Destiny 2 Is Dead And You Know What? Good.
I'll preface this with a disclaimer, I love Destiny. As I've said multiple times on this blog I think Destiny is the coolest sci fi setting. The Final Shape made me cry. Whenever I write my own scifi pieces the Destiny influence is so thick you could shoot it and make it drop an engram.
But I need to stress that when I say "I Love Destiny" what I mean is "I love Destiny (The Universe)" and not Destiny 2 (The Video Game).
I have an intensely on and off relationship with the game, over the years I dropped it easily because I was wholly uninterested in grinding power level, easily sick of repeating the same content over and over and over to unlock an exotic I was never actually going to use. When the Final Shape was good the sentiment amongst my social circle was shocked bafflement. "What do you mean Bungie sent this story off in a way that was tasteful and well measured? How is this campaign well paced and interested, where's the part where we grind to unlock armour pieces?" As good as Destiny 2 was, it was also really, really bad. So the Final Shape was the best jumping off point. I was done. Wash my hands. See you later.
I did not come back for Edge of Fate, but I did look up the lore. See where the game was going. I was disappointed. In my opinion the end of the "Light and Dark Saga" was the perfect time to step back, let the stakes simmer down a bit and focus on lore details that were less grand, more personal, something that fans had been salivating for like...
Dredgens, and the Praxic Order.
As a Star Wars fan I have very strong feelings about Renegades, specifically I fucking hated it.
Destiny is the coolest scifi setting and it was also completely unique, there is NOTHING out there that's like Destiny. And now not even Destiny is like Destiny, it's like fucking Star Wars. I read every appearance of a Praxic Warlock in the lore and was so fascinated, Aunor and Shayura in particular had this desperate fanaticism that was so human. Everything that these characters believed in was crumbling around them slowly and they needed something to hang onto. Meanwhile the Dredgens was just cool. Evil cowboys delving into the dark arts, getting into gunfights with the Man With The Golden Gun.
But now, Dredgen are Sith and Praxics are Jedi, complete with Lightsabers.
There's a cutscene at the start of Renegades where Praxic Aunor and Dredgen Bael have a fight. It's a cool lightsaber battle with dramatic turnabouts and push and pull, it's genuinely a cool little scene. But when I watched it for the first time I just, hated it. This isn't what a fight between these people should be. It should be a gunfight. It should be a showdown at high noon I thought that's what this setting was all about!
So I didn't play Renegades, and I heard that after this cutscene the Star Wars references dies down significantly, and that Dredgen Bael really is more Dredgen than Sith, and that overall the expansion was Pretty Good, and I said "Okay, cool." and moved on.
And then it was announced that Destiny 2 would get one final update tying things off and everyone lost their shit, including me.
Fast forward, the update is out, I'm at work reading all of the lore entries added on my phone, I'm learning all the ways that this universe that I loved and the characters I cared about move on. I'm seeing all the plot hooks they could have elaborated on in future expansions, the mystery of Old Chicago, Maya abandoning her search for her beloved and realizing she'd made a horrible mistake, Xur having his free will stripped away and, seemingly, the death of VI in the process?
I read the last entry of Assumptions where, trillions of years in the future where everyone is long dead, Lodi remains. Lodi, who has somehow become a god in of himself, gathers all of the atoms that made up his beloved brother and recreates him, then reveals that the natural flow of entropy has taken its course, and that he's going to need to quickly gather every bit of his family and friends to recreate them. And I realize this is the ending of Destiny, this piece of lore, right here. Its existence unwrites the Winnower and his Final Shape. Death doesn't end something's existence, disproves its right to exist, it just changes it into something else. It's been trillions of years and the Vex haven't become the Final Shape, they've been eliminated too. Instead it changes indefinitely, forever, as another god clings to what he cares about.
I see the cutscene where Zavala reflects on everything he's done, and now that there is finally peace he retires.
And sitting at work I fight back an urge to cry, because it's great. And it's wonderful.
And then, I find out there's more. One more big reveal. One more showing to hint at what the real ending of Destiny was going to be. Everything in Edge of Fate and Renegades was building toward a big reveal that we were going to throw down with the Winnower. We were actually going to fight the Idea of Entropy itself and disprove it. This reveal has gotten people simultaneously so excited and so angry, their minds rushed with the possibilities and hope for what could have been, and then had that hope immediately turn to ash when they remember that because of the greed or incompetence of executives those possibilities would never come.
It didn't sit right with me, couldn't put my finger on why. I didn't think punching the Winnower in the face would have been good.
Like everyone else, I started replaying Destiny 2. I bought the awesome bundle deal that is significantly cheaper than I thought it'd be. I started working my way through campaigns I never played. I had FUN. Then I decided I would rush through Renegades to get the lightsaber to wave it around in front of my fellow Star Wars fan for a laugh. In fact, I did this the same night I read all of those lore entries and almost cried at work.
The experience burned up every bit of good will those lore entries earned.
To swing back to the start, I thought the Praxic Order was so cool and interesting. I thought Aunor was a really, really cool character. There was a part of me that was looking forward to Renegades because I thought the Praxic Order would get their chance to shine, even if they had to do it with a Jedi coat of paint. We'd get more lore about them, we'd get to SEE them.
In the mission where you get the lightsaber you go to a "Praxic Temple". It's contained in the same scifi base the bad guys were using like, a mission ago, but we'll chalk that up to game limitations. Their big temple is just this massive, stone building, full of various urns and jars. I wonder if it's just a reskin of the Pyramid interiors that looked similar from previous expansions, but I can't say for sure. It has a portal to the, notably Darkness affiliated, Ascendant Plane which contains a "Trial" you need to do to get the lightsaber. It's swarming with Taken. When you enter you hear a recording of Bael meeting VI, which Aunor then angrily declares is proof that Bael is the Praxic Order's fault, somehow. Eris Morn defends the Praxic Order. I sit there wondering if I missed dialogue or something. At the end of this long mission I spend in the Ascendant Plane, aka, turbo Darkness Area, I hear another dialogue exchange where Aunor miserably wonders if Bael could really be the Praxic Order's fault, Eris Morn bites her head off and says the Praxic Order sucks ass. I continue to be confused. After the mission Aunor says that the Praxic Order has a lot to answer for and so I go to a third party source to find out what the fuck she's talking about. Apparently Bael encountered VI when he broke into the Praxic Order's vault where they seal away all the Darkness stuff where no one can get it. This is apparently the Praxic Order's fault. It dawns on me that Aunor is trying to have a character moment over the flaws of the Praxic Order and that her character has "Progressed" because she's over come them. It dawns on me that the Praxic Order has not actually been in this expansion at all. It dawns on me that there isn't any lore tabs going into the Praxic Order. It dawns on me there isn't even another named Praxic in this story except for Aunor.
It dawns on me that the reason Eris and Aunor did weird 180s on their positions at the start and end of this mission is because this game's development is rushed and sloppy.
It dawns on me that the Praxic Order and the Dredgens were always more interesting as concepts written about in prose, rather than actual things that showed up in the game.
It dawns on me that this is likely true for most of Destiny's cool lore.
It dawns on me that this is likely true for everything that has recaptured people's enthusiasm in Monument of Triumph.
And finally, it dawns on me that I already knew this, and it's why I didn't think the Winnower being an actual threat we faced would have been cool.
Because there's no way that Bungie could have pulled it off. Not the Bungie that made Renegades, not the Bungie that made Edge of Fate. Not the Bungie that had been experiencing layoffs already. Not the Bungie that had completely and utterly fumbled the ball.
And, frankly, a slower scale more personal story about Guardians fighting Dredgens probably wouldn't have worked even if Destiny 2 was at its best. It just isn't the game for it, Destiny 2 is the game where you shoot hundreds of dudes and run through dungeons. It's not the game where you have tense gun fights with a single dude. Whatever story Bungie could have told it couldn't revolve around these heartfelt character moments people are excited for, it would have to revolve around getting a machine gun and mowing down people until you reached the big guy. Then you'd pick up a ball and dunk it into something to drop his shield so you can shoot him in the face or something, for real, can you imagine that? Can you imagine The WINNOWER being a Raid Boss? The guy whose whole thing is that he doesn't do anything.
Can you actually imagine a version of this that actually works and feels satisfying and pays off all of the themes and philosophical angles the prose has been offering up and, most crucially, involves you and 5 friends getting guns and killing a whole bunch of people?
And even from a practical standpoint, do you think Sony was ever going to allocate Bungie a budget like the Final Shape's ever again? Do you think this company that was hemorrhaging money and hemorrhaging talent had the budget and skills to flesh all of these concepts and themes out to full satisfaction? Do you think Bungie put the Praxic Order in the game represented with boring, potentially reused assets and a singular character who never really talks about the Order except for when she realises how wrong they are, and thought to themselves "We are happy with how much we've explored this concept and have no feelings that we've squandered anything."
But what do we have instead? We have heartfelt prose that cuts straight to the emotions they want to illicit. We have the possibilities of something that could have been really good, if everything went perfectly, and no one had to compromise, and no one made a mistake.
I guarantee you, you wouldn't have liked what you got.
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