A lot of changes are coming with the Beyond Light expansion to Destiny 2 that’ll make your Guardian look cooler. Bungie already outlined how transmogrification will allow you to change the look of any piece of armor when its next expansion drops. Now it turns out that you’ll soon be able to customize your Ghost sidekick to make it more useful as you play, and give you a chance to show off a little more.
In its This Week at Bungie blog post, the developer outlined alterations it’s making to Ghost shells, the customizable looks you can add to your robotic Ghost pal. Right now, Ghost shells are largely cosmetic, and while you can earn some through different gameplay activities, most are purchased through the premium currency Eververse store. Shells offer a bunch of different looks for your Ghost and often have themes–there are some for the Festival of the Lost Halloween event, for instance, while others align with the story underpinnings of certain seasons, or just have cool animations and styles.
Each Ghost shell currently comes with a set of random perks that make using certain shells useful in specific situations. A Ghost shell might give you boosts to Glimmer or resource gains on a specific planet, make your Sparrow load faster, or give you extra experience boosts. Since perks are random, you’ll often find yourself switching Ghosts for different activities, which might saddle you with a shell you don’t particularly like to get the perks you need. Bungie is changing that in Beyond Light so that Ghost shells become more customizable, provided you’re willing to put in a little work.
Instead of having random perks, all Ghost shells in Beyond Light will take on a version of Destiny 2’s Armor 2.0 system introduced with the Shadowkeep expansion. Like armor in the new system, shells will have “Energy” that you can spend to equip “mods” to that shell. As with armor, shells will generally start with one Energy point, and you’ll have to spend in-game currency to upgrade those shells up to as many as 10 Energy points. Different mods carry different Energy costs, so the more you have to work with, the more mods you can equip, up to a total of four. If armor is anything to go on, expect better mods to have higher costs, so you’ll have to make decisions about what to spend your Energy on as you mix and match different mods.
As with armor, this means you’ll be able to customize Ghost shells to your liking once you’ve upgraded them, and switch their mods on the fly as necessary. If you’re headed to Nessus, you could slap in a mod specific to that planet that’ll net you higher resource gains from Public events–and when you leave, you could unequip that mod and replace it with one for another planet, or for activities like Gambit or Strikes.
Each Ghost shell will come with three mod slots unlocked by default: “an Experience mod slot, a Tracking mod slot, an Economic mod slot, and an Activity mod slot,” Bungie writes, with the fourth slot unlockable by upgrading a Ghost’s energy. All shells will have default mods equipped, but you’ll be able to earn more mods through gameplay. (You can still buy shells from the Eververse store with other cosmetics, but you won’t be able to buy mods there.) A few specific shells will still have their specific mods, like a shell that tracks Leviathan raid completions, but most existing perks are being brought forward as default mods.
Bungie’s plan here, as with armor, is to separate the look of a Ghost shell from its gameplay effects, so you’ll be able to use whatever shells you want and still get all the boosts you enjoy. As with Armor 2.0, it should allow you to bake your Ghost shell choices into your character build a little more easily, while potentially allowing for some new rewards to earn through gameplay. We’ll see how the new Ghost shell system plays out when Beyond Light launches on November 10.
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