Looter Shooter

Friends, I have been playing some Destiny 2 and having a lot of fun doing so. I knew that Beyond Light was creeping up on us, but I had not really been following it terribly closely after the launch reschedule. After participating in the final night prior to the release and watching the Traveler heal itself, I started to get a bit of hype going on. Destiny is one of those games that I have been a voracious fan of the lore and the setting. The world that has been crafted rivals any of the great science fiction franchises, and I will stand by that statement. The challenge is that the game has always struggled with actually telling that story in a way that does not require you to go digging through the archives of some wiki to piece together the details.

If you have a spare four hours, I highly suggest the extremely dense review of the lore from Byf that takes you from the origins of Destiny through the Shadowkeep expansion. The challenge however is that a lot of shit has happened since that video. This week he released a follow up video on the complete story The Darkness that I plan on watching at some point today. This one clocks in at an hour and a half and while I have stayed somewhat connected to the events that are happening… I still feel like I could use a refresher course. Essentially the key conflict in the Destiny universe is between the Traveler that represents a force known as The Light, and a forced that has been speaking to us since Shadowkeep known collectively as The Darkness. With Beyond Light, we begin to start wielding the powers of the Darkness against our enemies that are also suddenly Darkness infused.

Beyond Light feels in so many ways like a restart of the game. The events that lead to the launch of the expansion saw the Darkness claim four locations. Gone are Io, Mars, Mercury and Titan… and knowing that going in was a little frustrating. Titan was my go to location for farming public events and had some of my favorite lost sectors… I will miss you Greg. The way in which they have done it however feels like we are starting a brand new chapter of the game. Now we have Europa and access once again to the Cosmodrome, which feels really damned good to be exploring once more. More than this the lighting in the entire universe is a bit more harsh and sinister. Everything about the game feels a little darker including the UI which has flipped to black on white to white on black. All of this reflects the fact that we are now taking our first steps into becoming a “Warrior of Darkness” to borrow the term from Final Fantasy.

There are a whole lot of things that I am going to miss from the destinations that we lost. That said, Europa is one of the best designed worlds that I have seen from the Bungie team. You have these giant icy fields, areas infiltrated by Vex structures, and the cold and modern labs of Clovis Bray. I am sure there are probably other areas that I have not explored yet but those are the stark differences between environments that I have already seen. Everything seems to be the gorgeous color palette that varies from deep dark teals to fiery maroons. Again though as you can see through this screenshot above… there is a dark sinister nature to all of the lighting and color work. It feels like we are going places we were not supposed to be going.

The area I am most excited to be back in however is the Cosmodrome. This is where we began our adventure in Destiny 1 and probably the area that I spent the most time exploring in either its original incarnation or the later Rise of Iron SIVA infused version. I was admittedly a little sad that the SIVA areas are closed off, but I guess that makes sense as they would probably want to control its spread. The Cosmodrome that is available however very closely presents that experience I felt back in 2013 as I first explored Alpha and later Beta on my brand new PlayStation 4. There were so many locations that we lost in the jump between Destiny 1 and 2 that I would love to explore once again. I still desperately want a modern version of an activity like the Prison of Elders, and while Sorrows Harbor was great… I still miss the Court of Oryx and Archon’s Forge events.

I said earlier that this really feels like a fresh start for the game, and with that comes a wiping of the original triumph system. There is now a legacy area that lets you revisit your past accomplishments, but upon logging into the game we all started back at square one with a brand new set of triumphs to complete. I have to admit that while I claim not to be motivated by achievements… it has been really nice ticking new boxes in the system. The only thing that I have not found is the cosmetic system that they talked about, but maybe that was going to come out in a later release of the game. I did spend awhile cleaning house in my vault and dismantling anything that was not outdated that I did not have deep emotional attachment to.

Also in the theme of fresh starts, I have changed clans and returned to Tequila Mockingbirds the group I raided in Destiny 1 with and spent the early days of D2 on the PS4 playing with. I have passed the baton of Greysky Armada to Thalen as I think he might be the most likely to return to the game and has some real world friends that he invited to the clan. This had been something that my friends Warenwolf and JazSquirrel had been low key suggesting for awhile, and I figured with the start of an expansion it was a good time to make the change. I am hoping with an active clan that I myself will be significantly more active and maybe even start raiding again.

I am nowhere near finishing the main story, and it is paced in a way that leads me to become easily distracted. This may or may not be a positive to other players because between each mission there seems to be some open world activities that you need to engage in before entering the next story area. This personally fits my play style as I ground up to the soft cap of 1200… before actually starting the expansion story and I tend to space out story blocks with a lot of patrol activity anyway. However there will be folks that want to make a beeline through the story and might get a bit frustrated by that.

What I don’t know however is what the game is going to be like for brand new players. I am guessing that everything that existed previously on the missing planets is just gone forever? I would love to hear some clarification for anyone who did not do the Red War sequence previously, what that actually looks like now. Some friends asked me yesterday and I did not have answers, so if you do please drop them in the comments below.

Last night I spent my evening with so many other players, hanging out in a new social space in Destiny 2 and watching a pulsating orb in the sky. My timeline was filled with pictures of the Traveler and various subtle changes as we counted down towards an undetermined event. When the almighty was shot down, something similar happened as folks watched it blow up and crash in very slow motion. Similarly I think we all sort of expected the traveler to subtly change as it began to heal itself. That however was not exactly the case, and what happened was considerably more interesting.

The first challenge however was trying to get through the login queue. I started this nonsense considerably later than most folks, and as a result I had to push through a queue of other 10,000 players. I had been watching Aztecross, because I did not really plan on joining in the reindeer games yesterday. I was not there for the explosion of the Almighty, and instead watched one of the many recordings that had been posted around and sped up so you could see the whole event that took place over a number of hours in a few minutes. I am not exactly sure what it was about last night however that made me want to log in and experience it for myself.

When you logged in there was a new mission called The Last City in the Tower where the Halloween events previously showed up. When you queued for the mission you were dropped down to a copy of The Last City that you’ve experienced in a few other events and you slowly make your way to a door leading to a brand new social area. There were a bunch of rumors scattered around about needing to do something while you were in that area, but it seemed like it was mostly just a vantage point to watch the world burn… or in our case the Traveler attempt to heal itself.

At various points during the night there were a number of subtle changings taking place. The random debris started to order itself into rings. There were lightning flashes taking place between the main body of the traveler and the larger chunks that had been floating around. Just ahead of 9 pm CST something started to happen and both Eris Morn and our own Ghost started talking to us. The surface of the Traveler began to pulse and shimmer as though suddenly liquid and waves of light started to cause a shimmering heat island effect in the area from which we were watching. You can somewhat see this happening if you look at the building on the right side of the above screenshot.

My good friend Jaz Squirrel recorded the event on their widescreen set up so you can experience the final moments of Destiny 2 before things changed. For those who don’t wish to watch it in video form… as we watched the traveler continue to pulsate brighter and brighter this is what played out between Eris Morn and your Ghost.

Eris Morn: Something is coming, I can feel it…
Eris Morn: It is drawing power. Could it be enough to drive the Darkness away from us?
Your Ghost: Every fireteam has returned to the City. Even the Hunters. They’re wit the people, keeping them safe.
Your Ghost: Well, the last time this happened… the world ended.
Your Ghost: I’m not worried. I’m not.
Eris Morn: It is reforming. Healing its wounds.
Eris Morn: This will not be the end. It will be an escalation.

When the sequence completed, the Traveler grew so bright that our visuals went completely white, upon which we were left with a cinematic. The Traveler fully healed radiating light to push back against the Darkness that now swallows the entire left side of the director map. In one swoop Io, Mars, Mercury and Titan are gone from us.

For those with particularly long memories with this Franchise, this visual might seem similar. In fact during the very intro video of Destiny 1, we saw a similar representation of how the Darkness came and engulfed the solar system. It seems that not only has the Darkness arrived, but we are once again being thrust into a new apocalypses of a sort. This time however the Darkness has reached out to us and has been courting all of the races that were once the chosen of the Traveler. The events of the last several seasons have lead us to question as to whether or not the Traveler is actually the benevolent force that we think it. It has also lead us to question if the Darkness is in fact evil, or has just been wielded to ill intent by our enemies such as the Vex and the Hive.

When the cinematic finished we were left with a very ominous server offline message. “The Light cannot save you. Seek us out on Europa.” So that is precisely what we will do when the servers come back online today. We will seek our fortune on Europa and begin the next chapter of Destiny.