Destiny developer “truly sorry” as The Final Shape launch issues see players missing crucial story cutscenes

Destiny 2’s climactic expansion The Final Shape is now available, bringing to a close 10 years of storytelling – but launch issues have meant many players missed key narrative moments.

A string of issues plagued last night’s The Final Shape launch, which Bungie has now apologised for. These began with the game’s usual traffic issues whenever a big update lands, but continued with further problems that saw players kicked out of the game mid-activity and mid-cutscenes.

“I was wondering why the pacing felt so weird until I realised I had missed two entire cutscenes and had to look them up,” one fan wrote on reddit. “I understand and sympathise with server instability, but it feels so bad for the story experience to be harmed this much. I don’t remember this being that much of an issue with previous expansions.”

Destiny 2: The Final Shape | Reveal Trailer

As a “temporary workaround”, Bungie has said anyone affected can replay missions to then watch the cutscenes again at their end (there are five major cutscenes, at the end of missions one, four, five, six and seven). Alternatively, fans have already begun uploading the expansion’s full story moments onto YouTube.

Regardless, this isn’t how Destiny’s decade of narrative was supposed to climax, and for that Bungie has apologised.

“We built The Final Shape to be an exciting, cathartic, story-driven adventure for everyone to enjoy,” the developer wrote in a statement released overnight. “We’re truly sorry for connection issues and instability getting in the way of that experience, and we promise to keep working until these issues are resolved.”

While Destiny 2’s narrative reaches a climax in the expansion, Bungie has already said there’s plenty more Destiny to come. The coming year will see the launch of three DLC episodes to wrap up remaining plot threads – and after that, well, this was always just the end of the franchise’s Light and Dark saga. Leaks suggest work on Destiny 3 is already underway.