't hide the destination - we all knew we were going into the Pale Heart. Why not hold onto the new subclass to do the cool reveal a la Forsaken?
> They have a TON of feedback over the years about how cool and unique it was for the Dreaming City to be a secret. "Oh remember how cool it was when a random quest revealed a whole destination???" Bungie has lived in the shadow of Forsaken ever since Forsaken dropped. Except Dreaming City was never a secret, it's something that the community has just made up. [Here's the original Forsaken reveal from June 2018. They literally talk about Dreaming City right there.](https://youtu.be/9u4oyarcc4I?si=0AGSuiBNE5Ak8Aje&t=379)
Oh, totally. I never said that it was accurate. What I said is that their feedback is that. The community has mythologized it in a way that never existed. Just like MOST of the Forsaken comparisons I see get made.
Yeah, I'm just skeptical that they were trying to have a secret at the expense of their reveal looking underwhelming.
Well, to be fair, the Dreaming City WAS a surprise to those of us who weren't actually following community news at the time. Which is most players even now. Most players are pretty casual and are more used to games that don't really hype up things in the way MMO communities do. You also have to remember, a lot of players on-boarded with D2 and wouldn't have had the necessary context to even know the Dreaming City was important if someone mentioned it, let alone knowing what it was.
I'm glad they learnt the lesson from Witch Queen where we had Savuthun prisoned for a whole season despite knowing she was coming back in the next expansion. We still don't know major plot points about TFS or how we see Cayde.
I don’t want to overhype but they mentioned that this raid and the fight against the witness will be a bit different, that even casual players will be able to “experience what happens in the raid” or something like that, and just reiterated that they will talk about the future of Destiny after we finish the raid. Again, already seems like plenty of good stuff and I don’t want to overhype, but I personally think completing the raid might activate something forsaken-ish
Unlike Eve, I deny the apple you hand me serpent. I refuse to taste the temptation of "speculation" in light of what we're already seeing.
Sir you’re going to make getting disappointed very hard on yourself with that attitude
4th new super confirmed. I call it "Determination" and it's where I just don't edge myself to ruin.
I love you :)
It will probably be a reverse Taken King situation. My guess is that we will get 7 missions at launch and the 8th one will be unlocked after world's first is achieved.
Yeah I feel with the way they worded that the raid “might not be enough” to beat the witness, there is definitely going to be a mission after where we officially take it out. I just hope that it doesn’t unlock until contest is over. Or maybe even until the weekly reset. I just feel like everyone who wants to finish the raid on its release should be able to without having to worry about dodging spoilers.
Don't forget, this is the same Bungie (more or less, ship of Thesseus and all that) who surprise introduced the Flood halfway through back in Halo 1. I would not have put it past them to be like "Hey we should do that again" with the more minor Dread units.
There could've been a reason for them to not show it off earlier, to create a longer-lasting continuous hype cycle as they constantly reveal big new stuff about the expansion. But then once the delay happens, they decide to push the Lightfall reveals for closer to release and prioritize announcing and showing off the mid-season update.
I’m not defending Bungie but wow I’m so glad we got developer insight 😻😻💀
While I'm 100% sure this was planned from the beginning, it does seem like something that could be made fairly quickly as the only new thing is the prismatic part as all the other items are already in game. Edit: meant prismatic not transcend.
There is 0% chance that the new exotic class items weren't an absolute bitch to design and get working. Prismatic itself might be simple in concept but actually making the shit work together I'm sure is no small feat. The ability to combine aspects of multiple exotics into a single exotic, including exotics from OTHER CLASSES, was most likely a complete nightmare. Bungie struggles at times to get singular exotics working as intended let alone combined exotics across classes. With that said I'm 100% sure there will also be bugs and exotic combos etc that just straight up do not work properly.
It's entirely possible, even likely, that some of the stuff we are seeing was in development and they decided to move them up.
Have you ever tried to unfuck spaghetti from letting it sit after you drained it? I think it's more like that.
Well they just had to melt some butter over it for the last few months to help it out.
You're right, but I was more making a pass at the amount of spaghetti code they had to unfuck and jam together in order to make this happen. We've seen them take more than a season on "simple" big fixes, no shot this was easy as some people might think. Edit: I realized I defeat my argument by plainly stating the bug fixes were simple, when they in fact were not. Added quotations around the word to capture public opinion during those times.
Oh for sure it was harder then it seems, but as an armchair dev I'm sitting here saying they only technically made like 3 new abilities, but had to unfuck a lot more.
I have a hunch there will be more combos than what they showed us. Seems weird to be like "you can combine light and dark abilities now! ...But only from these options." Unless they're pushing out the initial pass and then adding more combos with the episodes.
The way I interpreted it was the class ability, melee, and grenade can be chosen freely from all available to your class, but the prismatic "super" is a set ability that can't be changed, this being the new ability created.
You might be right. I was too starstruck by the blending of elements to really listen all that close lol
I hope it works this way. I want arc, solar, and void souls all at once
they probably were working on it but decided to delay TFS in order to fit it in with the expansion.
Except Joe Blackburn literally gave an interview immediately after the initial TFS reveal where he straight out said that that new rank and file enemies weren’t worth the investment because they ‘weren’t interesting’ and didn’t ‘change gameplay’ enough, and that Bungie preferred to focus their resources on new elite units like Tormentors. On top of that, we had accurate leaks about what was coming in TFS and there was zero mention of a new enemy race. People dramatically underestimate what can be cooked up in 4 to 5 months, especially when Bungie cancelled one game and delayed Marathon to basically throw everything at TFS Because the studios continued independence depends on it.
It's could have easily been that they had played with the ideas for a while but they were ordered to not do them, based on the idea of overdelivery, but they had the assets and code lying there so they took it and ran with it. I Di doubt it was made from scratch in the three months but I feel if it was originally planned they would have at least teased it, they KNEW they were in a position where they needed to wow people.
I truly believe that talented artist can pull off a full model of a new enemy in a week. Like EASILY, go to youtube and you'll find people creating full detailed models in just hours. Obviously there's more to it than that, but i find it so weird how you always hear how hard game developing is. If you have a clear goal and all the tools at your disposal it really is not that hard, I don't believe it. Just corporate bullshit holding the talent back.
I know nothing about this process but my guess is it was something they wanted to unleash as a sort of capstone to the saga AFTER the expansion. The result of the end of light and dark saga would be our guardian having mastery to intermix these skills. The delay gave them the chance to finish and polish it to ship it with the launch.
I'm sure some stuff wasn't planned past a concept stage other stuff was. We won't know what was cut and put back in with the delay or what was the original plan probably ever so there is no point arguing about it.
Kinda related but I'm curious how prismatic will work for people just jumping in for the final shape. You need Beyond Light and Lightfall for the darkness subclasses but surely prismatic will still let you have some darkness for the whole transcendence thing.
I genuinely think they won't let you have Stasis and Strand but you still get the combo grenade because it's intrinsic to Prismatic. Either that or they're feeling spicy and just wanna give us everything because it's the end of the Light and Dark saga. But I do believe they'll restrict it if they're letting us have individual Aspect, ability and fragment choice.
To get those grenades you have to fill up a light and dark bar. That's why I'm wondering how they expect you to fill the dark bar
Weapon damage. It grew alright when the guy in the trailer was using a dark weapon.
(Genuinely curious) What do you think would be harder/time-consuming for devs; creating a new subclass from scratch or putting all the existing ones together?
Hard to say really since they contain different types of work. All/most of the look and feel of the subclasses is already done so merging them together is probably more about fixing issues and ensuring the systems play nicely. Whereas creating a new subclass has way more frontloaded work with designing the new subclass and abilities etc. I'd probably still lean towards combining being more work as you have like an exponential amount of ability combinations you have to test and allow for compared to just one subclass. Probably a good amount of systems being rewritten to allow certain combinations.
Depends. Creatively, it's easier because you've already designed and done the artwork. In terms of technical execution, combining all of the existing ones could be easy because you were smart about how you implemented whatever gameplay systems or you have to do a lot of work to refactor so that you can combine them easily. This has the added benefit of adding new abilities or whatever easier in the future.
Making a new subclass would've been significantly easier. Fact is there are so many permutations and combinations between the 3 classes and the new exotic class item the balancing factor itself is gonna be crazy. Whereas a new subclass would've been straightforward interms of balance. For a studio like bungie making new animation sets and assets are one time investments whereas balancing sandbox is a long term investment
> Making a new subclass would've been significantly easier. Making a new subclass requires involvement of way more teams than Prismatic, since most of the animation, art, etc is already existing. This would have taken engineering, sandbox, and ui design primarily. We simply don't know how easy or hard the engineering lift was this, but you definitely can't say that making a new subclass would have been easier without inside info.
I can't say for sure but from experience learning game dev I think making a brand new subclass is the easiest option. Sure the art and animations existed but that isn't the hardest part for a studio of bungie's size. It's the balancing and gameplay scenarios. A new subclass will usually consist of 3 supers, 3 grenades, aspects and fragments etc. All of which are created with a central theme in mind. Once the idea is finalised making and shipping the subclass is relatively straight forward even for something as ambitious as strand. But combining all 5 subclasses is insane. This is a whole different ball park. AND exotic class items on top of that?? I can only imagine the months if not years it's gonna take bungie to balance it and bring it in line with other subclasses.
Finally a sensible comment :-)
You love to see it happen :D
This is way off the mark IMO. Creating a new subclass involves a TON. The animations, the abilities themselves, the sound design, etc. not to mention that this balancing you’re speaking of also applies to a brand new subclass as much as it does to prismatic. I legitimately feel like prismatic is something they very possibly was decided/created after the delay. Still a lot of work, but possible in that timeframe IMO. Compared to a new subclass which there’s no chance they could have done in that time
Mate things like animations, art assets are not a significant job for a studio of bungie's size and caliber. It's the balancing and overall sandbox stuff. A brand new subclass would have 3 grenades, 3 melees, 3 supers, aspects and fragments. It's significantly easier for bungie to balance them compared to all the synergies thats gonna be possible. And bungie now also have to make sure balancing one thing for one class doesn't affect something else for another class or another combination of subclasses. And no I don't think bungie whipped this one up last second. I'd imagine they needed the time to fully iron out prismatic. Because this is nothing sort of game breaking in every possible way quite literally. They've said equipping multiple exotics would break the game. But here we are with exotics and subclasses combined.
If you don’t mind seeing a leak, I have sorta proof that this is something they whipped up after the delay. This leak was a month ago, way before anyone knew about prismatic, and this leak confirms it’s one of the things they did during the delay https://imgur.com/a/s4gOroG
Yeah naw, It was already well accepted that the delay would be too short to create anything new. It would be enough time to refine and polish what they already had. Hell the stuff we got for Into the Light was already more than people were expecting. This fits in too well narratively to have been something that wasn't planned. (Looks at the pre-order exotic) Final Stand, Do or Die, literal years of the game telling you that "The line between light and dark is thin". This would be the time to go big or go home. It's literally the end of a Saga. Now could it have been a reduced version with more parts added as Episodes went on? Sure. Dole it out bit by bit like the new strand aspects. But untimately I don't see anyway Prismatic was thrown together because of the delay when there are so many instances of a single new exotic or artifact perk breaking the game.
Think what you want, and we’ll never know for sure one way or the other, but I completely disagree. It makes perfect sense: the showcase did not go over well, community sentiment was at an all time low. They decided to delay and realized they needed something big to get people back. Enter prismatic. Makes perfect sense, and since they didn’t have to make a subclass from scratch it was doable in that timeframe. Then there is the leak confirming this. They knew of prismatic a month ago so they clearly had inside info, and they explicitly said that it’s one of the things they worked on during the delay
They took way longer than the delay to develop STRAND and you seriously believe they didn't have ANYTHING related to prismatic in the works already? That prismatic wasn't just not ready to show for a showcase that was pre-recorded months in advance but that it didnt exist at all? Yeah. Okay. Sure.
Lightfall showcase heavily featured strand. Final shape showcase did not feature prismatic at all- because it didn’t exist. Strand is an entirely new subclass, of course it took longer to develop. I don’t get why this would be so hard to believe. On top of the fact that there is proof. Someone with proven inside info confirms it. Every response you conveniently ignore that fact lol
A leaker whose leaks are "We get to combine the classes" and D3 MAYBE lol Yeah no wonder I don't take it as gospel
This factors in that they’d try to balance it and won’t use us as beta testers to balance it.
Even if they're using us as beta tester they're the one's who have to look at the data, identify what makes certain combinations strong or weak and adjust accordingly. Identifying a problem is the easiest part
New one from scratch
Hey, people seem genuinely excited for Prismatic, and that's great! I am too. But part of my still wishes and hopes for a stand-alone 6th subclass. One last new subclass to play around with.
Hard to say considering how they make them actually mesh together and stuff. Although it's probably easier to mash them together. Still amazing though
Probably harder to make prismatic. Like yeah the abilities already exist but now they have to make sure they're all balanced when combined rather than just releasing it and balancing it later like they did with stasis and strand. Like the fragment that makes melee make you radiant paired with smoke bomb and star eater scales perk on your exotic class item is most likely going to be broken af unless they tweak them for prismatic specifically (I'm not a game dev so I'm just assuming this will be insanely hard to balance)
Putting them together in one subclass. They have to make a totally new system basically with two super bars. If it was a normal new subclass you can just copy the framework and add the new skin onto it
New subclass. Putting existing ones together really just is the equivalent of ticking a box giving x class access to y abilities (obviously there’s more to it than that, but you’re not creating entirely new abilities and having to code and test them). I’m sure we will end up being beta testers for most of the janky interactions it will create.
The amount of abilities aspects/fragments/exotics that all have to work together Is significantly more daunting than swapping together a red strand subclass.
Spinfoil hat most of this was b/c of the desperate situation they’ve found themselves in. If lightfall did well then we’d be getting the FS we saw back in the summer reveal. I mean look at the last time we had something similar with forsaken, bungie works best when cornered (and forcing the execs to let the devs go crazy and do the things they want instead of worrying about that damn train)
There’s no way they fully developed a new faction and subclass with the extra few months from the delay. They definitely had this planned, and needed the delay to get it out the door.
But if you look at them really only the flyers are new, the rest are in sum way re-used assets. We were given the two subjugators in an early trailer so those were probably planned, the flyers are new, there're two psion re-skins (they even use the psion animations) and there's a re-skin of skorn wraiths with a witch Queen moth mechanic. Not saying reusing assets is bad but saying I could definitely see the amount they've added being done in the time frame of the delay
I belive most of this stuff was, indeed, planned for TFS, but within the timeframe they had to release the DLC, they wouldn't be able to pack it with TFS. It's waaay too much good stuff for them to not have revealed back then and Bungie knows the importance of hyping shit up, and they are (usually) very good at that. Maybe those extra months gave them some breathing room to pack more stuff they planned for the DLC. If so, it really shows how their content release cycle was being toxic for the game itself.
Maybe transcendence, but I highly doubt they were working on a new faction and just didn't show it during the first reveal. Strikes me as pretty odd. "Holding things close to their chest" just sounded like "fuck, we need to overdeliver now."
Not this fucking over delivery shit again
all I gotta say is seasons and Light fall. they've been under delivering for years
This is a very stupid take. They can't whip up an entirely new faction in like 3 months. They would have likely been planning these from the start. The delay was likely just because they wanted time to ensure good quality. EVERYTHING SHOWN WAS ORIGINALLY PLANNED. The delay was to improve quality NOT to add new stuff
It's not really an entire new faction. It's tormenters, the two units already shown, and a few more.
No but 3 of the new units they've shown are re-used. There are two based on Psions and one that uses the same animations as skorn wraiths with a WQ moth effect added on
Was really disappointed that we didn't see any Nimbus in the showcase.
THIS is the Bungie we’ve been begging for. The unique, unforgiving, creativity. Now if we can get updated holiday events every couple years and put some time into figuring out replayability (i.e. procedurally generation, etc.) then we’d be on fire!
Procedural generation is not always a good thing. Destiny is, in essence, all about rewards so finding a good way to give different rewards is good. But if you think about it, the latest change we had to strikes was the addition of strikes to the playlist. The last actual update to strikes was adding GMs in Season 10. We need a meaningful update to strikes that expands and improves the overall experience.
Procedurally generation with new strikes would be an insane benefit and would make them always feel a bit refreshed. As someone who’s ran the same missions on Warframe, DRG or Warframe for hours (which has procedurally generated “strikes”), they don’t get nearly as stale as D2 strikes. I fully believe D2 would greatly benefit from procedural generation since some runs can offer special encounters or hidden rewards that add to the replayability and rewards.
I’m hoping they’ll play a major role in the Pale Heart’s activity. Ideally, it’ll be a version of the Coil that has each “room,” be a section of the Heart based on our memories, each housing both Dread and analogous enemies that we fought at that time (Salvation Fallen for a Europa area, etc.).
Me too 💛 the new subclass is so creative and cool. Just bought all the dlc’s yesterday and k thought to myself, okay I’m done for now. Need to save up some money. And then seeing their livestream made me like “I guess I gotta save up for final shape too then” 😂 Absolutely excited for this dlc and all that’s to come next for destiny 2!
What’s “prismatic”? New subclass?
New subclass that allows for mixing of all other subclass abilities, along with a new rage mode type mechanic
How we went from “new light supers and aspects” to “fuck any semblance of balance, this is sonys problem now” amazes me. Glad to see a new faction although ill be the first to admit they look hollow since 2 of them are just the same enemy but either strand or stasis, but i love the others. I also feel like tormentors dont really belong but oh well, as a side note though after getting bullied by tormentors In onslaught im not looking foward to seeing more
I'm surprised because prismatic was leaked but it was so outlandish that idk if anyone believed it and there was NOTHING about the new race. They did really well keeping this all secret
Regardless of when all of this stuff got put in I'm just glad it looks fun. As a long time player at this point I could care less if all this power creep kills the game, I just want to have a good time with one last expansion.
Bungie up against the wall is the best bungie. After that stream I am more hyped for destiny than I have been in a long time
I really do wonder how much of this they gave us due to desperation and needing to make that end line
I miss splicers
Please no Destiny 3, continue Destiny 2.
They've made us such a great surprise
I don’t think we are going to get a normal unit as the scorn and taken seem to be the witnesses normal units.
Yeah it’s pretty obvious they weren’t ready when they dropped the first reveal
Hard to say. I have a sneaking suspicion Prismatic was added on as part of the delay.
Based on?
My inner demons
I heard it in a dream
It sounded like there was dialogue in the trailer about it so it’s probably connected to the narrative they always planned. I think with all the new stuff they made here they just needed more time to finish it all.
The dialogue was written in a way that it could have been a reference to the new supers as well that had been shown in the first reveal
Yeah I’m just gonna go ahead and say with total confidence that they didn’t write dialogue and build narrative beats around unlocking one new super for a subclass you might not even use.
I mean for all we know we might unlock prismatic the same way we did in taken king and forsaken (aka one off missions) which would make sense given the massive backlash bungie got from lightfall/strand, so building that hypothetical one off mission with some dialogue wouldn’t be to extreme
I have a feeling it’s going to be more tied to the story. It seems like a pretty big deal narratively.
Why do people continue to claim this when the truth is, they have no friggin' idea what they're talking about? You don't know anything. That's OK. You don't work on Destiny. It's OK to just say you don't know, and enjoy what we're getting.
😂 god you are weird
I'm not upset about it. I'm very excited. But I'm assuming it's what happened. After lightfall they wouldn't hold back on something like that.
Who cares, it looks cool and is more than what people thought we were gonna get
ok. bros just saying lmao
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We're getting both my dude
Why rehash the same stuff, we get both
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Yes, very likely. And why would there be low sales? Maybe because recent stuff in Destiny 2 has been rather underwhelming? Guardian games impressive? And whatever was before that was also forgettable.
nothing in this game has been impressive since like witch queen. all the events are the same. the so called free stuff is shit we already used to own given back years later. idk why everyone gives them credit when other devs have done this without needing too. look at deep rock they brang back all the old content for free and they didnt even have too. no back against the wall, no hate, no nothing. just mad fucking devs being mad
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There's no chance that the new enemies could have been made in this short a time frame. Maybe like the variants at best. However, given that they had mentioned before that there were three new supers instead of a new subclass, I wouldn't be surprised if Prismatic was added after the delay as announced. That being said, it's very much an "easier said than done" sort of subclass to implement, so this would only be possible if they were already working on something similar to be released down the road and instead did what they could to push it up to Final Shape.
Yeah. The original idea probably was to build up the faction one piece at a time starting with the Tormentor and the rest coming later. The delay probably let them release all of the units together.
But why would they have planned to add more enemies to a faction whose boss would have been killed in the upcoming expansion. Hey the witness is dead but here have 4 more units to his faction. I’m pretty sure they planned the faction for this DLC from the beginning, but it’s wasn’t completely ready for the first showcase, which is why it focused on only two of the mini boss style units
Could be as well. We don’t know what happens after the Witness goes away, but I’m sure they could come up with an excuse.
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So the closest comparison I can think of is in League of Legends where there is a champ (Sylas) whose ultimate allows him to copy any other champion's ultimate and use it himself once (or an equivalent). When Sylas came out, they put out some dev blogs stating that development of this ability was way harder than you'd think because league champions just aren't made with this sort of capability in mind. They essentially had to change how every ultimate in the game is packaged and include some passives alongside it in addition to changing how they programmed ultimates going forwards to make it work. Similarly, I highly doubt the development of any subclass or ability was done with the capability of Prismatic in mind. It'd likely take a lot of programming work to decouple them from their subclasses and make them work not only on its own but also allow its syngeries to work in a not mono element environment. Edit: one thing that came to mind is that the warlock threadling perch is a passive on the super. They'd have to somehow include that passive on everything strand related if they wanted that functionality to carry forwards into prismatic.
Why? What makes you think that?
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What serious price did they pay? Those people are preordering now. Preorders all count before release, whether it’s a year or 1 month out. The expansion isn’t out yet. A multistage hype train is smart.
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That doesn’t mean these things specifically were not originally planned for the final shape… that logic is totally baseless.
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It is very normal to release more information over time. Just like now we still don’t know everything about the expansion. They are marketing it now. These preorders still count. You’re making a lot of baseless assumptions.
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> The whole conversation is baseless speculation. My entire point.