For the first time in Destiny 2, the Forsaken expansion will bring two full patrol zones to the game. Players will be able to explore the Tangled Shore during the campaign, and the Dreaming City once the endgame comes around. Through Game Informer’s August cover story, we’ve been able to learn even more about these two unique locations.
The Tangled Shore
In its original Forsaken announcement, Bungie spoke about wanting the expansion’s campaign to feel like a revenge tale from an old Western. The Tangled Shore realizes that dream with ragtag groups of enemies and what is essentially a space desert made of asteroids.
Each of the enemy races — aside from the Vex, as far as we know — is represented in the Tangled Shore in a few different ways. The Cabal are being pushed off of the Shore, with the few remaining soldiers fighting for their lives. The Fallen are attempting to fight back against their mutated brethren, the Scorn, who have seemingly taken over the entire zone. And a group of Hive has crash-landed on an asteroid, leaving them stranded in the new area.
Guardians will have quite a few enemies to fight back against, but they won’t be without allies. The Spider is the Tangled Shore vendor. The cover story describes him as a Fallen mob boss, and he looks like a large Vandal who’s fallen on hard times.
It seems that the Spider and his band of Fallen minions have gone into hiding since Prince Uldren and the Barons took over the Reef. Guardians will form a tenuous alliance with the Spider to help achieve their mutual goals. Not only will he send Guardians on missions and facilitate the new Prison of Elders inmate hunts, he’ll also send his minions to aid you on quests in the Tangled Shore.
As far as Public Events, the Tangled Shore boasts a completely new one. It’s called Cryo-Cell Escape, and asks players to take down a fugitive before it leaves the area. A frozen pod filled with a dangerous criminal will crash onto the Tangled Shore. For the first part of the Public Event, minions from that criminal’s faction will rush the pod and attempt to rescue their leader. After some time, the convict will escape and players will have to take it down. This activity has many different enemies it can pull from, meaning that it should be a bit more varied than some other Public Events.
The Tangled Shore is where players will spend most of the campaign in Forsaken, and it’s where they’ll hunt down Uldren and the eight Barons that serve under him. But once the campaign is over, players will be able to gain access to the Dreaming City, a new endgame location in Destiny 2.
The Dreaming City
The Dreaming City is a very mysterious location filled with secrets to find and difficult enemies to kill. Bungie has described it as being very similar to the Dreadnought in Destiny. But unlike Oryx’s ship, the Dreaming City is the size of Nessus and patrol-able on players’ Sparrows.
Inside the Dreaming City, players will encounter very powerful enemies — so powerful, in fact, that it could take weeks for players to tip the power difference in their favor. But they’ll have a familiar ally to help pull them through this challenging area: Petra Venj, who served the queen of the Reef in Destiny, is the vendor for the Dreaming City.
But unlike most vendors, Petra won’t stay in the same place all the time. Instead, she — along with the entire location — will exist on a three-week cycle. Each week, the Dreaming City will be different. Enemies will get more powerful, and even the landscape may change. Some secrets will even be unavailable during certain weeks.
One of the ways the world will change around players is with the Ascendant Realm, a secondary plane that exists alongside the Dreaming City. Players will be able to go in and out of this alternate reality at certain points, leaving Bungie room to literally hide things in plain sight.
There is a new Public Event in the Dreaming City called Rift Generator, which Game Informer describes as a tower defense-esque activity where players can power up turrets to defend an area. But the Dreaming City also houses an Escalation Protocol or Court of Oryx equivalent, the Blind Well.
The Blind Well allows six players to take on wave-based encounters in an arena filled with gas. As the activity proceeds, the gas will fluctuate and change, allowing players to have more or less fighting space as waves progress.
The Dreaming City will also house Forsaken’s raid, which takes place in a mysterious tower called the Keep of Voices. We know virtually nothing about this raid, aside from it having more bosses than Bungie has ever created before.
We should learn more about these two locations before they become playable when Destiny 2: Forsaken is released on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One on Sept. 4.