Destiny 2: Forsaken arrives Sept. 4, here’s our first look

Destiny 2’s fall expansion, Forsaken, will attempt to breathe new life into the game when it launches Sept. 4 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. Purchasing Forsaken will net players new abilities to use, a new campaign to play through and new areas to explore.

Forsaken will return random rolls, loadout flexibility, weapon customization and new supers. It also adds lots of new features like bows and a new PvPvE mode, Gambit. Thanks to a Bungie ViDoc that kicked off the livestream, players can view all of the changes coming to Destiny 2 in a nine-minute dump.

Forsaken will bring players back to the asteroid belt and the Prison of Elders. While Bungie won’t reveal the story until E3, it seems to focus around the Fallen, Cayde-6 and the mysterious Awoken. Here’s Bungie’s synopsis of the campaign, which the studio developed in collaboration with Transformers: Fall of Cybertron maker High Moon Studios:

Following years of strife, what remains of the Reef has fallen to lawlessness. You and Cayde-6 are sent to personally investigate the recent unrest. Upon arrival, you soon discover the most-wanted criminals in the Prison of Elders have organized an escape. Beyond the Vanguard’s authority, you’ll pursue these fugitives deep into the Reef. Explore new regions, awaken new powers, earn powerful weapons, and uncover long lost Awoken secrets. The hunt is on.

Grid View

• Bungie, High Moon Studios/Activision
• Bungie, High Moon Studios/Activision
• Bungie, High Moon Studios/Activision
• Bungie, High Moon Studios/Activision
• Bungie, High Moon Studios/Activision

More than just Forsaken is coming in the next year, as Bungie also introduced a new content rollout strategy for Destiny 2’s second year, the Annual Pass. It includes three “premium content releases” that are scheduled to launch from winter 2018 through summer 2019.

Destiny 2: Forsaken will cost $39.99 on its own. A bundle of Forsaken and its Annual Pass will be available for $69.99. Bungie and Activision will also sell a Digital Deluxe Edition of the expansion for $79.99 that includes Forsaken itself, the Annual Pass and a set of Awoken-themed in-game items. Activision also said that when Forsaken launches this September, the company will release all of Destiny 2’s existing PlayStation 4-exclusive content on PC and Xbox One.

Forsaken

In case you missed Bungie’s live reveal, we’ve gathered everything coming to Destiny 2 this fall right here.

Forsaken will first bring players to the Tangled Shore, a collection of asteroids anchored together in the Reef. Cayde has been filling the Prison of Elders with enemies, but his plan backfires and fills the universe with previously captured foes. The Fallen will return as our primary enemies, with the Barons — eight powerful foes who escaped the Prison of Elders — and the Skorn being new enemy types we’ll see.

Bungie, High Moon Studios/Activision

Each class is also getting a host of new supers. There are flaming knives, electric beams, and a giant flaming hammer. Bows are also a brand-new weapon type coming to Destiny 2. Players will be able to take on enemy players with laser arrows fired from all different kinds of bows.

Forsaken will bring a new kind of mode Destiny 2. Gambit is a PvPvE game mode — it has both competitive and cooperative elements — that takes place in the Prison of Elders, a location that should be familiar to Destiny players. In Gambit, players will take on enemies and collect a currency as they go. Banking the currency causes more enemies to spawn.

But you won’t be playing this mode alone. Instead, another team of Guardians will be taking on a similar challenge. You can block the enemy team from depositing their currency, and even jump over to their arena and kill them in select circumstances. Ultimately, it seems that one team is crowned as victors when they kill the final boss first.

One of the more mysterious features touched on in this new expansion reveal is that of the Dreaming City. The developers at Bungie described it as being similar to the Dreadnaught in Destiny’s Taken King expansion. The location is “built from the ground up to support endgame content,” according to Activision — including a full new raid.

Image: Bungie, High Moon Studios/Activision

Destiny 2 v2.0

Bungie is also working on plenty of improvements and new features that it will make available for all Destiny 2 players with the game’s version 2.0 update, which is scheduled to launch around the same time as Forsaken.

Players will be able to gather randomly rolled weapons — a feature returning from the original Destiny — and employ a more flexible weapon loadout, with Bungie promising the option to roll with three shotguns if desired. While we don’t know much about the loadout or mod system yet, it looks like players will be able to customize what they want to play with more efficiently than in vanilla Destiny 2. Bungie showed footage of Guardians with a power level of 600, although it’s unclear if that figure is final.

The studio also showed off a new gear collection feature. It will list all the weapons, armor and other items that players have already earned, and everything they have yet to unlock. The idea, said Bungie, is to tell players how to get the gear they’re missing to fill out their collection. In addition, Bungie plans to roll out a milestone feature that seems akin to the original Destiny’s Age of Triumph.

Other new elements that Bungie is promising for Destiny 2 v2.0 in its latest development roadmap include an extra 200 vault slots (for a total of 500), the long-awaited ability to delete shaders en masse, and a new Crucible mode and four additional maps. Plus, power levels will once again matter in Iron Banner and Trials of the Nine, just like they did in the original Destiny.