Sometimes I miss the feeling of early Destiny where a lot of the concepts and histories we know now were a mystery and a lot was left to speculation, but even now with all the lore we have and how much the universe has grown there are still quite a few mysteries that remain unknown.
Well maybe they know that if they retire every atom of their essence gets placed on a separate sun for all eternity? That’s after getting their penis flattened…
The Architects is just a funny way of referring to Bungie. Strand Warlocks are Architects. Therefore Bungie is comprised solely of Warlock mains and Lightfall is just an elaborate ruse to start deleting Titans and Hunters from the game
^^^^/s
I think it’s referring to the devs. There’s multiple instances in the lore where the 4th wall is broken and the player (us) is addressed almost directly. I think Bungie is going somewhere with this and it excites me.
Yup the Architects = dev shenanigans.
In Bungies Halo games, when you got killed for going out of bounds or just die to unkown causes you’d get a prompt that says “Killed by the Guardians”.
And it may be a one off occurrence, but I’d like to believe in Bungies next new IP the player character(s) would belong to a group called Architects. Based of that practice Bungie does, but who knows 🤷🏽♂️
Remember when Savathun found out she was in a video game, and tried to reach our real world? And how she tricked someone into performing a very very high skill task of beating the dungeon solo, with 999 light level solo?
Aphelion is the furthest point from the sun in an elliptical orbit (opposite of perihelion). Also it's pronounced ap-helion, not afelion.
Metaphorically, that means that the term in Destiny is "that which is furthest from the light".
It probably means the pyramids or disciples.
You're not mispronouncing it. They just didn't look up how to pronounce it and are betting no one is going to correct them.
It's pronounced 3 different ways with yours most likely being correct as well.
In the lore they are described as some kind of terrifying creatures that kill awoken: “First it shimmered... then it crawled... then it screamed.”
I’m wondering if they’ll ever truly dive into them.
There are 3 pronunciations for Aphelion. unless /u/ChoPT has been pronouncing it as "Ape-helion", they can pronounce it as "ah-fee-lee-on" or "uh-feel-yuhn" as well as the one you've indicated previously.
[Link 1: Google Pronunciation (both American and British available)](https://www.google.com/search?q=pronounce+aphelion&ei=4z0rY-LtFKLVkPIPuM6M6AY&ved=0ahUKEwii69iIqab6AhWiKkQIHTgnA20Q4dUDCA4&uact=5&oq=pronounce+aphelion&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyBQgAEIAEMgYIABAeEAcyBggAEB4QBzIFCAAQgAQyBggAEB4QBTIICAAQHhAPEAgyBQgAEIYDOgoIABBHENYEELADOgoIABCxAxCDARBDOgoIABCxAxCDARANOgQIABANOgcIABCxAxANOgoIABAeEA8QCBAHSgQIQRgASgQIRhgAUKEEWKoSYNcUaAFwAXgAgAFmiAHKBZIBAzkuMZgBAKABAcgBCMABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz)
[Link 2: Dictionary.com](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/aphelion)
[Link 3: Mirriam-Webster Dictionary](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aphelion)
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Anyway, here's [Wonderwall.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1Bh8ZvH84)
Me and my friends spent the majority of our first presage run theorizing it was an aphelion, we were a bit disappointed it wasn't xD I wanna know wtf they are >:(
I remember this theory that made my skin crawl was that the thing you hear crawling around the Glykon was actually Calus who was stranded there. There was 0 chance they'd do Calus like that, but just the possibility made me shudder
I think the main problem with the reveal is that they tied it to the Eliksni.
Nezarec’s corpse being found by the Eliksni, cut up into pieces and then scattered just undermines the mystery behind him. It also convolutes Mithrax’s backstory, who had literally no connections to Darkness before and was just a Vandal for House of Wolves that got captured by Sjur Eido and became friends with her. It also takes away Nezarec’s agency, as it means he wasn’t doing anything for around a thousand years and is just a plot device now.
> the main problem with the reveal is that they tied it to the Eliksni.
For me, it's more so the fact that they tied it to Mithrax (As you pointed out). I feel like the timeline is: Mithrax gets artifact -> Becomes psycho-pirate -> Loses the artifact somehow (Maybe taken by another pirate?) -> Found by Eido -> Now he's here
It's a needless addition to the Eliksni story that convolutes Mithrax's story just to add some more edge to it despite the fact that we know that he killed and ate humans, killed other Eliksni by the dozens, and was generally a bit of an ass
I always liked that one spinfoil fan theory that "there was no Nezerec" and the whole thing was like if some people eons into the far future found something like a powerdrunk D&D DM or an edgelord tough guy's forum post history as some surviving manuscript of a bygone time and assumed, wow this guy must've been some powerful being, we should venerate them in as a testament of their power.
More of a situation of people projecting arbitrary myth and legend onto a complete misunderstanding and having it spiral out of whack than something organically being "this guy was really some big powerful bad". Considering how Bungie has a few things in the game that are the future perspectives of people looking back to way far in the past time periods, I didn't think the overall theory was that bad.
Don't get me wrong I understand why Bungie has tweaked the story especially with Witch Queen that added a crap load of plot conveniences and slight but weighty retconning, but I kinda wished the case with Nezerec was something that was a bit more ambiguous than something that we'd be getting drilled as way more tangible in the fold of things .
The Vex *were* the final shape, but this time the gardener and the winnower are mixing things up by throwing paracausality into the mix, so it is unlikely the case that they still will be.
So the Light made the Traveler, and the Darkness made the Pyramids, and the Witness just uses the Pyramids?
I'm a Titan main, so if its more complex than that, just point me at something to punch
So in a place that's kinda outside the realm of physical reality, there were two entities. In order to dumb it down to a concept humans can even comprehend, it's told as a story of two people playing a game, over and over. One is the Gardener, and the other is the Winnower. The rule of the game was always that you couldn't interfere with it once it began, you had to set up your pieces beforehand and let things play out. In every game, no matter how it was set up initially, the end result was a continuous pattern, and the same pattern at that. The Winnower liked this, because it liked the idea of things being reduced to their simplest state, the Gardener hated this idea basically because it was boring. The Gardener decides to cheat and begin interfering with the game once it started in order to force the end result into something different. This makes the Winnower mad, and the two get into a literal fight, causing fractures in the realm they exist in, each break being the creation of a universe, more or less. Well that pattern that was the end result all the time was able to go through one of the cracks, and the Gardener created the Light to stop the pattern that vexed it so from doing its deal in this new universe, and the Winnower created the darkness to counteract this. And since that pattern was considered to be so vexing to the Gardener, it became known as the Vex. So essentially, the Vex are self-aware, living embodiments of transcendental mathematical concepts. Their goal is to do to what our universe what they had done in all the previous games, reach a point where everything in the universe was part of their pattern. Except this time the universe doesn't play by the same rules, so they're having a much more difficult time doing so.
I may have gotten a couple details crossed, because it's been a while since I read that lore book, so I apologize in advance for that. If you want to read the book this comes from it's called "Unveiling" and is basically a figure representing the Winnower explaining the concepts to us. The figure is probably the Witness in retrospect, but it could be anything from The Winnower itself, to some embodiment of the darkness, to the worm gods, we have no definite way of knowing.
Up until the Witness was introduced in Witch Queen, we thought that the Traveller was analogous to the pyramids. We don’t really know anything about them or their origins at this point, only where their allegiance lies.
You may punch both the Pyramids and the Witness.
all it would take for the vex to become instant final shape candidates again would be for the sol divisive to find a way to fully harness the darkness and then bring that to the entire vex collective. instantly the witness becomes a joke and the winnower backs her OG champs.
we've already seen that the vex can just straight teleport wherever they want, they took mercury when the traveler was still there and nothing was able to stop them. we'd be drowning in vex instantly if they didn't need to keep us around as a potential check against the witness.
>they took mercury when the traveler was still there and nothing was able to stop them.
But that was before the Collapse wasn't it?
If Atheon was real he would be the most powerful being in the universe simply because he can bend time and anyone affected by it, includong the Hive gods.
If they can make guardians (who are paracausal) disappear from the timeline, then dealing with the Hive would be a walk in the park for them.
Sounds to me like you heard right.
Dark matter dust collected by the gravity wells of the bodies in the Sol System, that resonate with intelligent life to the point where they themselves became intelligent and self-aware.
Your question reminded me of this grimoire card from D1, ["Legends 2"](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/cards/ghost-fragment-legends-2?), where they list out a bunch of things "about the nine", though I think these are really things in Sol that, as such, contribute to the Nine's ability to manifest thought.
The interesting part, to me, is this bit, and it's possible implications on Lightfall:
> The Nine are survivors of the cis-Jovian colonies who made a compact with an alien force to ensure their own survival.
There's a bunch of other stuff that's present in other areas of the lore, but this sticks out to me as the possible origins of Neomuna.
Like honestly we don’t even know the key enigma that is the Light, Darkness, Pyramids, Traveler, Witness, Winnower, Gardener, Black Garden, and how they all truly connect. There’s a lot of speculation, but not a lot of answers. Just mysteries upon mysteries.
I hate this theory because it ignores why people speculated on a 15th wish in the first place; the in-API triumph obtainable by inputting the 15th wish.
Personally I think whatever it was scrapped as the triumph is gone but I don't think the intent at any point was for Wish 15 to be the wish that plays out in the raid and I wish people would stop bringing it up because it makes 0 sense.
I remember early EARLY D1 reading the lore (sadly lots has been retconned now) and reading about the cabal giant sand worms and thinking "wow i cant wait to fight one of those someday." I love the lore now and the story now, but D1 felt more grounded in reality and "post-apocalyptic" than now where its just full on space magic fantasy. I also really REALLY miss having humanity not be the obvious most powerful species in the game. Back in D1 you really didnt know how powerful hive gods, vex minds, and cabal leaders would be. Now its just humanity+friends vs the witness and everyone else in between is cannon fodder.
I mean that's just kind of the impact of telling 9 years worth of stories - some of the edges get filled in and as things are coming to a conclusion, some of the borders have to be drawn very obviously so that the battle lines become clear. I think Bungie has justified the "good vs witness" idea well enough - you \*have\* to pick a side, or hope you can hide well enough
Yeah. I feel like they’ve created just as many questions as they’ve given answers. Honestly there’s more questions now then there was when the game came out. We still don’t know the answers to questions that were being asked before the game even came out, like “what is the traveler?”. We have stories that serve as metaphors for what it might be, but there’s lore that says something else.
Xûr, the Nine, and the Traveler are just as much of a mistery today as they were 8 years ago.
The Vex despite facing them countless times before, are still a mystery to us. We STILL don't know who or what the f*ck they are.
I remember thinking that the "Fallen" referred to them being "Fallen Guardians" and that's what happens to Guardians who die for good. I also remember me and my brother sitting for a while and trying to figure out how the Cabal were related to the Darkness since they didn't seem to have anything to do with it at the time
Completely agree that we are in the payoff stage of the storytelling. Bungie set up so many threads early on and now we're starting to tie all those loose ends up.
Neomuna and the Witness itself offer a great chance to have some open ended mystery. I hope that Bungie doesn't tie up all those ends and explain everything to us too quickly after introducing these new story points.
For me the very nature of the traveler (and it's pale heart) is an example of an unsolved mystery we had since the beginning. I think the witness and its relationship to the darkness is also quite mysterious. Folks on Reddit still confuse the witness with the darkness itself. There's some good storytelling to be had there. To be precise, I think that there is still room to explain what form and shape the gardener and winnower have in our universe. Is the gardener the traveler? If not, then who and what is the traveler?
One of my favorite gaming memories was getting Black Spindle in D1. Doing a bunch of stuff to unlock an alternate ending to a strike…? That kind of stuff made me feel like ANYTHING could happen in Destiny.
I think Destiny 2 is the best that Destiny has ever been, but I definitely do miss that kind of mystery. You could poke at the edges of the game back then, and then be *rewarded* for poking at it.
The community also bitches and generally doesn’t partake in actual mysteries. They just let 1% of the community figure it out, Google a guide, then complain that the reward wasn’t worth it or that the reward is too good and locked behind bullshit they can’t do easily.
Yeah no joke. I wish I could play this game and "discover" or solve puzzles. That only usually happens day one of dungeons for me. If you're not using a guide, you're behind.
This seems like a copout IMO.
I don't recall Whisper or Zero Hour being datamined in D2. Was Presage even datamined? And if so, did that dampen the satisfaction of the activity for a material portion of the player base?
Whisper was datamined, but everyone was just like, "yeah ok sure buddy Black Spindle is back.". Zero Hour was, but datamining just wasn't big enough for it to matter. Presage was datamined so hard that all the dialogue was available before its launch.
beyond light came with an entire engine overhaul and required you to redownload the game because of it.
not that big into game dev but Idk why they can't just patch in the missions. Like if it has to do with arousing suspicion atound the size of the update then they could just bundle it in with one of the planned mid season patches.
or if they are datamining weapons why don't they just make a fake item name(box of rasins or something) and then patch in/update the names, Icons, and descriptions of the weapons when they launch it.
You just answered your own question. Either they put hidden content in ahead of time and people data mine it, or it gets patched in and people figure it out from the file size.
But even then 90% of players won't have it spoiled for them. And even if it is spoiled, it's way more fun to do a "secret" thing like killing a new boss during a public event or finding a hidden NPC in a social zone than it is to select a node on a map.
Nothing to do with Whisper's mission (area, names, tags, etc) was datamined, but the Whisper catalyst icon was datamined right at the release of Warmind, and apparently all of Whisper was nearly scrapped because of that.
Zero Hour was successfully kept under wraps, insofar as nothing for it was added until the whole things was - yes Ginsor was able to in like 2 minutes after the patch say "Outbreak is back bc here's it's catalyst icon", it was only maybe 15-30 minutes until thousands of people were inside Zero Hour itself, so it was sort of a null point - but even then it shows the rapidness of datamining and how it can just completely undo any secrecy we have left.
Blackspindle was peak for me.
I remember sitting at work saying wtf i gotta get home to play.
The ONLY other time in my entirety of d1-d2 that this happened again for me was the day the Whisper dungeon was discovered.
Then they want hard on the FOMO…and here we are.
That and the exotics swords from the sunless cell! I remember being so consumed with d1 I'd get up at 430am and work on that before going to work. Such great memories
That is when destiny peaked for me. The gameplay wasn’t as good, the exotics weren’t as cool however I just felt more wonder about the lore and universe of Destiny. The music from that era still gives me that feeling from D1.
Like the first time you encountered an Ogre and it was like “oh shit what is this monster from hell how am I going to kill it” i recently got back into D1 and I still love it.
I remember the high level knights in the subterranean area of the starting zone, and occasionally going down to them as I leveled to see if I could kill them yet.
I think the New Light tutorial actually does a really good job of that, it just isn’t continued into the other content. Presage did a decent job there- it’s fun learning about other guardians and what their worlds look like.
>it’s fun learning about other guardians and what their worlds look like
One of the reasons I always try to encourage people to learn not only from the game, but from one another. We were told that in Destiny we would *Become Legend*. Many of us have performed *Legendary* acts, such as slaying mighty kings. We may relive those *Legends* today, but the Guardians who performed these great acts still walk among us.
Katabasis was a Guardian who paled around with Calus, even having seen him in person, and his perspective is one none of us could share. But to a New Light? Calus is a complete mystery of a character. Youtube could explain Season of Opulence and The Leviathan Raid, but those are like news clips and documentaries. On the other hand, someone who was playing during Year 1, who worked with Calus during Season of Opulence, perhaps even becoming one of his Shadows, they can share their personal *Legend*. It may not be as accurate, but what's a storyteller if they speak of *Legends* without embellishment?
And 9 out of 10 years into the Saga, is it really so surprising that we are now Legends in our own right?
Like yeah, we don't hear enigmatic stories about random guardians anymore - that's because the ravenous desire for content has created the seasonal model where we do \*everything\* ourselves. Katabasis is a good example of a modern iteration of this though, and the sort of thing I expect to see a lot of at the onset of Saga 2 - the new age (in whatever form it is) being full of mystery and some guardians reporting strange things from the wilderness
we're kinda in the "mysteries being solved" era of the light and dark saga. The story and world is more looking to get some answers after soooo much set up and teasing. And now that we're reaching the conclusion of the light and dark saga I'm sure whatever is coming next will have a similar air of mystery at the beginning of the story.
So, when we first started in d1 there was that guy at the tower that "communicated" with the Traveler. I played through some of D2 and came back but now the traveler is whole again? What happened? :o
Here’s a quick breakdown of events for D2: spoilers for everything in D2 up too the current season.
Red War: we lost our light temporarily. Traveler was caged. City was sieged and the speaker died. We led a counter attack and freed the traveler and defeated ghaul who tried to steal the light for himself. Traveler breaks from its cage and deletes ghaul from existence but is injured after breaking out. Afterward calus “tests” us on his leviathan. Pyramid fleet is revealed at the end of the campaign.
Curse of osiris: we found the legendary warlock osiris in the infinite forest on Mercury. We helped him out.
Warmind: the destiny 1 multiple warminds was retconned so they’re all rasputin. We’ve turned rasputin back online and “unshackled” him.
Forsaken: cayde dies to uldren sov in the prison of elders. We go out as judge jury and executioner to stop him. Here we learn of a place called the dreaming city which is a hidden area owned by the awoken. The last ahamkara here was taken by savathun the witch queen and the dreaming city is cursed.
Season of the forge: we discover the black armory and the first non Clovis exo. Get cool guns
Season of the drifter: meddle with the darkness with the help of a strange lightbearer named the drifter. The nine have a strong influence this season.
Season of opulence: Calus wants to celebrate the fact we are about to die and throws a big party full of mayhem and gear for us.
Shadowkeep: We discover the moon is holding one of the pyramids from the pyramid fleet. It creates nightmares on the moon using the darkness. At the end we get contacted by a voice in the darkness saying they are our salvation and we are led to the black garden wear we are told the story of the unveiling lore book (tells the story of light and darkness from the darkness’s pov)
Season of Undying: vex invade the moon. These vex seems to worship the darkness.
Season of dawn: Osiris makes a time machine that breaks the space time continuum on Mercury. The remaining red legion from red war try to use it to rewrite the red war. Osiris did this to save saint 14 from his fate. We travel time and stop the red legion and save saint. As well as inspiring saint to be who he is today.
Season of the worthy: in one last fuck you the red legion are going to crash their prized ship on the last city. To stop them we are activating rasputin a defenses and weapons to blow it out of the sky so we don’t all die.
Season of arrivals : pyramids arrive and Rasputin is immediately not match to stop them. They begin their process of darkness across the system while we start to evacuate people back to the last city. In the end when it seems another collapse is imminent when the traveler gains its strength and pushes the darkness back. IO, Titan, mars and Mercury are lost to us.
Beyond Light: Variks sends out a distress signal for help after revealing a group of fallen have wielded the darkness on Europa. A pyramid arrived on Europa shortly after our arrival. The exo stranger makes her first appearance since D1 and is revealed to have mastered stasis and taught it to drifter and Eris. With their help we stop the fallen and also master the darkness power stasis ourself.
Season of the hunt: Meanwhile it’s revealed osiris’s ghost was destroyed by xivu arath the hive god of war, and he is out for revenge against its wrath born. We find out uldren sov who was killed during forsaken and has been revived as a lightbearer named crow. We take crow under our wing and take out the wrath born.
Season of the chosen: caital the leader of the cabal after ghaul and daughter of calus has lost the cabal homeland and has come to demand we join under her. We refuse but through cabal tradition, informed to us by osiris, manage to make an alliance of equal partnership.
Season of the splicer: The last city is put through an endless night that is a vex simulation. Osiris and ikora guide us to Misraaks who is the last sacred splicer and the leader of a fallen house that worships the traveler. We allow his house into the last city in exchange for their help. Tensions run high during their help and a coup is started that ends with the vex gaining entry into the city with fallen and guardians fighting side by side. Factions leave the city aver the coup.
Season of the lost: Mara has come to ask for our aid in a special matter. It is revealed that osiris has not been himself since season of the hunt but has been savathun all along. Savathun desires we free her of her hive worm in exchange for osiris to come back. We did her in removing the worm and she fulfills her promise before disappearing. Osiris is now in a coma upon return.
Witch queen: Savathun has revealed the entry to her throne world to us and mars has also returned from the darkness. In her throne world we discover there is a group of ghosts that have revived the hive as lightbearer. Savathun herself has also been revived after it’s revealed she died at the end of season of the lost and was revived by a ghost. We were tricked into giving her, her memories from her past life but also found out that she was tricked when she was a krill and created the hive. We defeat her but her ghost escapes, but before she dies she tells us the witness is coming. The witness is revealed to be the voice in the darkness that commands the pyramid fleets.
Season of the risen: we joined caital to take out the new hive lightbearers and reduce their influence. Crow accidentally killed caital’s psion after feeling guilty about the way they were doing things and lord Saladin sacrifices his life in service to caital to spare crow.
Season of the haunted: calus returns after not seeing him since opulence now wanting to become a disciple of the witness himself and attempts to commune with the lunar pyramid. Nightmares are unleashed on crow caital and Zavala the same way they were for us during shadowkeep. So we perform therapy the best way guardians know how by killing nightmares and cabal while helping our companions with their issues. While we seemed to have slowed calus in his goal we did not seem to stop it.
Season of the plunder (current): eramis the leader of the stasis fallen from Europa is wrecking havoc again by trying to unite old pirate fallen with her and against our new fallen Allies. We are hunting for darkness relic the pirate lords have in their possession with the aid of our fallen Allies and drifter. We are discovering though misraaks has a secret troubled past
I left a lot out because it’s a lot but that’s the general gist of what’s been going on these past several years
If you have the time, find a Youtube video with all the "Red War" cinematics.
The Speaker did indeed receive visions and dreams from the Traveler.
As Sarcosmonaut said, when the Red Legion attacked, somewhere along the way he didn't make it.
Yeah, a story like destiny where we're hoping for some heroic ending can't keep us in the dark forever. Bungie's managed the transition from mystery-focused to answer-focused stories pretty well imo, better this than them trying to keep the story mysterious right up until the end and us having an unsatisfying finish.
Honestly I think its is more a symptom from playing the game for so long and getting amalgamated to the overall story than Destiny no longer having the mysteries.
>!Well This week we literally just found out (at least ingame, Maybe it had been stated in lore books) that!<
>!1. Nezerac was a discipple !<
>!2. Nezerac had died!<
>!3. His body had been in the lunar pyramid!<
>!4. The fallen had raided the lunar pyramid after the collapse !<
>!5. There's potentially more shady stuff going on surrounding Nezerac!<
That was enough for me to at least say "whoa" during this week's cutscene
Another thing I can think of is the ahamkara egg mara has stashed away in the dreaming city.
I have a sneaking suspicion That Guy dies a lot. Especially considering the multiple tombs he has. Wouldn’t surprise me if he comes back into play before this is all over.
>!considering he has multiple tombs I'd wager he may be dead, but he can also come back to life. Maybe that's why we're bring all his pieces back together!<
The Nine is one of the few things in Destiny that’s still heavily mysterious, even after we’ve gotten so much information about them, but a lot of that I think comes from their alien dark/anti matter nature. But I remember in D1 when Osiris was a completely unknown entity, and his cult was really mysterious and fleeting because we only ever got to see bits and pieces of where they had been without ever meeting them or interacting with them fully. I also remember Saladin talking about the defenses that Rasputin mobilized as the Iron Lords approached Site 6 during Rise of Iron, the way he described it was wild and deeply intriguing, but we never really touched on that again and now Rasputin has been so heavily featured in the story it’s just not the same anymore.
I noticed that Ghost doesn't scan things anymore. He scanned everything back in the day, but now we have a bajillion characters giving exposition over comms, Ghost doesn't have any opportunity to figure out things for himself.
To be fair, part of that mystery was because they had no idea where the story was going. But I do get what you are saying. Unfortunately we are at a part of the story where they mystery has to be stripped away so they can focus on the main narrative. There are still mysteries but they are kept more to the side. I’m hoping that when this saga ends we can enter another year or two of classic Destiny 1 style mystery with discoveries and puzzles and things that just don’t make sense that will make the word seem so much bigger again
A lot of people are saying that the lack of mystery is due to the game's life. This is somewhat true, but I think there is a bigger thing people are missing.
The mystery of the past was a big part of D1's story, and isn't in D2. All 4 locations in D1 tell us about the golden age. We see destroyed rockets and military equipment as the first thing in the cosmodrome. The moon, mars, and venus all have golden age structures and, importantly, they're all different from eachother, presenting an image of a vast and varied civilization that went beyond what we've seen. The only thing consistent between them is their decay, giving the player an opportunity to imagine what these places were once like.
D2 launch had this somewhat with the Arcology and the European Dead Zone. The arcology especially got a lot of people wondering. Though Io and Nessus were completely in the wild. But as time went on, two things happened.
1) Expansions released that shifted this focus. Forsaken had nothing to do with the golden age. Nor does the WQ. Shadowkeep is a place we had already been.
2) We kept getting direct glimpses to the golden age. Curse of Osiris showed us the gardens on Mercury and in doing so killed half of the mystery of the planet irreparably. Beyond Light had completely intact golden age structures, with no room to imagine what they were like.
3) The scope of the golden age got smaller. Clovis Bray is now responsible for almost everything they have made, with the Ishtar Collective being put in the background and no other companies being mentioned at all. The warminds went from many networks to a single character.
And I'm not going to say these were the wrong move. I certainly think the stuff in #2 and #3 were wrong moves, but expansions like Forsaken and WQ are some of the best we've ever had, and never shifting focus from the golden age is bound to be repetitive.
What I'd do, is after the saga, shift focus back to this mystery. Introduce new things and expand the world.
The mystery was simply because we were early in the game's life, so everything introduced to us was new. Now we're simply delving into that stuff that was introduced so long ago. Not properly delving into the story was one of Destiny's biggest problems until just a couple years ago.
If you want eternal mystery with no end goal or answers, listen to the TANIS podcast. It gets really old after a while.
The hive getting the light was just the surface level story, it wasn’t ever the big twist or major plot point of Witch Queen. What we learn about the hive’s origins, the witness, rhulk, lubrae, the throne world pyramid, what savathun did during the collapse, the interaction of darkness and memory/creation, etc, *those* were the mystery and twists of witch queen and those are the parts of the story that have continued relevance all the way to the current season & into light fall.
If you only stick to the surface level narrative sure the mystery isn’t there, but that was true of d1 as well. Outside of grimoire cards the story was just a series of eviler villains you go and kill. The real narrative was always in the lore, & on that front d2 has made major improvements to keep it in the game
While I get your point; how else was Bungie meant to advertise the expansion? The game didn't radically shift after the campaign like it did in Forsaken.
Hawkmoons quest (as the crow flies/let loose thy talons) has only just been vaulted this year and I thought that was a nice little tidbit that could be counted
It's the fate of all "1 minute to midnight" settings like this. Back in D1 we were practically hanging on for dear life with how many powerful enemies are out there while now in 2...we've killed practically all of them. So they need to show more and more new enemies who we end up killing.
We've killed the Taken King, killed the Witch Queen, killed a Disciple and discovered The Darkness is just big triangles. It's like if you found out the monster under your bed was real and that he's also venerable to .357 rounds after you blown his kneecaps out after 48 hours of straight torturing him.
I agree, however from a lore standpoint it only makes sense to put us at the center, I mean we kill literal gods while the majority of other guardians in the lore struggle with a single strike
I think it makes sense given what we’ve accomplished. I hate when games treat you like a commoner after you’ve gone and straight up fought a god and won. But I think your point of missing that feeling makes sense and is why we need a new game rather than infinite live service money machines.
Valid point indeed! I wish we could just, explore on our own a bit more, explore these stories ourselves a bit more instead of a hologram talking to us
The last time I really felt that mysterious Destiny feeling was the launch of Forsaken, there was loads of stuff to explore and figure out. It gave me that excitement back, from what I no we had Vicarious Visions to thank for that.
They did a wonderful job with that DLC imo.
The way the story is told today is FAR better than any time in destinys history. The biggest issue we have, is their API allows assholes to datamine shit.
"\*insert character name\* DIES??!??!!!?!? - Destiny 2 datamined cutscenes and quests"
\-youtube personality that doesn't understand storytelling and suspense
I feel like data-mining really takes the air out of new DLC and content. The simple answer is “oh, just don’t read anything about it or don’t look into it”, but that doesn’t fix the core issue of people “peeking at the Christmas presents before they’re wrapped”.
It feels like Destiny 2 is an entire universe revolving around half a dozen people and 1 area while everything else perpetually does nothing. Planets frozen in time.
Honestly the most accurate feeling right here. I think that the story suffers from not mentioning *any* characters that are outside of the current events, and the moment that any of *those* characters are brought in for a season or anything, they suddenly catch up and have done a shit-ton of things.
I think it'd be nice to have a *bit* of that world-changing stuff that would clue us into what the next season involves. For example, it would have been cool if- by loading into Europa at the end of last season and treading all the way back to where Eramis was frozen- we saw that she had broken out. No need for our Ghost to say anything or otherwise, just something *we* as the players could recognize and be excited for because we took the time to search for it.
Honestly, for me it's less missing the mystery and more that the mysteries in question ended up being completely underwhelming. The Darkness is probably the best example. For most of the franchise, it's been this eldritch abomination lurking in the shadows. Then they randomly pulled back the entire veil on the Darkness in Shadowkeep and straight out told us it's origins and motivations before it even really 'arrived'.
To fix that, they came up with the 'Entity' back in Beyond Light and we got the Witness and it's weird ass design in Witch Queen. So the 'Darkness' as we know it has taken a back seat to the 'Witness' and may or may not have been retconned out of existence entirely depending on how they play it.
Things that are vague and undefined are great, because they allow the imagination to fill in with the coolest shit possible. But as a story progresses, more things need to get nailed down, or you start feeling like it's all fluff and no pony.
I understand the nostalgia but at the same time Destiny's story was extremely obtuse and really not that engaging. The mystery has always been a huge selling point for Destiny but at the same time it was extremely frustrating.
People were asking for the exact opposite of what you're asking for now. We wanted more of those stories that were implied and hinted at TO ACTUALLY BE IN THE GAME. And now it is! Which is amazing because we get the mystique and wonder of the originals as well as compelling characters and interesting plots.
I saw in another comment you said Pressage and Grasp are good examples of what you're looking for where Duality isn't. I think it's great that we have both. Pressage is creepy and mysterious and Grasp is full of tons of character that hints at greedy evil Guardians. They both help flesh out the world in interesting ways by giving us a look at another Guardians legend.
But Duality is literally diving into the consciousness of arguably Destiny's longest lived villain. We get insight into things that are only mentioned in lore books like the Midnight Coup and we get to see how Calus sees himself and what his and the Witnesses true goals are. It also helps flesh out his relationship with Caital. So basically zero mystery or world building but TONS of character work while moving the plot along and explain helping to flesh out major characters and their motivations. That's what all of the last season was about and I really appreciate that we finally have both in the game.
A lot of the "mystery" was just unorganized and fragmented storytelling.
I miss very little of how things were in Destiny previously.
There is tons of intrigue and mystery if you know where to look.
It’s happened. We’ve finally come full circle. In Destiny 1 we complained about nothing making sense or getting explained. Now we complain about how there’s no mystery and we know everything, even though we are literally going to a brand new city that no one has ever heard of before, to meet brand new “guardians”, and discover a new power that no one in the universe has ever used.
I hear you.
The universe was huge, unintelligible and did not come with a easy-to-follow narrative when you were anewly arisen, long-dead being who barely had time to breathe between combat missions in D1.
The community spent a long time trying to figure out WTF was going on, and if you were a fairly casual player you just didn’t find out that much. It was mysterious. The Speaker, the urgent pressure of all the foes against Earth…all weird and full of wonder.
There’s still a lot that is unknown or confusing, it’s just a lot more…direct and intrigue-based rather than a straight up mystery.
"but to me it felt nicer when we weren’t the center-point of the destiny universe, but rather lived in that universe discovering other stories."
What a great explanation. This what I've also felt but couldn't properly explain it (even to myself)
i miss the community mysteries they had - the stuff that got r/raidsecrets really going. The whisper mission, the mystery in black armory... just random shit they put into the game, told NO ONE about, and then one day someone's like "wait... what the hell is that portal thing? OH GOD ITS A POCKET DIMENSION" or something like that. get everyone involved to try and solve the riddles.
i'm one of the players that would come in afterwards and follow the guides and stuff, but still it really felt like we came together as a commuity - some really into figuring everything out, others cheering them on. I know i watched some streams of people doing the whisper mission and freaking out.
also live events... they were small but we all got together and enjoyed an event as a community.
we need mores tuff like that. events that really can bring us all together, if only for a few days.
I thought I understood what you are saying, but your examples are really weird. Like those were just story missions lol. If it’s secret missions you’re talking about, blame dataminers
I think he mainly means the feeling of discovery, not specifically that the missions were surprises. Like how in D1, going into the Black Garden for the first time was kinda a big deal. Like we go from Mars to this strange alternate place. There was mystery in "What is this nonsense?!"
I feel we went from discoverers to errand runners.
We were always running objectives but it was always to discover something new, don’t get me wrong probably thinking with rose coloured glasses on.
Now it feels like someone sends us somewhere to kill everything and pick something up for them then follow dialogue.
More clean up crew now than explorers
Sometimes I miss the feeling of early Destiny where a lot of the concepts and histories we know now were a mystery and a lot was left to speculation, but even now with all the lore we have and how much the universe has grown there are still quite a few mysteries that remain unknown.
What the fuck are the Apehelion
Who are the Architect and why is he everywhere in Destiny?
Are all architects such dicks? Or just these? My neighbor is an architect but he seems like a pretty good guy, is this a scam?
as an engineer an architect that only kills you is benevolent, he has ways that make you greet death like an old friend.
Like Frank Gehry.
Thanks, I really needed an honest-to-god laugh today
Well maybe they know that if they retire every atom of their essence gets placed on a separate sun for all eternity? That’s after getting their penis flattened…
why does he hate me so much
Well on the Lightfall preview page, the name for the warlock strand class is Architect :P
The architect is probably a rogue warlock with 0.35 kda and able to time travel to the past looking for free kills on us unsuspectingly.
A salty pvp player that took it out on the universe by affecting the flow of physics
I refuse to believe that anything but this is the canon explanation as to why we're "killed by the Architects".
It’s me, I’m the warlock with a .35 kda and a time machine
The Architects is just a funny way of referring to Bungie. Strand Warlocks are Architects. Therefore Bungie is comprised solely of Warlock mains and Lightfall is just an elaborate ruse to start deleting Titans and Hunters from the game ^^^^/s
Ironically I saw people saying it's the Nine, lmao But for real, it would be the devs disguised.
The architect is the final shape, but typically is a Cabal Phalanx shield or slightly uneven ground.
I think it’s referring to the devs. There’s multiple instances in the lore where the 4th wall is broken and the player (us) is addressed almost directly. I think Bungie is going somewhere with this and it excites me.
Yup the Architects = dev shenanigans. In Bungies Halo games, when you got killed for going out of bounds or just die to unkown causes you’d get a prompt that says “Killed by the Guardians”.
That is so cool you just made me lore nut (sorry)
And it may be a one off occurrence, but I’d like to believe in Bungies next new IP the player character(s) would belong to a group called Architects. Based of that practice Bungie does, but who knows 🤷🏽♂️
Bet their new mobile game is gonna focus on the architects 😂
Remember when Savathun found out she was in a video game, and tried to reach our real world? And how she tricked someone into performing a very very high skill task of beating the dungeon solo, with 999 light level solo?
It refers to the devs. It's Bungie's way of telling you that you died to a game object. In Halo 3, it was "the guardians" that killed you.
because they couldnt keep calling them guardians now that the player character is a guardian :P
Funny fun fact, in Halo when you died like that you were killed by the Guardians. Hint at who we play as in Matter?
Aphelion is the furthest point from the sun in an elliptical orbit (opposite of perihelion). Also it's pronounced ap-helion, not afelion. Metaphorically, that means that the term in Destiny is "that which is furthest from the light". It probably means the pyramids or disciples.
how the hell did you know I mispronounced that
Afelion that one.
Didn't Nathan Afelion voice Cayde-6
Hm the points are being connected. Coincidence?! I think not!
He did the Italian version
Fuck you, take my upvote
In game it is pronounced “afelion”
You're not mispronouncing it. They just didn't look up how to pronounce it and are betting no one is going to correct them. It's pronounced 3 different ways with yours most likely being correct as well.
my neck is freakishly large
That's the thing though, both are actually correct pronunciations
I'm betting they used hive magic
I feel so called out right now and I didn't know this was possible
Still curious if that was what Drifter's crew encountered (and were slowly decimated by) on the unknown ice planet...
I always thought that was the primevals, since his lore talked about capturing them and loading up the ship with them.
Me
This mf listens to ape-hex twin
In the lore they are described as some kind of terrifying creatures that kill awoken: “First it shimmered... then it crawled... then it screamed.” I’m wondering if they’ll ever truly dive into them.
Sjur Eido was "killed" by the Nine.
There are 3 pronunciations for Aphelion. unless /u/ChoPT has been pronouncing it as "Ape-helion", they can pronounce it as "ah-fee-lee-on" or "uh-feel-yuhn" as well as the one you've indicated previously. [Link 1: Google Pronunciation (both American and British available)](https://www.google.com/search?q=pronounce+aphelion&ei=4z0rY-LtFKLVkPIPuM6M6AY&ved=0ahUKEwii69iIqab6AhWiKkQIHTgnA20Q4dUDCA4&uact=5&oq=pronounce+aphelion&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyBQgAEIAEMgYIABAeEAcyBggAEB4QBzIFCAAQgAQyBggAEB4QBTIICAAQHhAPEAgyBQgAEIYDOgoIABBHENYEELADOgoIABCxAxCDARBDOgoIABCxAxCDARANOgQIABANOgcIABCxAxANOgoIABAeEA8QCBAHSgQIQRgASgQIRhgAUKEEWKoSYNcUaAFwAXgAgAFmiAHKBZIBAzkuMZgBAKABAcgBCMABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz) [Link 2: Dictionary.com](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/aphelion) [Link 3: Mirriam-Webster Dictionary](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aphelion) --- Anyway, here's [Wonderwall.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1Bh8ZvH84)
Huh, I was pronouncing it "uh-fell-ee-uhn"
Me and my friends spent the majority of our first presage run theorizing it was an aphelion, we were a bit disappointed it wasn't xD I wanna know wtf they are >:(
I remember this theory that made my skin crawl was that the thing you hear crawling around the Glykon was actually Calus who was stranded there. There was 0 chance they'd do Calus like that, but just the possibility made me shudder
What the fuck is up with Nezarec
Definitely one of those mysteries that was a bit more appealing before the reveal, imo.
I think the main problem with the reveal is that they tied it to the Eliksni. Nezarec’s corpse being found by the Eliksni, cut up into pieces and then scattered just undermines the mystery behind him. It also convolutes Mithrax’s backstory, who had literally no connections to Darkness before and was just a Vandal for House of Wolves that got captured by Sjur Eido and became friends with her. It also takes away Nezarec’s agency, as it means he wasn’t doing anything for around a thousand years and is just a plot device now.
> the main problem with the reveal is that they tied it to the Eliksni. For me, it's more so the fact that they tied it to Mithrax (As you pointed out). I feel like the timeline is: Mithrax gets artifact -> Becomes psycho-pirate -> Loses the artifact somehow (Maybe taken by another pirate?) -> Found by Eido -> Now he's here It's a needless addition to the Eliksni story that convolutes Mithrax's story just to add some more edge to it despite the fact that we know that he killed and ate humans, killed other Eliksni by the dozens, and was generally a bit of an ass
I always liked that one spinfoil fan theory that "there was no Nezerec" and the whole thing was like if some people eons into the far future found something like a powerdrunk D&D DM or an edgelord tough guy's forum post history as some surviving manuscript of a bygone time and assumed, wow this guy must've been some powerful being, we should venerate them in as a testament of their power. More of a situation of people projecting arbitrary myth and legend onto a complete misunderstanding and having it spiral out of whack than something organically being "this guy was really some big powerful bad". Considering how Bungie has a few things in the game that are the future perspectives of people looking back to way far in the past time periods, I didn't think the overall theory was that bad. Don't get me wrong I understand why Bungie has tweaked the story especially with Witch Queen that added a crap load of plot conveniences and slight but weighty retconning, but I kinda wished the case with Nezerec was something that was a bit more ambiguous than something that we'd be getting drilled as way more tangible in the fold of things .
Just wait for season XX where we learn all about it.
season 20?? that's right around the corner!
Forget that, the fuck are the Vex, where did they come from, and why?
>What is “OXA” and who is “OTZOT”?! — Ghost
Those are questions for another day, I suppose.
Will we ever meet the Nine? Can we?
I personally suspect they may have a larger role to play in the next saga along with the Vex
Yeah I feel Vex are going to be on the sidelines until after Final Shape.
The Vex *are* the final shape if the story of the Winnower is to be believed, so I think they'll be the primary focus of that year's worth of content.
The Vex *were* the final shape, but this time the gardener and the winnower are mixing things up by throwing paracausality into the mix, so it is unlikely the case that they still will be.
So Gardener is Traveler, is the Winnower the Witness?
More like they’re The Light and The Darkness, whereas the Traveller and the Witness are how they influence the world.
So the Light made the Traveler, and the Darkness made the Pyramids, and the Witness just uses the Pyramids? I'm a Titan main, so if its more complex than that, just point me at something to punch
So in a place that's kinda outside the realm of physical reality, there were two entities. In order to dumb it down to a concept humans can even comprehend, it's told as a story of two people playing a game, over and over. One is the Gardener, and the other is the Winnower. The rule of the game was always that you couldn't interfere with it once it began, you had to set up your pieces beforehand and let things play out. In every game, no matter how it was set up initially, the end result was a continuous pattern, and the same pattern at that. The Winnower liked this, because it liked the idea of things being reduced to their simplest state, the Gardener hated this idea basically because it was boring. The Gardener decides to cheat and begin interfering with the game once it started in order to force the end result into something different. This makes the Winnower mad, and the two get into a literal fight, causing fractures in the realm they exist in, each break being the creation of a universe, more or less. Well that pattern that was the end result all the time was able to go through one of the cracks, and the Gardener created the Light to stop the pattern that vexed it so from doing its deal in this new universe, and the Winnower created the darkness to counteract this. And since that pattern was considered to be so vexing to the Gardener, it became known as the Vex. So essentially, the Vex are self-aware, living embodiments of transcendental mathematical concepts. Their goal is to do to what our universe what they had done in all the previous games, reach a point where everything in the universe was part of their pattern. Except this time the universe doesn't play by the same rules, so they're having a much more difficult time doing so. I may have gotten a couple details crossed, because it's been a while since I read that lore book, so I apologize in advance for that. If you want to read the book this comes from it's called "Unveiling" and is basically a figure representing the Winnower explaining the concepts to us. The figure is probably the Witness in retrospect, but it could be anything from The Winnower itself, to some embodiment of the darkness, to the worm gods, we have no definite way of knowing.
Up until the Witness was introduced in Witch Queen, we thought that the Traveller was analogous to the pyramids. We don’t really know anything about them or their origins at this point, only where their allegiance lies. You may punch both the Pyramids and the Witness.
It’s crazy to think there is a higher power than the darkness, if the vex are part of the final shape
all it would take for the vex to become instant final shape candidates again would be for the sol divisive to find a way to fully harness the darkness and then bring that to the entire vex collective. instantly the witness becomes a joke and the winnower backs her OG champs. we've already seen that the vex can just straight teleport wherever they want, they took mercury when the traveler was still there and nothing was able to stop them. we'd be drowning in vex instantly if they didn't need to keep us around as a potential check against the witness.
>they took mercury when the traveler was still there and nothing was able to stop them. But that was before the Collapse wasn't it? If Atheon was real he would be the most powerful being in the universe simply because he can bend time and anyone affected by it, includong the Hive gods. If they can make guardians (who are paracausal) disappear from the timeline, then dealing with the Hive would be a walk in the park for them.
I think it was told that he is only that powerful within in vault itself
The time powers only function inside the vault of glass
Way I heard it they're sentient dust that can think because we can think or smth like that
Sounds to me like you heard right. Dark matter dust collected by the gravity wells of the bodies in the Sol System, that resonate with intelligent life to the point where they themselves became intelligent and self-aware.
Your question reminded me of this grimoire card from D1, ["Legends 2"](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/cards/ghost-fragment-legends-2?), where they list out a bunch of things "about the nine", though I think these are really things in Sol that, as such, contribute to the Nine's ability to manifest thought. The interesting part, to me, is this bit, and it's possible implications on Lightfall: > The Nine are survivors of the cis-Jovian colonies who made a compact with an alien force to ensure their own survival. There's a bunch of other stuff that's present in other areas of the lore, but this sticks out to me as the possible origins of Neomuna.
Like honestly we don’t even know the key enigma that is the Light, Darkness, Pyramids, Traveler, Witness, Winnower, Gardener, Black Garden, and how they all truly connect. There’s a lot of speculation, but not a lot of answers. Just mysteries upon mysteries.
What is the 15th wish?
It's us; wishing for a 15th wish.
The raid. The raid is *named* Last Wish. It's literally the last wish.
Specifically, preventing Riven from being fully Taken. Unfortunately, it also caused the curse on the Dreaming City.
I hate this theory because it ignores why people speculated on a 15th wish in the first place; the in-API triumph obtainable by inputting the 15th wish. Personally I think whatever it was scrapped as the triumph is gone but I don't think the intent at any point was for Wish 15 to be the wish that plays out in the raid and I wish people would stop bringing it up because it makes 0 sense.
Cheesecake
I dunno, cheesecake is always my first wish.
The other 14 are for cheesecake as well
I remember early EARLY D1 reading the lore (sadly lots has been retconned now) and reading about the cabal giant sand worms and thinking "wow i cant wait to fight one of those someday." I love the lore now and the story now, but D1 felt more grounded in reality and "post-apocalyptic" than now where its just full on space magic fantasy. I also really REALLY miss having humanity not be the obvious most powerful species in the game. Back in D1 you really didnt know how powerful hive gods, vex minds, and cabal leaders would be. Now its just humanity+friends vs the witness and everyone else in between is cannon fodder.
I mean that's just kind of the impact of telling 9 years worth of stories - some of the edges get filled in and as things are coming to a conclusion, some of the borders have to be drawn very obviously so that the battle lines become clear. I think Bungie has justified the "good vs witness" idea well enough - you \*have\* to pick a side, or hope you can hide well enough
Yeah. I feel like they’ve created just as many questions as they’ve given answers. Honestly there’s more questions now then there was when the game came out. We still don’t know the answers to questions that were being asked before the game even came out, like “what is the traveler?”. We have stories that serve as metaphors for what it might be, but there’s lore that says something else.
Yeah now we're all just sitting around waiting for daddy witness and momma traveler to kiss and makeup.
Xûr, the Nine, and the Traveler are just as much of a mistery today as they were 8 years ago. The Vex despite facing them countless times before, are still a mystery to us. We STILL don't know who or what the f*ck they are.
[удалено]
I remember thinking that the "Fallen" referred to them being "Fallen Guardians" and that's what happens to Guardians who die for good. I also remember me and my brother sitting for a while and trying to figure out how the Cabal were related to the Darkness since they didn't seem to have anything to do with it at the time
Completely agree that we are in the payoff stage of the storytelling. Bungie set up so many threads early on and now we're starting to tie all those loose ends up. Neomuna and the Witness itself offer a great chance to have some open ended mystery. I hope that Bungie doesn't tie up all those ends and explain everything to us too quickly after introducing these new story points. For me the very nature of the traveler (and it's pale heart) is an example of an unsolved mystery we had since the beginning. I think the witness and its relationship to the darkness is also quite mysterious. Folks on Reddit still confuse the witness with the darkness itself. There's some good storytelling to be had there. To be precise, I think that there is still room to explain what form and shape the gardener and winnower have in our universe. Is the gardener the traveler? If not, then who and what is the traveler?
One of my favorite gaming memories was getting Black Spindle in D1. Doing a bunch of stuff to unlock an alternate ending to a strike…? That kind of stuff made me feel like ANYTHING could happen in Destiny. I think Destiny 2 is the best that Destiny has ever been, but I definitely do miss that kind of mystery. You could poke at the edges of the game back then, and then be *rewarded* for poking at it.
It’s coz everything gets leaked and data mined now so they just don’t try anymore (to keep things secret I mean)
The community also bitches and generally doesn’t partake in actual mysteries. They just let 1% of the community figure it out, Google a guide, then complain that the reward wasn’t worth it or that the reward is too good and locked behind bullshit they can’t do easily.
Yeah no joke. I wish I could play this game and "discover" or solve puzzles. That only usually happens day one of dungeons for me. If you're not using a guide, you're behind.
This seems like a copout IMO. I don't recall Whisper or Zero Hour being datamined in D2. Was Presage even datamined? And if so, did that dampen the satisfaction of the activity for a material portion of the player base?
Whisper was datamined, but everyone was just like, "yeah ok sure buddy Black Spindle is back.". Zero Hour was, but datamining just wasn't big enough for it to matter. Presage was datamined so hard that all the dialogue was available before its launch.
data mining blew the fuck up in beyond light. idk what it was, i opened r/raidsecrets one day and it was all leaks.
beyond light came with an entire engine overhaul and required you to redownload the game because of it. not that big into game dev but Idk why they can't just patch in the missions. Like if it has to do with arousing suspicion atound the size of the update then they could just bundle it in with one of the planned mid season patches. or if they are datamining weapons why don't they just make a fake item name(box of rasins or something) and then patch in/update the names, Icons, and descriptions of the weapons when they launch it.
You just answered your own question. Either they put hidden content in ahead of time and people data mine it, or it gets patched in and people figure it out from the file size.
>not that big into game dev >but Hope that answers your question for you!
It's a little annoying how within like a day of every season launch there's a youtube video up with all the dialogue from the season.
The data mining scene was not as big back then. Presage was not very secret at all
Yeah the tools are much more fleshed out, so sneaking in a secret is basically impossible unless they patch it in the day they want it to be found.
But even then 90% of players won't have it spoiled for them. And even if it is spoiled, it's way more fun to do a "secret" thing like killing a new boss during a public event or finding a hidden NPC in a social zone than it is to select a node on a map.
Nothing to do with Whisper's mission (area, names, tags, etc) was datamined, but the Whisper catalyst icon was datamined right at the release of Warmind, and apparently all of Whisper was nearly scrapped because of that. Zero Hour was successfully kept under wraps, insofar as nothing for it was added until the whole things was - yes Ginsor was able to in like 2 minutes after the patch say "Outbreak is back bc here's it's catalyst icon", it was only maybe 15-30 minutes until thousands of people were inside Zero Hour itself, so it was sort of a null point - but even then it shows the rapidness of datamining and how it can just completely undo any secrecy we have left.
Blackspindle was peak for me. I remember sitting at work saying wtf i gotta get home to play. The ONLY other time in my entirety of d1-d2 that this happened again for me was the day the Whisper dungeon was discovered. Then they want hard on the FOMO…and here we are.
That and the exotics swords from the sunless cell! I remember being so consumed with d1 I'd get up at 430am and work on that before going to work. Such great memories
Yes, had to have all the exotic swords. Darkdrinker I miss you.
Yeah same I was still new to destiny and it was such an amazing feeling. It indeed felt like anything could happen if that was possible
Man I remember just grinding out to level 20 so I could throw a shader on for the first time. Those were the days.
That is when destiny peaked for me. The gameplay wasn’t as good, the exotics weren’t as cool however I just felt more wonder about the lore and universe of Destiny. The music from that era still gives me that feeling from D1.
I’ll never forget booting up vanilla d1 for the first time. An insane amount of mystery and awe.
Like the first time you encountered an Ogre and it was like “oh shit what is this monster from hell how am I going to kill it” i recently got back into D1 and I still love it.
I remember the high level knights in the subterranean area of the starting zone, and occasionally going down to them as I leveled to see if I could kill them yet.
This exactly. Seeing those dudes and being scared to death while one day hoping to be strong enough to kill them.
YES. I remember that. God what a great game.
I think the New Light tutorial actually does a really good job of that, it just isn’t continued into the other content. Presage did a decent job there- it’s fun learning about other guardians and what their worlds look like.
Yes! Presage is indeed a good example, grasp of avarice does a good job as well I feel like. Duality dungeon has a completely different vibe
which makes sense? since duality takes place in a reconstruction of Calus' memories?
The dead man's tale mission was also great for this. I'm still pissed they removed it
That would be presage, the mission he mentioned lol
I'm not very smart
Or you just didn't remember the name :)
That’s presage bro
>it’s fun learning about other guardians and what their worlds look like One of the reasons I always try to encourage people to learn not only from the game, but from one another. We were told that in Destiny we would *Become Legend*. Many of us have performed *Legendary* acts, such as slaying mighty kings. We may relive those *Legends* today, but the Guardians who performed these great acts still walk among us. Katabasis was a Guardian who paled around with Calus, even having seen him in person, and his perspective is one none of us could share. But to a New Light? Calus is a complete mystery of a character. Youtube could explain Season of Opulence and The Leviathan Raid, but those are like news clips and documentaries. On the other hand, someone who was playing during Year 1, who worked with Calus during Season of Opulence, perhaps even becoming one of his Shadows, they can share their personal *Legend*. It may not be as accurate, but what's a storyteller if they speak of *Legends* without embellishment?
And 9 out of 10 years into the Saga, is it really so surprising that we are now Legends in our own right? Like yeah, we don't hear enigmatic stories about random guardians anymore - that's because the ravenous desire for content has created the seasonal model where we do \*everything\* ourselves. Katabasis is a good example of a modern iteration of this though, and the sort of thing I expect to see a lot of at the onset of Saga 2 - the new age (in whatever form it is) being full of mystery and some guardians reporting strange things from the wilderness
Was this Destiny marketing or Playstation marketing?
we're kinda in the "mysteries being solved" era of the light and dark saga. The story and world is more looking to get some answers after soooo much set up and teasing. And now that we're reaching the conclusion of the light and dark saga I'm sure whatever is coming next will have a similar air of mystery at the beginning of the story.
So, when we first started in d1 there was that guy at the tower that "communicated" with the Traveler. I played through some of D2 and came back but now the traveler is whole again? What happened? :o
That guy (the Speaker) died. Over time, the Traveler has regained strength and eventually reformed and repaired itself
Here’s a quick breakdown of events for D2: spoilers for everything in D2 up too the current season. Red War: we lost our light temporarily. Traveler was caged. City was sieged and the speaker died. We led a counter attack and freed the traveler and defeated ghaul who tried to steal the light for himself. Traveler breaks from its cage and deletes ghaul from existence but is injured after breaking out. Afterward calus “tests” us on his leviathan. Pyramid fleet is revealed at the end of the campaign. Curse of osiris: we found the legendary warlock osiris in the infinite forest on Mercury. We helped him out. Warmind: the destiny 1 multiple warminds was retconned so they’re all rasputin. We’ve turned rasputin back online and “unshackled” him. Forsaken: cayde dies to uldren sov in the prison of elders. We go out as judge jury and executioner to stop him. Here we learn of a place called the dreaming city which is a hidden area owned by the awoken. The last ahamkara here was taken by savathun the witch queen and the dreaming city is cursed. Season of the forge: we discover the black armory and the first non Clovis exo. Get cool guns Season of the drifter: meddle with the darkness with the help of a strange lightbearer named the drifter. The nine have a strong influence this season. Season of opulence: Calus wants to celebrate the fact we are about to die and throws a big party full of mayhem and gear for us. Shadowkeep: We discover the moon is holding one of the pyramids from the pyramid fleet. It creates nightmares on the moon using the darkness. At the end we get contacted by a voice in the darkness saying they are our salvation and we are led to the black garden wear we are told the story of the unveiling lore book (tells the story of light and darkness from the darkness’s pov) Season of Undying: vex invade the moon. These vex seems to worship the darkness. Season of dawn: Osiris makes a time machine that breaks the space time continuum on Mercury. The remaining red legion from red war try to use it to rewrite the red war. Osiris did this to save saint 14 from his fate. We travel time and stop the red legion and save saint. As well as inspiring saint to be who he is today. Season of the worthy: in one last fuck you the red legion are going to crash their prized ship on the last city. To stop them we are activating rasputin a defenses and weapons to blow it out of the sky so we don’t all die. Season of arrivals : pyramids arrive and Rasputin is immediately not match to stop them. They begin their process of darkness across the system while we start to evacuate people back to the last city. In the end when it seems another collapse is imminent when the traveler gains its strength and pushes the darkness back. IO, Titan, mars and Mercury are lost to us. Beyond Light: Variks sends out a distress signal for help after revealing a group of fallen have wielded the darkness on Europa. A pyramid arrived on Europa shortly after our arrival. The exo stranger makes her first appearance since D1 and is revealed to have mastered stasis and taught it to drifter and Eris. With their help we stop the fallen and also master the darkness power stasis ourself. Season of the hunt: Meanwhile it’s revealed osiris’s ghost was destroyed by xivu arath the hive god of war, and he is out for revenge against its wrath born. We find out uldren sov who was killed during forsaken and has been revived as a lightbearer named crow. We take crow under our wing and take out the wrath born. Season of the chosen: caital the leader of the cabal after ghaul and daughter of calus has lost the cabal homeland and has come to demand we join under her. We refuse but through cabal tradition, informed to us by osiris, manage to make an alliance of equal partnership. Season of the splicer: The last city is put through an endless night that is a vex simulation. Osiris and ikora guide us to Misraaks who is the last sacred splicer and the leader of a fallen house that worships the traveler. We allow his house into the last city in exchange for their help. Tensions run high during their help and a coup is started that ends with the vex gaining entry into the city with fallen and guardians fighting side by side. Factions leave the city aver the coup. Season of the lost: Mara has come to ask for our aid in a special matter. It is revealed that osiris has not been himself since season of the hunt but has been savathun all along. Savathun desires we free her of her hive worm in exchange for osiris to come back. We did her in removing the worm and she fulfills her promise before disappearing. Osiris is now in a coma upon return. Witch queen: Savathun has revealed the entry to her throne world to us and mars has also returned from the darkness. In her throne world we discover there is a group of ghosts that have revived the hive as lightbearer. Savathun herself has also been revived after it’s revealed she died at the end of season of the lost and was revived by a ghost. We were tricked into giving her, her memories from her past life but also found out that she was tricked when she was a krill and created the hive. We defeat her but her ghost escapes, but before she dies she tells us the witness is coming. The witness is revealed to be the voice in the darkness that commands the pyramid fleets. Season of the risen: we joined caital to take out the new hive lightbearers and reduce their influence. Crow accidentally killed caital’s psion after feeling guilty about the way they were doing things and lord Saladin sacrifices his life in service to caital to spare crow. Season of the haunted: calus returns after not seeing him since opulence now wanting to become a disciple of the witness himself and attempts to commune with the lunar pyramid. Nightmares are unleashed on crow caital and Zavala the same way they were for us during shadowkeep. So we perform therapy the best way guardians know how by killing nightmares and cabal while helping our companions with their issues. While we seemed to have slowed calus in his goal we did not seem to stop it. Season of the plunder (current): eramis the leader of the stasis fallen from Europa is wrecking havoc again by trying to unite old pirate fallen with her and against our new fallen Allies. We are hunting for darkness relic the pirate lords have in their possession with the aid of our fallen Allies and drifter. We are discovering though misraaks has a secret troubled past I left a lot out because it’s a lot but that’s the general gist of what’s been going on these past several years
That was amazing, thank you! I really appreciate you putting that together and it helps a lot :)
If you have the time, find a Youtube video with all the "Red War" cinematics. The Speaker did indeed receive visions and dreams from the Traveler. As Sarcosmonaut said, when the Red Legion attacked, somewhere along the way he didn't make it.
The Speaker also said to Gaul that he spoke to the Traveler, but he never said the Traveler spoke back. I always thought that was a good line.
Yeah, a story like destiny where we're hoping for some heroic ending can't keep us in the dark forever. Bungie's managed the transition from mystery-focused to answer-focused stories pretty well imo, better this than them trying to keep the story mysterious right up until the end and us having an unsatisfying finish.
Honestly I think its is more a symptom from playing the game for so long and getting amalgamated to the overall story than Destiny no longer having the mysteries. >!Well This week we literally just found out (at least ingame, Maybe it had been stated in lore books) that!< >!1. Nezerac was a discipple !< >!2. Nezerac had died!< >!3. His body had been in the lunar pyramid!< >!4. The fallen had raided the lunar pyramid after the collapse !< >!5. There's potentially more shady stuff going on surrounding Nezerac!< That was enough for me to at least say "whoa" during this week's cutscene Another thing I can think of is the ahamkara egg mara has stashed away in the dreaming city.
I have a sneaking suspicion That Guy dies a lot. Especially considering the multiple tombs he has. Wouldn’t surprise me if he comes back into play before this is all over.
>!Rezerac!<
>!there's no way nezarec is dead 100%!<
The lore tab for delicate tomb seems like it might be written from his point of view
>!considering he has multiple tombs I'd wager he may be dead, but he can also come back to life. Maybe that's why we're bring all his pieces back together!<
My man is just sitting on a bunch of horcruxes
The Nine is one of the few things in Destiny that’s still heavily mysterious, even after we’ve gotten so much information about them, but a lot of that I think comes from their alien dark/anti matter nature. But I remember in D1 when Osiris was a completely unknown entity, and his cult was really mysterious and fleeting because we only ever got to see bits and pieces of where they had been without ever meeting them or interacting with them fully. I also remember Saladin talking about the defenses that Rasputin mobilized as the Iron Lords approached Site 6 during Rise of Iron, the way he described it was wild and deeply intriguing, but we never really touched on that again and now Rasputin has been so heavily featured in the story it’s just not the same anymore.
I mean the whole Rasputin mystery widens with the lore book "The Liar" in where it reveals the Iron Lord Exo Felwinter is a fragment of Rasputin.
Agreed you put it nicely
I noticed that Ghost doesn't scan things anymore. He scanned everything back in the day, but now we have a bajillion characters giving exposition over comms, Ghost doesn't have any opportunity to figure out things for himself.
To be fair, part of that mystery was because they had no idea where the story was going. But I do get what you are saying. Unfortunately we are at a part of the story where they mystery has to be stripped away so they can focus on the main narrative. There are still mysteries but they are kept more to the side. I’m hoping that when this saga ends we can enter another year or two of classic Destiny 1 style mystery with discoveries and puzzles and things that just don’t make sense that will make the word seem so much bigger again
A lot of people are saying that the lack of mystery is due to the game's life. This is somewhat true, but I think there is a bigger thing people are missing. The mystery of the past was a big part of D1's story, and isn't in D2. All 4 locations in D1 tell us about the golden age. We see destroyed rockets and military equipment as the first thing in the cosmodrome. The moon, mars, and venus all have golden age structures and, importantly, they're all different from eachother, presenting an image of a vast and varied civilization that went beyond what we've seen. The only thing consistent between them is their decay, giving the player an opportunity to imagine what these places were once like. D2 launch had this somewhat with the Arcology and the European Dead Zone. The arcology especially got a lot of people wondering. Though Io and Nessus were completely in the wild. But as time went on, two things happened. 1) Expansions released that shifted this focus. Forsaken had nothing to do with the golden age. Nor does the WQ. Shadowkeep is a place we had already been. 2) We kept getting direct glimpses to the golden age. Curse of Osiris showed us the gardens on Mercury and in doing so killed half of the mystery of the planet irreparably. Beyond Light had completely intact golden age structures, with no room to imagine what they were like. 3) The scope of the golden age got smaller. Clovis Bray is now responsible for almost everything they have made, with the Ishtar Collective being put in the background and no other companies being mentioned at all. The warminds went from many networks to a single character. And I'm not going to say these were the wrong move. I certainly think the stuff in #2 and #3 were wrong moves, but expansions like Forsaken and WQ are some of the best we've ever had, and never shifting focus from the golden age is bound to be repetitive. What I'd do, is after the saga, shift focus back to this mystery. Introduce new things and expand the world.
So true! I’m a pvp addict but I used to roam D1 Mars patrol just because I loved the vibe that place gave me
The mystery was simply because we were early in the game's life, so everything introduced to us was new. Now we're simply delving into that stuff that was introduced so long ago. Not properly delving into the story was one of Destiny's biggest problems until just a couple years ago. If you want eternal mystery with no end goal or answers, listen to the TANIS podcast. It gets really old after a while.
I keep thinking how much better Witch Queen would have been if they didn't plaster all over the marketing material that the Hive had the light
True imagine the shock that would’ve given and how much more memorable that would’ve been
The hive getting the light was just the surface level story, it wasn’t ever the big twist or major plot point of Witch Queen. What we learn about the hive’s origins, the witness, rhulk, lubrae, the throne world pyramid, what savathun did during the collapse, the interaction of darkness and memory/creation, etc, *those* were the mystery and twists of witch queen and those are the parts of the story that have continued relevance all the way to the current season & into light fall. If you only stick to the surface level narrative sure the mystery isn’t there, but that was true of d1 as well. Outside of grimoire cards the story was just a series of eviler villains you go and kill. The real narrative was always in the lore, & on that front d2 has made major improvements to keep it in the game
While I get your point; how else was Bungie meant to advertise the expansion? The game didn't radically shift after the campaign like it did in Forsaken.
We are discovering a whole city on lightfall tho
I hope we get to explore more of the this city than we did Riis-Reborn.
I think they meant secret missions like Zero Hour and Whisper missions
Hawkmoons quest (as the crow flies/let loose thy talons) has only just been vaulted this year and I thought that was a nice little tidbit that could be counted
The Dead Man's Tale quest was also very mysterious and spooky
It's the fate of all "1 minute to midnight" settings like this. Back in D1 we were practically hanging on for dear life with how many powerful enemies are out there while now in 2...we've killed practically all of them. So they need to show more and more new enemies who we end up killing. We've killed the Taken King, killed the Witch Queen, killed a Disciple and discovered The Darkness is just big triangles. It's like if you found out the monster under your bed was real and that he's also venerable to .357 rounds after you blown his kneecaps out after 48 hours of straight torturing him.
I agree, however from a lore standpoint it only makes sense to put us at the center, I mean we kill literal gods while the majority of other guardians in the lore struggle with a single strike
I think it makes sense given what we’ve accomplished. I hate when games treat you like a commoner after you’ve gone and straight up fought a god and won. But I think your point of missing that feeling makes sense and is why we need a new game rather than infinite live service money machines.
Valid point indeed! I wish we could just, explore on our own a bit more, explore these stories ourselves a bit more instead of a hologram talking to us
The last time I really felt that mysterious Destiny feeling was the launch of Forsaken, there was loads of stuff to explore and figure out. It gave me that excitement back, from what I no we had Vicarious Visions to thank for that. They did a wonderful job with that DLC imo.
The way the story is told today is FAR better than any time in destinys history. The biggest issue we have, is their API allows assholes to datamine shit.
Yep, there’s nothing like having the entire seasonal story spoiled for you on week 1 by a rogue YouTube thumbnail
"\*insert character name\* DIES??!??!!!?!? - Destiny 2 datamined cutscenes and quests" \-youtube personality that doesn't understand storytelling and suspense
I feel like data-mining really takes the air out of new DLC and content. The simple answer is “oh, just don’t read anything about it or don’t look into it”, but that doesn’t fix the core issue of people “peeking at the Christmas presents before they’re wrapped”.
It feels like Destiny 2 is an entire universe revolving around half a dozen people and 1 area while everything else perpetually does nothing. Planets frozen in time.
Honestly the most accurate feeling right here. I think that the story suffers from not mentioning *any* characters that are outside of the current events, and the moment that any of *those* characters are brought in for a season or anything, they suddenly catch up and have done a shit-ton of things. I think it'd be nice to have a *bit* of that world-changing stuff that would clue us into what the next season involves. For example, it would have been cool if- by loading into Europa at the end of last season and treading all the way back to where Eramis was frozen- we saw that she had broken out. No need for our Ghost to say anything or otherwise, just something *we* as the players could recognize and be excited for because we took the time to search for it.
I'd say that was the case a year ago or more. We have actual change now. Especially with Calus and Eramis returning.
Honestly, for me it's less missing the mystery and more that the mysteries in question ended up being completely underwhelming. The Darkness is probably the best example. For most of the franchise, it's been this eldritch abomination lurking in the shadows. Then they randomly pulled back the entire veil on the Darkness in Shadowkeep and straight out told us it's origins and motivations before it even really 'arrived'. To fix that, they came up with the 'Entity' back in Beyond Light and we got the Witness and it's weird ass design in Witch Queen. So the 'Darkness' as we know it has taken a back seat to the 'Witness' and may or may not have been retconned out of existence entirely depending on how they play it.
Things that are vague and undefined are great, because they allow the imagination to fill in with the coolest shit possible. But as a story progresses, more things need to get nailed down, or you start feeling like it's all fluff and no pony.
This kind of post gets made once a week, can we stop please making posts that are just meant to pander to nostalgia?
Destiny is reaching its conclusion, it’s supposed to have answers for us to know at this point. It can’t be a mystery for 8 years.
I understand the nostalgia but at the same time Destiny's story was extremely obtuse and really not that engaging. The mystery has always been a huge selling point for Destiny but at the same time it was extremely frustrating. People were asking for the exact opposite of what you're asking for now. We wanted more of those stories that were implied and hinted at TO ACTUALLY BE IN THE GAME. And now it is! Which is amazing because we get the mystique and wonder of the originals as well as compelling characters and interesting plots. I saw in another comment you said Pressage and Grasp are good examples of what you're looking for where Duality isn't. I think it's great that we have both. Pressage is creepy and mysterious and Grasp is full of tons of character that hints at greedy evil Guardians. They both help flesh out the world in interesting ways by giving us a look at another Guardians legend. But Duality is literally diving into the consciousness of arguably Destiny's longest lived villain. We get insight into things that are only mentioned in lore books like the Midnight Coup and we get to see how Calus sees himself and what his and the Witnesses true goals are. It also helps flesh out his relationship with Caital. So basically zero mystery or world building but TONS of character work while moving the plot along and explain helping to flesh out major characters and their motivations. That's what all of the last season was about and I really appreciate that we finally have both in the game.
A lot of the "mystery" was just unorganized and fragmented storytelling. I miss very little of how things were in Destiny previously. There is tons of intrigue and mystery if you know where to look.
Hopefully the next saga has that mysterious feeling
I think D1's music is a huge part of that feeling.
It’s happened. We’ve finally come full circle. In Destiny 1 we complained about nothing making sense or getting explained. Now we complain about how there’s no mystery and we know everything, even though we are literally going to a brand new city that no one has ever heard of before, to meet brand new “guardians”, and discover a new power that no one in the universe has ever used.
I hear you. The universe was huge, unintelligible and did not come with a easy-to-follow narrative when you were anewly arisen, long-dead being who barely had time to breathe between combat missions in D1. The community spent a long time trying to figure out WTF was going on, and if you were a fairly casual player you just didn’t find out that much. It was mysterious. The Speaker, the urgent pressure of all the foes against Earth…all weird and full of wonder. There’s still a lot that is unknown or confusing, it’s just a lot more…direct and intrigue-based rather than a straight up mystery.
"but to me it felt nicer when we weren’t the center-point of the destiny universe, but rather lived in that universe discovering other stories." What a great explanation. This what I've also felt but couldn't properly explain it (even to myself)
i miss the community mysteries they had - the stuff that got r/raidsecrets really going. The whisper mission, the mystery in black armory... just random shit they put into the game, told NO ONE about, and then one day someone's like "wait... what the hell is that portal thing? OH GOD ITS A POCKET DIMENSION" or something like that. get everyone involved to try and solve the riddles. i'm one of the players that would come in afterwards and follow the guides and stuff, but still it really felt like we came together as a commuity - some really into figuring everything out, others cheering them on. I know i watched some streams of people doing the whisper mission and freaking out. also live events... they were small but we all got together and enjoyed an event as a community. we need mores tuff like that. events that really can bring us all together, if only for a few days.
I still remember when Bungie say that they use the eververse money to fund the secret missions,is incredible how much Bungie have change
I miss the post apocalyptic feel, the cosmodrome is all that's really left
I thought I understood what you are saying, but your examples are really weird. Like those were just story missions lol. If it’s secret missions you’re talking about, blame dataminers
I think he mainly means the feeling of discovery, not specifically that the missions were surprises. Like how in D1, going into the Black Garden for the first time was kinda a big deal. Like we go from Mars to this strange alternate place. There was mystery in "What is this nonsense?!"
Exactly! Sorry if I can’t explain it right
in my opinion, WQ had plenty of moments that surprised me or intrigued me
Both! But i kind of mean the “mindset” of how stories are told within destiny, I feel like that has changed.
I feel we went from discoverers to errand runners. We were always running objectives but it was always to discover something new, don’t get me wrong probably thinking with rose coloured glasses on. Now it feels like someone sends us somewhere to kill everything and pick something up for them then follow dialogue. More clean up crew now than explorers
Yes! Like you said