A bunch of (undead, vampire) super-soldiers have to protect humanity (the white race) from hordes of invading aliens. The threat is everywhere and omnipresent, even though the actual baddies are underwhelming and you can readily slaughter tens of thousands of them. They're almost all uniformly evil, apparently just for the evulz. They're controlled by the all powerful yet unseen (((Darkness))) and the only thing protecting humanity is a giant white golfball. A white golf ball. Violence is the only way to interact with anything, and violence and death are goals unto themselves.
I keep trying to play this game and keep ending up frustrated by how empty, brutal, and fashy it is. Your characters, based on their actions, would be complete pyschopaths IRL, and the bad guy factions are all empty caricatures of evil evil baddies including Alien Invaders (Cabal), dirty illegal aliens who steal things (Fallen), Space Muslims (Scorn, Hive), and whatever the taken are (lazy writing so they can re-use assets).
Idk, I'm kind of done with it. Grinding for loot so you can grind for more loot is fun, but the story is so dumb and unselfconscious, and not even fun. Like with WH40k it's fascist and it's glorious because it revels in the excess and stupidity of fascism, it's all a huge fucking joke that's completely over the top. But Destiny plays it straight and it's so... dour and boring and unpleasant. This is the second time I've tried to play it and the second time i've given up in disgust.
Eh, why not. I know literally nothing about the streamer but in the proud leftist tradition of being a schismatic asshole I denounce that Destiny too.
“The rioting needs to fucking stop. And if that means like white redneck fucking militia dudes out there mowing down dipshit protesters that think that they can torch buildings at 10 p.m., then at this point they have my fucking blessing because holy shit, this fucking shit needs to stop. It needed to stop a long time ago.” - Destiny
Oh boy, what a kind gentleman streamer I just discovered. I can’t wait to find out his opinions on the people killed by Kyle Rittenhouse
Literally everything you need to know.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uncensorstiny/comments/iitw20/destiny_wants_the_riots_to_stop_and_hopes_white/
Yeah I was trying to figure out if this was saying Destiny is an undead vampire. Tbh might not be far off.
"excesses" from the pre-covid times when it was considered grimdark to demand the sacrifice of 1000 psykers a day to keep the galaxy-spanning empires warp travel working. smh this is what it looks like when you don't know what you don't know, we'll eagerly sacrifice 1000 people a day to keep the applebees open.
Jesus that's bleak. I hadn't even thought of that. The Emprah eating all those psykers is extremely bad, but, like... at least it makes the warp trains run on time. IRL we're sacrificing people to the line and it's not even working. Jesus fucking christ.
To the people who own everything, the stupid fucking Holy Line is their Astronomicon.
They’re controlled by the all powerful yet unseen (((Darkness)))
No they're not. The Hive (fascist space shrimp in a giant intergalactic pyramid scam - I'm not joking here, their entire hierarchy is a pyramid scheme except instead of money their currency is literally abstract commodified violence, which is literally power that makes them magic, because paracausal bullshit) are vaguely allied to it, but neither them nor it are exactly happy with that. The Taken are basically just enslaved empty husks created by Oryx or later Savathun, the Hive royals who are every bit as incestuous and monstrous as IRL royals would be if they were magic fascist space shrimp that genocided galaxies. The Cabal are fashy imperialists with armies of canonically cloned soldiers that are "born" fully grown and thrown into battle immediately. The Fallen are aggrieved settler colonialists with their own manifest destiny shit going on. The Scorn are basically just strasserites. The Vex are sociopathically impassive and don't really have any stake in things except "fuck paracausality and its stupid bullshit; light, dark, idc I just wanna grill (on the surface of a star. it's a space grill)."
Meanwhile the Traveler's a fucking technocratic liberal that's just like "lmao hey everybody paracausality makes for some pretty cool tech huh?" handing out power without regards for how it's used or who hoards it (thus the "Golden Age" for humanity was basically a space-faring cyberpunk dystopia), then it fucks off once its fascist rivals showed up and murdered everyone, and it only stayed around on Earth because Clovis Bray (an evil bastard oligarch and one of the biggest villains of the background lore*) built a gun big enough to plausibly threaten it, forcing it to fight and nearly die. There's apparently some background lore that explains both the Traveler and The Darkness as basically competing gods, one trying to grow a wide variety of life for its own sake and the other trying to winnow it all down to one ultimate killing machine that destroys all other life, but really they both fucking suck because the Traveler hands out world shattering space magic without any sort of vetting or responsibility and then it just fucks off leaving everyone else to pay for it, and the Darkness is just omnicidal social darwinist fascist bullshit.
* unreleased current season lore spoilers about Clovis Bray
Now he's the senile robot that makes some of your guns, and neither him nor anyone else knows it.
it only stayed around on Earth because Clovis Bray (an evil bastard oligarch and one of the biggest villains of the background lore*) built a gun big enough to plausibly threaten it
There's nothing that conclusively proves this, we have no way to know for sure why the Traveler stayed. But everything else you cover is broadly correct. There is a lot of interesting lore in the game, but it's both hidden away most of the time and rarely used for the actual in-game storylines.
Destiny is fashy. But that’s because it’s a video game, and a shit one at that.
Ban all video games. :ban-hammer:
Banning Tetris is counter revolutionary!
Ban all video games might not be a good idea, though I believe, that if the USSR would've existed to a time that Dota, CS Go, WOW (or whatever is current) and the internet endless scroller were alive it wouldn't have fallen.
This is a bit, right? Cause otherwise you're reading way too much into a pretty generic setting, shooting aliens is the basis for probably hundreds of games. White golf ball, really? Also, shit like the triple parentheses is kinda revolting in any context.
Yeah, I feel like the world of Destiny is kind of at odds with the actual game.
The lore is establishing that we're making inroads of diplomacy with the Fallen and the Cabal, that we actually have large groups of them working with humanity.
But in game, we have no interaction with them outside of a few vendors. Hell, in the new expansion there's an activity where you help friendly Fallen flee the tyrannical House of Salvation, but you never actually see or speak with any of the allied Fallen.
It feels like the genre itself is just incredibly limiting to the concepts they want to convey.
Destiny is also the worst offender of the "show don't tell" rule in, like... ever. Having everything hidden in obscure background lore worked great in Dark Souls because everyone who could explain anything is dead or insane and dead. But in Destiny Zavala just stands there staring in to the distance and could literally just explain the state of things... but doesn't.
Bungie has always made the mistake that Cryptic Bullshit is the same thing as world-building.
Pathways Into Darkness was like this Marathon was like this Halo was like this
Like, they've gotten a little better about explaining stuff in game, but there's still too much that's only available if you grind through content that 5% of the player base will ever attempt
It was cool when Marathon did it because the story-telling capacity available in 1995 was extremely limited and the number of title's available was very low, so playing the same game over and over to find secrets and because there was nothing else to play made sense. And Durandal was a cool new idea in 1995.
But they're on the same bullshit in 2020, and it just comes off as bad, lazy writing. There's no reason to make basic background information about the setting difficult to find.
But in game, we have no interaction with them outside of a few vendors.
Aside from vendors we see Spider's Fallen 'associsates' and fight alongside them in Forsaken and a mission in Beyond Light after the campaign. We also get to see Mithrax (or as Variks calls him, Misraaks) in the Outbreak Perfected mission. I do agree though. I just want to see my four armed buddies milling around like in the tower. :(
Maybe we'll get to see Eliksni guardians or something down the line in D3 or a later expansion, as Mithrax is building a House of Light.
By this point I am honestly surprised there's still Fallen willing to keep fighting us, considering every attempt of theirs to fuck with humanity ends with thousands of their side dead.
Kind of surprised the Scorn haven't completely taken the place of hostile Fallen at this point.
Your characters, based on their actions, would be complete pyschopaths IRL
They do at least play with this in the lore. Canonically your character IS standoffish and a silent killing machine, and guardians are often feared and avoided by regular citizens due to their casual relationship with death and the danger that comes from simply being close to them. And although it's not in the game anymore, the Leviathan and Calus are in-game representations of how guardians often prioritize material gain over acting as a hero. Sure, you could be out serving the people, but why do that when being a glorified handyman for the Cabal emperor gets you sweet loot? It opens up a lot of interesting ideas on what standards we should be and are capable of holding these immortal godslayers to. Is basic human morality even applicable to these paracausal beings?
I do agree that the gameplay loop doesn't do a very good job of communicating any deeper ideas than "kill stuff, get loot". If there's one single fatal flaw for Bungie with Destiny, it's their inability to marry the in-depth lore with gameplay.
This is the same game that had pretty much the entire story on the wiki. I remember playing through the entire thing and not having a single idea of what was going on.
Destiny 2 is better than Destiny 1 in that regard because the lore books and entries are pretty much all in game, but it's still somewhat difficult to piece it all together, especially now that so much of the game got removed in Beyond Light.
The Leviathan raids are part of what got me to quit the first time. It felt so totally out of place to just... kill a bunch of people to impress some floating space asshole? I still don't know what the fuck they could possibly have been thinking investing so much effort in to something that seemed to be at a complete right angle to the themes of the game. "Go fuck around in space murder vegas for a while"
There's lore? I swear the game's "lore" is so shitty that I tuned it out. Then I tuned out because the same-y gameplay on all the maps was just dumb.
There is, and there;s a lot of good stuff. Check out ishtar-collective.net, they've got pretty much all the lore in one place to peruse at your leisure. One of my favorite lore books is https://www.ishtar-collective.net/categories/book-the-forsaken-prince
I forgot this was a game I poured about a year of my time into.
In broad strokes, nothing about destiny compelled me except for pre-production and world building.
But we were blessed by the golf ball, it rests with us, the last race blessed with the golf ball wants it back, the moon has wizards? And some turtles are fucking around on mars. I was never taken in by the concept of the “darkness” and only played up to the first year of D2 after giving them the second chance they didnt deserve.
I remember being more taken in with warframe, as you were the genocidal killing machine made by a genocidal race for a war against another genocidal race the first genocidal race made and lost control of, to then fight off the second genocidal race for the first genocidal race and then promptly kill off the first. Then you are sealed away to wake up to continue being a genocidal war machine, except it’s for “balance” and it’s all remnants of the genocidal race you destroyed in the pre-game history. And you have a space mom.
