Destiny 2's long-awaited finale for 10 years of cosmic storytelling is finally here, and players spent the first day struggling to get through pivotal cutscenes without the servers crashing and booting them back into outer space. Bungie’s overnight fixes have fortunately brought some much needed stability to The Final Shape experience, but in the meantime fans are furiously taking inventory of important dialogue or emotional moments they might have missed.
New Destiny 2 expansions are always mess. Servers can’t handle the initial onslaught of players, weird error codes kick them offline, and new bugs materialize as all of the fresh content is explored for the first time outside of internal testing. The Final Shape has been no different, but the fact that it’s a cutscene-heavy conclusion to the loot shooter’s 10-year Light and Darkness saga has made all of these issues more annoying than usual.
It would be one thing just to have trouble logging on or even just getting disconnected while on patrol. But players are also missing entire scenes. The biggest culprit is an error code called “Currant,” which kicks players to space before important events unfold at the end of a mission, like the reunion with Nathan Fillion’s back-from-the-dead Cayde-6 for the first time in six years.
“I was wondering why the pacing felt so weird until I realized I had missed 2 entire cutscenes and had to look them up,” wrote user JustSomeDude477 in one of the most upvoted threads on the Destiny subreddit. “Just got done with the 4th mission,” wrote another player. “People told me I didn’t see 2 cutscenes and had to watch them on YouTube. I’m not one to get mad easily but that’s just outrageous.”
There’s even an in-game message telling players that The Final Shape is best experienced as a single, cohesive narrative. While players can go do other stuff in the game, they’re clearly meant to barrel through to the end like a traditional Halo campaign. Unfortunately, there’s no way to go back and re-play cutscenes. As a result, players have been frantically uploading them to YouTube and sharing around the links so no one is left behind or accidentally misses something important.
This has frequently been a challenge for Destiny 2. Fans might remember the time a pivotal cutscene leading into 2022's The Witch Queen simply never played for some players because others in their group kept accidentally skipping it for the whole squad.
“Currant errors causing players to get kicked out of activities and miss cutscenes started at around 3:00 p.m. (PT) and remains our highest priority issue to resolve,” Bungie wrote last night on Reddit. “We believe we have identified the issue, and will be doing rolling server restarts soon to attempt to resolve this.”
The studio encouraged all players who might have missed a cutscene to go back and play the missions they’re attached to again from the Replayable Missions node in the middle of the Pale Heart map. Those scenes take place at the end of mission one, four, five, six, and seven.
“We built The Final Shape to be an exciting, cathartic, story-driven adventure for everyone to enjoy,” the development team continued. “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.”
Destiny 2 appears to be a lot more stable today. I played through the first few missions and didn’t hit any issues. Hopefully things continue to go smoothly until the raid drops on June 7. After it’s completed, The Final Shape’s eight and final story mission will unlock for all players, bringing an end to the crusade some players have been on for a decade now. In the meantime, you can find links to all of the existing cutscenes here.
? ? ? ? ?