Destiny 2: The Final Shape’s Prismatic subclass feels like another grand experiment

When I first saw the debut trailer for Prismatic, the new ‘advanced’ subclass was coming Lot 2 in The final shape — I told my friends, “This is the most important change they’ve ever announced for Destiny.” And after visiting Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, to play some of the expansion early, I’m convinced I was right.

“Deploying Prismatic will likely change Destiny on a fundamental level,” said Ben Wommack, Lot 2‘s combat zone leader, told me during our on-site interview. “But that’s actually the point of releasing these types of features in the game.”

If you’re unfamiliar, 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 shape, which is separate from Prismatic). Instead, the idea is that Guardians can combine elements from all their subclasses to create much more elaborate and powerful builds than ever before.

For example, currently if I want to use the Thundercrash Super on my Titan, I need to be in my Arc subclass because Thundercrash is an Arc ability. Prismatic lifts those restrictions – usually – so when The final shape is launched, 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, a new Super-like ability that you can charge by dealing Light and Darkness damage in equal amounts. Damage from Light-based weapons or abilities fills the Light bar, while the opposite fills the Darkness bar. Once you’ve filled both bars, you can ‘Transcend’, which will replenish all your skill energy, temporarily increase your weapon’s damage and defense, and give you an exclusive Transcendence grenade.

It’s all very overwhelming, but as Wommack said, that’s exactly the point.

“I think this is really us giving a big love letter to the master builders of the game,” Wommack said. ‘We’re going to give you a lot to think about. And we want you to think about it, because we think about it.

Catarina Macedo, the project leader of the expansion project Lot 2, went on to say that Prismatic works from two angles: rewarding players who already have a lot of knowledge of the game – the “master build crafters” that Wommack mentioned – and encouraging players who have very little experience creating builds to join in do the fun. Prismatic gives you so many more options than you’ve ever had in Destiny, that it’s almost impossible to look at the Prismatic customization screen and not think: Okay, how am I going to make these things work together?

Now I’ve put together quite a few builds with Destiny in my decade, but during my preview I repeatedly found myself jumping into my menu and making minor adjustments to my Prismatic setup. Finding a way to consistently charge my Transcendence meter felt like a real dance, and it got me thinking about how well my gear synergized with my class setup. I had a nice Stasis and Strand Titan built together that allowed me to freeze and suspend everything, but without any Light skills I had a really hard time getting the Light side of my Transcendence buff bar going.

Image: Bungie

To solve the problem, I started changing my weapons, swapping a Strand melee for an Arc melee. Now kills with my primary and heavy weapons added to my Lightbar, while most of my skills gave me Darkness energy. Every time I tried out a new build I had to go through this iteration process. And every time, the game rewarded me for it, as if every piece of the puzzle I managed made me that much stronger. I wasn’t just building so I could take down a big raid boss or a difficult 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 wondered how Bungie could ever challenge me again. The legendary campaign missions I played felt much easier then Light And The Witch Queen once I figured out how to maximize my new powers. But Bungie did already promised that the new Final shape raid is shaping up to be one of the franchise’s most difficult, and after last summer’s extremely difficult revival of Crota’s End, I’m willing to give Bungie the benefit of the doubt here.

My more serious concern was about what skills and aspects the developers decided to include in Prismatic, as currently you can only chain certain skills from each element together.

The team at Bungie decided to use some of the least popular aspects from each class when creating Prismatic. This meant I only had access to aspects I don’t spend a lot of time on. On the one hand, that was quite exciting, because it made the whole package feel fresh. On the other hand, I wondered what kind of builds I could make if Bungie loosened the restrictions even further.

Image: Bungie

What if I could combine the Sol Invictus Sunspots aspect of the Solar Titan with the Controlled Demolition aspect of the Void Titan so I could spread explosive, healing pools of fire throughout the entire arena? That would certainly be even stronger and harder to balance than the Prismatic I played during my preview – which is probably why both aspects are not available for Prismatic. But the new subclass is so much fun that it’s a bit of a shame I can’t just play out whatever bizarre Titan Fever dream my brain can come up with.

That may sound like whining, because you can only have cake or ice – and it is – but the people I spoke to at Bungie are fine with that.

“We have a lot of future plans that we hope to change and respond to depending on how players react to Prismatic on the first day, the first weekend, during the raid race and the first week,” Bom said. He told me that the developers want and expect players to think about how non-prismatic aspects would affect their prismatic construction. But the hope is that those same players will also ask themselves questions like, “How would Bungie balance that?”

There are a few ways to look at Wommack’s statement, but to me it’s clear that Prismatic is an experiment, much like Stasis was for the subclass 3.0 system in 2020. The final shape‘s launch, that experiment is already the most interesting thing Destiny has seen in years. But what will this experiment look like in a few months, or even next year? That’s the question all Destiny fans should ask at some point The final shape arrives June 4.

Disclosure: This article is based on a Destiny 2: The Final Form preview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from May 14 to 17. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodation for the event. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.