Destiny just got the most important cutscene in its 9-year history

The Destiny franchise has had some long-standing secrets since its birth nearly nine years ago, and Destiny 2 Has deepened them since its release. So it’s little surprise that, after years of offering more secrets than answers, Bungie decided to drop a massive lore bomb in the middle of a random Tuesday. Destiny 2: Season of the Deep.

The new cutscene, which appears after episode five of the “Into the Depths” quest, explains the origins of the series’ Big Bad, The Witness, and even begins to unravel the mystery of the Veil. is – MacGuffin players chased most of the recent Lightfall expansion, only to learn next to nothing about it in the end. More importantly, the cutscene finally gives players some insight into who The Traveler – the giant space orb that’s been sitting in Destiny’s horizon for nearly a decade – really is.

[Spoiler Warning: This post contains spoilers for a new Destiny 2 cutscene, as well as the end of the Lightfall campaign. If you don’t want to be spoiled, go play the Week 5 part of the “Into the Depths” questline and complete the Lightfall expansion first.]

The cutscene opens on a group of people of the same alien race as those from The Witness. Sloane (a long-forgotten NPC) tells the player about the Witnesses’ ancestors, and how they suffered alone on their planet. The Traveller, it turns out, was buried forever on their home world.

After being freed from the planet, The Traveler blessed the people of Sakshi with a golden age, and they called it Mali. The name is significant, as it confirms that The Traveler and The Gardener – thought to potentially be two separate Light entities for years – are in fact one and the same.

During this golden age cutscene, we see these people build the ominous pyramid ships that have threatened the players since the end. Destiny 2Red war campaign of. But after “ages” of prosperity, the people grew tired of The Traveller’s silence, and demanded that it give them some form of further guidance. This led people to search for an entity with which The Gardener shared a connection: The Winover or, as we know it, The Vail.

This is the most important lore revealed in the cutscene. Bungie has long teased players about the identities of the key forces of Light and Darkness – calling one The Gardener and the other The Vinover – and Guardians have spent years speculating who or what they might be. . We now know that Mali is the Traveler (a being of pure light) and Vinover is the Veil (the Traveller’s Darkness counterpart).

The people of The Witness found the Veil, and in turn, it taught them about the nature of light and darkness. He discovered that light is capable of both creation and destruction. So he considered light to be a force of chaos, saying that it needed to be tamed. Darkness was his answer to this chaos, as it was shaped by “thought and consciousness”.

Image: Bungie via redricks on youtube

To subdue the Darkness to the Light, The Witnesses’ people believed it could create the entire universe, which they called The Final Shape. This is another important reveal, as it gives meaning to the name. Destiny 2Next expansion of: final size,

However, when The Witness’s men attempt to use the Veil to subdue The Traveller, the Orb eludes them. Unable to accept that he would never have a final shape, he used The Darkness to merge himself – along with all remaining members of the species – into The Witness (so named because he “saw the truth in the darkness”). ).

Since then, the Witness has followed the Traveler through the universe in an attempt to “impose meaning on a meaningless universe”. The cutscene ends with an image of the merged passenger and veil, similar to what happened at the end of illumination Campaign.

In a little over three and a half minutes, Bungie explains the entire setup for Destiny’s Light and Darkness saga, which is set to come to an end final size, And while it’s still unclear who or what created The Traveler and The Veil (and who knows if we’ll ever get those answers), this is the most information we’ve gotten on the origins of The Light, The Darkness, and is of. Witness.

This cutscene is a welcome taste of transparency after Bungie’s overly cryptic illumination Expansion. Here’s hoping the studio hits the landing final sizewhich it will officially reveal on August 22 in its annual Destiny 2 Display.