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.
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