Destiny 2: Forsaken could mark a turning point in Destiny's story

Destiny 2: AbandonedThe Bungie campaign has been hailed as one of the best in Bungie. His story is simple on the surface: your friend Cayde-6 has been murdered, so you go to the border of space with a list of the names of the bad guys who are responsible and you kill them all.

For fans of Destiny, however, one of the most interesting aspects of the story is that it touches on a theme that has always existed under the surface of the tradition of the series: the possibility that the Guardians are not Gentiles.

The lost history of the original destiny

destiny went through a development process in famous trouble. The story of the original game is meaningless. Although this has brought players to all destinations and introduced all enemy races, many story topics have still not been resolved and no conspiracy has been found. It was bad enough that Kotaku investigative reporter Jason Schreier spent more than a year talking to sources inside the studio about what was happening.

Schreier issued a presentation in 2015 that indicated that late in destinyThe developers of the studio decided to hate the story of the game and want a total rewrite. This decision resulted in the ouster of veteran writer Joe Staten, and the team that succeeded him had to assemble the existing missions into some sort of feasible but new scenario.

While Bungie never published the details of the demolished narrative, unverified rumors circulating in the community suggest that the original story concerned the player's discovery that the Voyageur, a divine entity giving power to the Guardians and sleeping on the last human city, is not the savior that the guards believe that is.

The traveler would have been responsible for the destruction of most of humanity and the creation of the monsters that threatened the different planets on which you traveled. The player then joined a group of renegade Guardians in a quest to prevent the Traveler from being resurrected.

The leader of this group of Guardians was a Awoken character named The Crow. No analogous characters appeared in the final version destinybut his model was reused and became the prince Uldren, who is the villain of Abandoned.

So where does this put us now?

The Destiny franchise has never openly evoked the possibility that the Guardians actually work in the service of a malicious force, and we do not even know for sure if this was the original story. But it's an interesting place to start, because it contains a real arc and gives at least one meaning, unlike the wobbly tradition that the series uses today.

Indeed, the relationship between Traveler and the Guardians was totally ignored in all the original extensions of destiny. The traveler was rarely mentioned in the dialogues, and he played no role in the plot developments during destinyFirst three years. The President, a sort of high priest of the traveler, did not speak at all during the expansion. He has been appointed.

The idea that the traveler is benevolent has been reinforced in Destiny 2The campaign through a discussion of how the Guardians are chosen by the Light because of their righteousness. The villain, Ghaul, tries to seize the power of the Traveler, but the Traveler defends himself – first by empowering the Player's Guardian with new abilities and, at the end of the campaign, by waking up from his dormant state to annihilate Ghaul.

The President was a mysterious and vaguely sinister character in the original destiny campaign. This makes sense if you think he was probably conceived as a villain before the game's story was overhauled. But in Destiny 2, the President is kidnapped and eventually killed by the Red Cabal Legion, and his role is to pass his captivity by explaining to Ghaul that the Travelers must choose the beneficiaries of the Light, that the Light can not be stolen and that the dignity of To be chosen is a matter of virtue, no power.

This president has no secrets; he only recites the anodyne platitudes of the traveler.

The lost history of the remnants of Destiny remains

While the original vision of Destiny & # 39; s The story would have been abandoned, fragments of the old tradition remain in the original campaign missions, in the Grimoire cards and in the flavor text on various weapons and armor, which suggests that the traveler has a dark side.

First of all, the guards are zombies. There is no way to revisit this issue. destiny The Ghost begins by finding a corpse in a rusty car on a section of post-apocalyptic ruined road and resurrecting it to become a Guardian in which you play. The ghost can resurrect the guardian several times, as long as the ghost itself is not destroyed. Guardians are unstoppable undead warriors who fire and light.

Bungie / Activision

Secondly, the Fallen, one of the enemy races of the game, derive their name from the fact that they were favored by the traveler, and then abandoned them, which led to the ruin of their civilization. They may have been destroyed by the traveler's enemy, The Darkness. Now they are desperately recovering the abandoned technology to find its tracks. This suggests that the Traveler is a cowardly entity that illuminates the races he favors so that he can fight for it, and that if these battles do not unfold as expected, he will flee, abandoning his followers to their fate. .

Third, destinyThe Grimoire cards strongly suggest that Rasputin, IA Warmind, suspected the traveler of abandoning humanity in times of crisis and that he was considering using his nuclear arsenal to prevent the traveler from escaping. It is unclear whether Rasputin actually attacked the Traveler, but many players believe that these cards suggest that Rasputin's attack rendered the Traveler inactive, and that Rasputin's decision to attack the Traveler saved the last one. city ​​and the rest of humanity from destruction.

However, these Grimoire cards have been added with the King catch expansion, one year later destinyLiberation and long after Bungie reorganized the story of Staten. So, whatever these Grimoire cards suggest about Rasputin's story, it probably corresponds to the company's current franchise plan.

A darker turning point Abandoned

The plot of Abandoned is the darkest Destiny has ever had.

The villain this time is Prince Uldren. Queen Mara Sov of Awoken, sister of Uldren, lost after failure of reef attempt to stop Oryx's assassination King catch. Uldren heard her voice, despite the fact that the player is supposed to believe she's dead.

Uldren frees a group of fallen barons from the old prison to lead his new army of fallen zombies. With their help, he kills Cayde-6 and steals his Ace of Spades gun.

Meanwhile, the Guardian player teams up with General Awoken Petra Venj and heads to the reef to avenge Cayde by killing Uldren and his barons. Uldren goes on the burst of the traveler, who restored the guardian's light in the Destiny 2 campaign, and use the Cayde gun to pull a piece of shard. He brings it back to the reef for use in a ritual that, according to him, will bring back his sister.

Throughout the campaign, we learn in cinematics that Uldren did not communicate with the deceased queen. Instead, he is manipulated by a Lovecraftian space dragon that has led him to open an extradimensional portal in order to free new monsters in the game. Uldren is not a bad brain; he's a traumatized guy who's overcome with grief after taking part in a war against unspeakable horror, then his vulnerability was exploited by another indescribable horror.

However, the Guardian or Petra executes a disarmed and helpless Uldren at the end of the campaign. The game fades to black before the shot, so it's not clear which of them is killing him.

What does it mean for guards?

This is the first time we have seen the Traveler's Light used for purposes other than the protection of the solar system against extraterrestrial invaders who are willing to kill the rest of humanity. In Abandoned, the goalkeeper uses the light to settle a score. And we also learn that the power of the traveler – who, according to the President, could not be stolen but had to be given – can actually be used to open portals to the dimensions of hell.

The way Bungie developed his story gave the impression that the Guardians' god of alien space would not feel like heels. Destiny. But after Abandonedit seems a little less impossible that the history of the franchise goes in that direction.

It could be interesting if Bungie were willing to do anything to ensure that his players knew if the players had not done the right thing by slaughtering billions of foreigners over the past four years. We must continue to play to know it.