While Destiny 2 had a momentous finale for its Light and Darkness Saga in The Final Shape, which offered a clean opportunity to end its story there, the game’s development team at Bungie were narratively on a roll. The expansions that followed that quasi-climactic release, The Edge of Fate and Renegades, were meant to kickstart a second Fate Saga for the game. However, mechanical choices, particularly around attempts to more easily onboard new and returning players, not only failed to do so, they soured the experience for a lot of player Guardians who never left.
Aside from its issues, though, Destiny 2’s story has never been better, and it will be a real shame, if this truly is the end of the franchise, that we’ll never see that narrative play out.
For those who don’t know, the fate of Destiny was changed at the 11th hour before the original game’s release. Joseph Staten, who helped write the original Halo trilogy, was the initial lead writer for the first Destiny game. However, mere months before that title’s launch, much of Staten’s narrative was scrapped as it was deemed too dense and linear for the flexible and open design of the game. Staten left to join Xbox, and Destiny launched to reviews that heavily critiqued the game’s story, or lack thereof. As one developer at Bungie put it, Destiny was “a game written without writers.” Concepts like the Light and Darkness were in place, but no one on the team actually knew what they were.
Narratively, Destiny managed to scrape along by fleshing out said concepts as best it could. The studio focused more on developing its characters, such as Oryx, The Taken King, and Uldren Sov, the Awoken prince who would be reborn as the Guardian Crow. From their character development, the story of the game would be formed around them. Little by little, the team was building a more solid foundation on which to tell future tales.
The inconsistency continued in the lead-up to The Final Shape. Releases like Beyond Light and Lightfall were both criticized for falling short in their narratives for various reasons, while The Witch Queen was highly praised for its development around fan-favorite character Savathûn, as well as expanding how Destiny’s Light and Darkness worked.
In these expansions, Bungie slowly introduced the Witness, the eventual big bad of the Light and Darkness Saga. In the early days of the game, the downfall of humanity was simply the result of an ill-defined force that characters referred to as “the Darkness,” and the only thing that saved our species was another nebulous power known as “the Light,” which belonged to a giant, alien ball in the sky that had made its home on planet Earth centuries before the events of the Destiny duology: the Traveller.
While you can certainly point to moments in the earlier years of the game that hint toward the existence of the Witness, it’s clear this character wasn’t nailed down by the team until those later expansions in the Light and Darkness Saga. But once that character was defined, it felt as if all of Destiny’s disparate lore and narrative suddenly clicked into place.
From the very beginning of Destiny, players have known the Traveller is a higher being that moves from planet to planet, bringing with it the power for tremendous change. This ultimately results in prosperity for whichever civilization harnesses its Light, but once the Traveller leaves, that visited society begins to unravel, perpetuated by the arrival of the Darkness, which seems to be chasing the Traveller through the cosmos. However, when the Darkness, and the various antagonistic forces that accompany it, arrive on Earth, the Traveller remains with our world.
As is eventually revealed years into Destiny 2, the Witness belonged to a race of ancient beings dubbed the Precursors, who, eons ago, discovered the Traveller buried dormant on their home planet. Once unearthed, the Traveller woke up and worked its magic, uplifting the Precursors. However, in their enlightened state, the alien race understood that the Traveller’s magnificent power to bring about rapid change could also lead to chaos, and the Precursors searched for a means to control such power in order to avoid calamity.
Their hunt brought them to the Veil, an entity of Darkness. Another element that isn’t clarified until these later expansions is that while the Light has the power to manipulate the physical, the Darkness has the ability to influence the metaphysical: thoughts and emotions. With this power, the Precursors thought that they could wield the Light of the Traveller for themselves and create what would come to be known as the Final Shape; essentially creating what they believed to be the perfect formation of the universe, and then freezing it in time, preserving such a state from the chaotic forces of change.
However, there was dissension within the various factions of the Precursors as to what the Final Shape looked like, so the most zealous among them used their newfound knowledge of the Darkness to form all Precursors into a single being: the Witness. Any dissenting voices within this singular entity were successfully silenced and suppressed.
This revelation suddenly gave fantastic context to every facet of Destiny lore that we had absorbed prior to it. The Traveller wasn’t just aimlessly wandering from planet to planet, with a nebulous Darkness chasing it. It was running away from the Witness, which wished to wield its power to enact a terrible Final Shape. In its journey, the Traveller was looking for a civilization that could instead utilize its Light to fend off the Witness and the forces it had amassed over the years of chasing it through the universe. For one reason or another, the Traveller decided that the peoples of Earth were the ones who were up to the task, and that is why it didn’t flee as the Darkness encroached upon the planet.
In The Final Shape expansion, the player Guardians used both the Light and Darkness to chip away at the dissenting voices within the Witness’ psyche, severely weakening a once seemingly omnipotent being, metaphysically hacking away at each singular Precursor housed within it until there was nothing left.
It was an epic finale, in much the same way that Endgame served as an immensely satisfying conclusion to the string of Avengers movies that had been building up to that release. I totally get why many players–and based on Bungie’s blog post announcing the end of the game, those within the development team themselves–feel as if Destiny 2 should have ended with such a release. But that feeling totally discounts how good the story of the game continued to be even after The Final Shape.
You see, unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which had a very messy continuation following Avengers Endgame–with a mixed bag of both movies and TV shows–the start of The Fate Saga, at least from a narrative standpoint, was incredibly strong. Unlike The Light and Darkness Saga, which kicked off with very little forethought as to the direction the story of Destiny was heading, The Fate Saga had a clear directive.
The Nine, fourth-dimensional beings that have been pulling the strings of Destiny’s universe since the dawn of time, are, for the first time, at odds with one another. Each is tied to a celestial body within the solar system (the eight planets and the Sun), and exist outside of time and space. Five of the Nine believe that they need to continue nurturing humanity and existing within this fourth dimension, while the other four wish to untether themselves from such a cosmic cage, and use their powers to transform from puppet masters into beings that can actually experience the universe themselves, rather than through proxies.
In The Edge of Fate, the first expansion following The Final Shape, the renegade quad within the Nine manipulate events to ensure the death of III, the member of the group that is tied to the Earth and the one most fond of various lifeforms that call it home. In doing so, Nine becomes Eight, not only balancing the scales between the two disagreeing halves, but also removing the most passionate voice among those that wish to keep the status quo. By the end of The Edge of Fate, players learn that the actions of the dissenting members within the Nine will lead to the unraveling of the entire solar system, lest they “bind the Nine.”
Then in Renegades, the next expansion and the last expansion that Destiny 2 will ever receive, players learn that binding the Nine entails binding them with physical bodies. You see, the Nine communicate with mortal beings through an Envoy. In The Edge of Fate, a new Envoy for the group is chosen: a man called Lodi. He realizes that when one of the Nine talks through him, they actually cannot use their fourth-dimensional powers to simultaneously pull the strings of the universe. Therefore, he surmises that if the Guardians can find a way to permanently bind each of the Nine to a physical entity, their powers to manipulate events would be nullified entirely.
This revelation leads to the biggest tease in the history of Destiny; that the answer for how to accomplish this task can be found in the ruins of Old Chicago. For Destiny players, Old Chicago is an almost mythological place. It was meant to be a part of the original Destiny game, but was one of the many things that was cut from that release. Over the years, teases for the location were drip-fed throughout the game, and at the end of Renegades, players were fully expecting that they were finally going to visit the lost city.
Hopefully, even if you never experienced these moments for yourself, you can see why players were so excited for where this story was heading. Not only had clear confrontations been set up with tantalizing consequences if players were to fail in their mission, but the game was also going to lean into the most highly requested inclusion since the launch of the first Destiny back in 2014.
Yes, The Final Shape was the peak of Destiny’s narrative, but what came after actually continued to deliver a very compelling story. When I visited Bungie in the fall of last year to preview Renegades, narrative lead Allison Luhrs felt very confident in where the game’s story was headed, and described it as an accordion that was malleable and could be squished or stretched depending on the direction Destiny 2’s development went.
Tragically, it turns out that that direction is nowhere; the narrative accordion has been squashed into a flat pancake. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, while members of the team are pitching projects within the Destiny universe, Destiny 3 doesn’t seem to be on the table and mass layoffs loom at the storied developer, making the path to seeing this tantalizing story through, and Old Chicago, highly unlikely.
And that’s a damn shame, as Destiny’s story had never been this consistently good until it was too late
