It took about a month, but all of the promised exotics in Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion have been found. A few had early, relatively easy quests leading to them (Ace of Spades, Chaperone), others are hidden behind a miniscule drop rate in the wild, and this past week, Bungie unleashed the timegates of the last two missing exotics, Malfeasance and Wish Ender.
And yet I don’t think that’s everything that’s coming.
I once said that if The Last Word didn’t end up returning to Destiny 2 in Forsaken, that I would 3D print a model of the gun and eat it. Well, it didn’t arrive with other exotics, so that’s starting to look like an ill-conceived promise. And yet, I still have faith.
I do believe The Last Word is coming. And I think it’s going to be Forsaken’s Whisper of the Worm.
The Last Word is the iconic, hip-firing hand cannon from Destiny 1 that was one of the biggest fan favorites of the original, short of Gjallarhorn and Icebreaker. Its lore is pure spaghetti western, and given that Forsaken is essentially Destiny 2’s space western, it seems extremely likely that The Last Word will make an appearance.
Bungie has not exactly been subtle about teasing the weapon. I think the line “the last word” is spoken in the Forsaken script at least two or three times, and there’s no way that wasn’t intentional given how relatively little dialogue there is overall.
It seems likely to me that in an expansion full of secret quests and timegates, that The Last Word may turn out to be the ultimate secret, something revealed out of nowhere like the Whisper of the Worm quest this past summer that just shows up someday.
We already sort of have this with Wish Ender, a bow that requires a couple completions of a really, really difficult dungeon in the Dreaming City, a type of activity that Destiny really hasn’t done to date, something between a raid and a strike, but probably also the most similar to the Whisper quest.
The difference is that Wish Ender was teased before the release of Forsaken, and The Last Word, though hinted at and wished for by fans, has not. And in this, Bungie’s expansion jammed packed with the most secrets we’ve ever seen, I think we’re kidding ourselves to imagine there aren’t more hidden exotics coming, and I have to believe The Last Word is among them.
How should it arrive? After all, Whisper of the Worm and quests like Wish Ender are a biiiit exclusionary to most of the playerbase, given their extreme difficulty. Yet Bungie seems to be catering to harder core players more than ever, and many would argue the game has benefitted from it. As such, even if The Last Word is a returning exotic, I cannot imagine the quest or mission to acquire it would be easy, when it does arrive.
I will say The Last Word would arrive into a fairly crowded hand cannon market. Ace of Spades is one of the best exotics in the game. Malfeasance was the hidden quest hand cannon exotic. Trust is probably the best legendary weapon in the game. But nothing plays quite like The Last Word, so even if that was the case, I highly doubt anyone would mind.
The bulk of Forsaken’s secrets do seem to have been found at this point, but there’s so much in the Dreaming City it’s honestly hard to say what’s still hidden to be found. I am particularly struck by the “Callum’s Grave” area that fans found and thought it was tied directly to the Malfeasance quest. Yet that quest has come and gone, and visiting that area isn’t required. Callum appears as a blackened stain on the wall, Golden Gunned into ash by Shin Malphur. The gun that did the melting? The Last Word. (Update: I am told you visit this area during the Malfeasance quest version of the strike which I would know if I could GET THE DAMN SEETHING HEART TO DROP)
Stay tuned.
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