For years, Destiny 2 players have been wondering when the game would take them to a location teased way back before the original Destiny was even released: Old Chicago. With the release of its latest expansion, Edge of Fate, it looks like we might have at least a vague answer: soon.
Echoes of Fate seems subtle on this point, at first. Though the story is set on Kepler, a new location flung way out toward the edge of the solar system, it deals a lot with time-bending looks back into the past, and a few hints toward the future. You get your first hint about Chicago when Lodi, the expansion’s new character, gets a glimpse of the future. He mentions standing with the Guardian, Destiny’s player character, on the shores of Lake Michigan–the Great Lake on whose shores Chicago is found.
And then there’s the train. The campaign’s opening cutscene sees series mainstay Ikora Rey nearly getting run over by a subway train seemingly zapped across time to appear in Destiny 2’s far-flung futuristic post-apocalypse. Trains are all over the expansion, acting as a story touchstone, a sort of reality-bending entry point for different areas in the new location of Kepler, and the expansion’s defining image.
That train car sure looks like Chicago’s “El” train, the elevated railway that runs throughout the city, once you’re primed to look for it. And if you zoom in on the Edge of Fate key art, you can see the train’s destination printed above the door. It says “Ravenswood,” a north Chicago neighborhood.
But any sleuthing becomes unnecessary when things get really explicit later on, as you near the end of the campaign. In one of the final missions, Destiny 2 mainstay Ikora Rey literally says something to the effect of, “Maybe soon we’ll go to Chicago.”
Old Chicago is a big deal to Destiny players who have been around for a while. The location has been wondered about, discussed, and even teased for years. Bungie first dropped the possibility of visiting Old Chicago back before the original Destiny was even released. Since then, references to the city have come up time and again in lore and story. When Bungie first showed off images of its 2022 expansion, The Witch Queen, players speculated the location in its first trailer might be the swampy outskirts of Chicago.
It’d be a significant location to visit, because while Destiny 2 has destinations set on Earth, they’re fairly nondescript. The European Dead Zone, or EDZ, takes players to a destroyed, fictional European town called Trostland. There’s also the Cosmodrome, an airplane and spaceship graveyard and control facility located somewhere in Russia. But both locations are invented for Destiny 2–they don’t really reference anywhere specific from our world.
Chicago, on the other hand, would be a recognizable place from our reality, and it would be the first. While the old cities of Earth are all destroyed hundreds of years before the events of Destiny 2, surely the city will still look like the Chicago we expect, and seeing it in its ravaged, post-alien invasion state would be interesting in and of itself.
It’d also be the first American location to get Destiny 2’s futuristic treatment, so we’d get to see how Bungie might play with the city and change it through the course of both hundreds of years of progress and hundreds of years of decay. That’s to say nothing of what gameplay opportunities the ravaged city might afford, or story implications of the possibility of any humans still eeking out a living there.
There are hints within the Edge of Fate campaign that Chicago could be an important location as Destiny 2’s story develops, too. Cutscenes in the expansion jump back in time to Earth in what appears to be the 1960s, and one includes a distant city skyline. That city is also the apparent location of the Department of External Observation, a government agency from the past focused on the possibility of alien contact and abduction, which plays a significant role in the expansion. So if Chicago is, in fact, a future destination, it seems very likely the DEO is too.
That’s a lot of speculation, but it really seems like Edge of Fate is setting up Chicago as its next big destination. If that’s the case, it’ll be the culmination of waiting and speculation that’s lasted all of Destiny’s life–almost 12 years.
