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.
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.