long-form on games that won't leave your skull
Destiny 2 is done, having settled into its Final Shape by now. A monument of triumph as it currently stands, if you will. I'll quit the puns at some point, I promise, but maybe not for now.
Destiny at large isn't done, I don't think, as it's far too valuable a franchise for Sony and Bungie to just sweep under the carpet. For better or for worse — and I argue for the latter — someone else might pick up the mantle and see what might be done with it. It's a franchise: a massively successful franchise at that, and so it's gone far beyond anything a single creator might be able to steer.
Whether Bungie survives or not, its legacy deserves to be discussed, and one crucial aspect of it that I've not seen talked about often is just how much the game's grander mythology elevated the experience.
Now, please note that I'm not saying Destiny has been some masterpiece of storytelling over the years. Objectively, it's been all over the place, with some truly god-awful dialogue hampering what should be borderline grimdark narrative development. Yes, I do still dislike Nimbus: how could you possibly tell?
No, the bit I continue to be taken aback with is the background narrative, the lore of it all. Bungie has employed some truly phenomenal writers over the years, and though they've not often been nudged towards their games' front-end, they've always been the bees' knees for those who wanted to learn more.
Don't believe me? Good grief, just go and read Seth Dickinson's Exordia. The man is responsible for some of Destiny's formative concepts and lore, like the Books of Sorrow and the Marasenna, and — arguably most importantly — the Unveiling.
The thing is, none of these in-universe publications are shown to the casual player. You need to go out of your way to seek them out and read them and understand them and really think about what is being communicated. It's not high-brow philosophy, granted, but it's not nearly as far off as you might imagine, either.
Thinking is the important bit for me, because I greatly enjoy and appreciate media that makes me think long and hard. It's kind of like haunting in a sense: bits and bobs of cogitohazardous information that won't leave my sodding brain for years on end. Shockingly, Destiny's brimming with that crap, and that's precisely why I kept coming back to it.
Destiny 2: Monument of Triumph is the first I've played the game in over three years. I was basically cross with the franchise when the Star Wars expansion was announced, as I considered it to be incredibly artistically bankrupt. The fact that the game post-Edge of Fate was absolutely horrid helped none, granted.
What I've returned to is absolutely the best the game has ever been, bar none. Which is curious because up until this very moment, Destiny coasted in my mind as one of those games that forever held the promise of MORE over its players' heads.
Oh for sure, the Strike playlist sucks now, but MORE is going to be added to it over the next couple of seasons. Oh absolutely, Gambit is in dire straits today, but MORE is happening with it in just a few months' time! Oh yes, all the good cosmetics cost Silver today, but MORE free stuff is bound to be just around the corner. Forever the promise of MORE moreness that… ah, well, that's done now, isn't it?
There is no MORE for Destiny 2 anymore, and for once, Bungie fired on all cylinders to deliver possibly a year's worth of content in a single choc-full content update. Better still, Monument of Triumph elevates more-or-less all the old legacy content too, with just about every single mission and activity giving you relevant gear.
This isn't something Bungie would ever have done if they weren't forced to do so, naturally, but even the most cynical Destiny gamerbro must admit that the experience of engaging with the game is now just chef's kiss.
At the same time, none of this matters all that much to me, and I'm positive I'm not the only one who feels like this about Destiny and Bungie in a broader sense. The fact that Destiny 2 is getting a proper sendoff is the right and proper way of handling things, but even had I never returned to it, and even if the game concluded with Renegades, the memories and experiences I built up over the course of my experience with the game would've stuck around.
That's the cogitohazardous bit.
More so than almost any other game I've ever played, Destiny resonated with my eagerness to learn more and wonder. On a very objective, practical level, the game is a fancy shooter with a phenomenally grindy mechanical backing. You just keep replaying missions and over and over and over and over again to slowly grind gear to… well, gosh darn it, do it all over again.
When you pour some juicy lore over those ruddy mechanics, though? Just a tiny bit of context that unravels more and more over time? Yeah, that changes things.
Though most folks know Bungie from its Halo days, my first impression of the studio's capabilities came much before that, from Marathon. A silly little first-person shooter from the days when the term meant precious little and you couldn't really envision a reason to look up or down, not really.
The old Marathon, much as nuMarathon, was loaded with strikingly grown-up lore when games really didn't do much with that at all. Back then, in 1993, you got game lore from the back of its box. Marathon's direct competitor, DOOM, had hardly any lore to begin with.
In comparison, Marathon was a veritable bible. More important than the quantity of its lore alone, however, was the quality of it. Much was rudimentary, some was childish.
Interspersed in-between those lower-level bits was a wealth of genuinely (oh how I hate how LLMs have overused the word) exciting and brain-boggling statements, some of which I've included in this piece here.
Even then, when Marathon was all that was with Pathways Into Darkness propping it up ever-so-slightly, these were tantalizing. I couldn't help but wonder what the heck does it all mean! What are Bungie's writers implying? What do you mean "frog blast the vent core???"
It all boils down to a single concept, really: that of the Eternal Warrior. Each and every one of Bungie's games could be filed down to a single chosen avatar fighting against impossible odds, trying to overcome them over and over again until the job is done. Arguably, the concept stretches out beyond Bungie alone, with the Eternal Warrior being an ever-present idea that fights against a looming sundown of some sort in every single game, ever. You could call these catastrophes or adversaries the Nightfall or the Darkness if you wanted to be cheeky. All of these avatars are personifications of the same thing, really. The Eternal Warrior is not so much a being as it is an idea: a basic and essential myth that tickles some core human fancy. We wish for agency, do we not?
That is why I've decided to reinstall Destiny 2 one more time, in truth. Sure, it helped that Bungie's gunplay was and still is best-in-class, but I wanted to experience the sheer richness of Destiny lore one more time, now that it's done.
But then, it's not really done if you subscribe to the Eternal Warrior theory, is it? It's always that one figure struggling against the Adversary, forever doomed to keep trying anew as they're cut down, shot up, and torn asunder. Hopeless encounters successfully won, indeed.
I like it, I really do. Especially because it's one of the clearest examples of Bungie creating something that goes far beyond its own very self. Pete Parsons couldn't fuck this one up even if he was trying to.