Destiny 2
Bungie
On Tuesday, Destiny 2 surprised us all by finishing its Season of the Wish storyline early, throwing Crow through the Traveler portal ahead of schedule, and leaving him waiting for us to catch up.
This was an unexpected and somewhat disappointing end to what I would consider to be the most unusual year in Destiny 2’s history, at least from a storytelling perspective. While there were some good moments, overall it feels like a year of content that wasn’t meant to exist, with Lightfall and the subsequent seasons inserted just to give The Final Shape more time to develop. Let’s recap:
Destiny 2
Bungie
Lightfall – Clearly the biggest story offender, which wasn’t just strange, but actively bad. We are introduced to two new characters, one who dies in a completely expected fashion, but with whom we have zero connection. The other is Nimbus, universally agreed upon as one of the most irritating characters in Destiny history.
Neomuna is a dead city filled with holograms and the entire quest was in pursuit of something called “The Veil,” which is of extreme importance to The Witness and Traveler, though we ended the expansion knowing next to nothing about it, and it needed to be explained more in future seasons. All this time later, even after much more Veil discussion, it’s still pretty hard to parse and seems like a macguffin insert that exists for its own sake.
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Destiny 2
Bungie
Season of Defiance – At this point it’s difficult to remember almost anything that happened in Defiance as an actual season, other than the bizarre decision to kill off Amanda Holliday, one of the game’s few human characters. Death is always strange in Destiny as at any moment, some random ghost could choose to resurrect you, but Amanda’s “sacrifice” felt entirely unnecessary to the larger story and did not work as an emotionally compelling development. The theory that perhaps Amanda was meant to die in the Witness’s initial assault makes a lot more sense, to be honest, and this was inserted as a replacement when the plan changed.
Destiny 2
Bungie
Season of the Deep – I was kind of excited to return to Titan and see how Sloane survived but once we got there it was…strange. We did not actually get Titan back as a patrol space, and once we returned we learned that Sloane had…made friends with the giant sea worm in the ocean. This devolved into weekly telepathic communications through Sloane that lasted a few sentences at a time.
Then, randomly, in I think week five, the worm revealed the answers to all the central mysteries of Destiny. A single cutscene in the middle of this season talked about the past of the Traveler,