While Destiny 2 had a momentous finale for its Light and Darkness Saga in The Final Shape, which offered a clean opportunity to end its story there, the game’s development team at Bungie were narratively on a roll. The expansions that followed that quasi-climactic release, The Edge of Fate and Renegades, were meant to kickstart a second Fate Saga for the game. However, mechanical choices, particularly around attempts to more easily onboard new and returning players, not only failed to do so, they soured the experience for a lot of player Guardians who never left.
Aside from its issues, though, Destiny 2’s story has never been better, and it will be a real shame, if this truly is the end of the franchise, that we’ll never see that narrative play out.
For those who don’t know, the fate of Destiny was changed at the 11th hour before the original game’s release. Joseph Staten, who helped write the original Halo trilogy, was the initial lead writer for the first Destiny game. However, mere months before that title’s launch, much of Staten’s narrative was scrapped as it was deemed too dense and linear for the flexible and open design of the game. Staten left to join Xbox, and Destiny launched to reviews that heavily critiqued the game’s story, or lack thereof. As one developer at Bungie put it, Destiny was “a game written without writers.” Concepts like the Light and Darkness were in place, but no one on the team actually knew what they were.
Narratively, Destiny managed to scrape along by fleshing out said concepts as best it could. The studio focused more on developing its characters, such as Oryx, The Taken King, and Uldren Sov, the Awoken prince who would be reborn as the Guardian Crow. From their character development, the story of the game would be formed around them. Little by little, the team was building a more solid foundation on which to tell future tales.
The inconsistency continued in the lead-up to The Final Shape. Releases like Beyond Light and Lightfall were both criticized for falling short in their narratives for various reasons, while The Witch Queen was highly praised for its development around fan-favorite character Savathûn, as well as expanding how Destiny’s Light and Darkness worked.
In these expansions, Bungie slowly introduced the Witness, the eventual big bad of the Light and Darkness Saga. In the early days of the game, the downfall of humanity was simply the result of an ill-defined force that characters referred to as “the Darkness,” and the only thing that saved our species was another nebulous power known as “the Light,” which belonged to a giant, alien ball in the sky that had made its home on planet Earth centuries before the events of the Destiny duology: the Traveller.
While you can certainly point to moments in the earlier years of the game that hint toward the existence of the Witness, it’s clear this character wasn’t nailed down by the team until those later expansions in the Light and Darkness Saga. But once that character was defined, it felt as if all of Destiny’s disparate lore and narrative suddenly clicked into place.
From the very beginning of Destiny, players have known the Traveller is a higher being that moves from planet to planet, bringing with it the power for tremendous change. This ultimately results in prosperity for whichever civilization harnesses its Light, but once the Traveller leaves, that visited society begins to unravel, perpetuated by the arrival of the Darkness, which seems to be chasing the Traveller through the cosmos. However, when the Darkness, and the various antagonistic forces that accompany it, arrive on Earth, the Traveller remains with our world.
