Bungie’s been slowly peeling back the layers of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, unveiling systemic reworks, a new subclass, nitty gritty server details, and most importantly, a great deal of new loot for players to obtain. However, the newest Exotic weapon to be revealed isn’t entirely new, and might require a bit of a history lesson for folks to appreciate.
Today, Bungie announced that the Khvostov 7G-0X would be returning as an Exotic weapon in The Final Shape expansion. For those who likely don’t understand the significance of the move, this is the very first gun that players would’ve picked up and fired in the tutorial of the first Destiny way back in 2014.
Though the Khvostov auto-rifle you picked up just outside of Old Russia was a piece of shit that most players probably scrapped as soon as they could, this iteration of it is sure to be no joke. The Khvostov 7G-0X looks mostly the same—though it now boasts the paint job of one of its ornaments from the first Destiny as the base appearance—but it has a new Exotic perk that makes every seventh round fired ricochet between enemies. Seeing as how auto-rifles tend to feature magazines in the mid-20s, that’s a few guaranteed ricochets per reload, which might prove handy for clearing mobs of enemies when players undoubtedly take this weapon into endgame content.
Crucially, this isn’t the first time Bungie has re-released this weapon and made it into an Exotic. The first Destiny’s Rise of Iron expansion also featured the Khvostov 7G-0X, which was obtainable via an Exotic quest, though that version of the gun was entirely different. It lacked an Exotic perk that gave it a unique ability, but what made the Rise of Iron Khvostov significant was that it was highly customizable; it had upwards of 100 possible perk combinations that made it highly malleable to any kind of gameplay, whether it was PvE or PvP.
Destiny 2: The Final Shape is (sorry) shaping up to be a huge final chapter for the franchise’s ten-year history, and what better way to do so then by honoring the past with the very first weapon players ever used. A lot of The Final Shape seems to be leaning into nostalgia, considering the Pale Heart setting will apparently resemble locales that players have visited before. Not to mention, Nathan Fillion is returning to Destiny 2 to reprise his role as the jokester Hunter, Cayde-6, who has been dead since 2018’s acclaimed Forsaken expansion. I’d wager Bungie isn’t done bringing back beloved artifacts of Destiny’s past as it closes the book on this arc of the series, but I guess we’ll know more once The Final Shape launches in a few short weeks.