Ge of Triumph Raid Pictures Cool Destiny Digital Art Oryx Crota and Atheon
A consummate guide to Destiny lore for PC gamers
Destiny wasn't lauded for its plot when it came out in September of 2014. Bungie'due south shooter MMO lacked a stiff central narrative thread, which put off players looking for a traditional campaign. Over fourth dimension, however, the quality of Destiny's worldbuilding started to sally—offset through snippets of dialogue and out-of-game codex entries chosen grimoire cards, afterward through the game itself as part of the better expansions, specially The Taken King.
Destiny 2 builds on a detailed and distinctive sci-fi setting that has slowly grown deeper and more than complex over the last three years. If you lot're coming to the series this yr as a PC actor, at that place'due south a lot to catch up on. Hither's what you need to know about Travelers, Ghosts, Guardians, Low-cal, robots, fourth dimension travel, blue people, carmine nanomachines, and more.
The Traveler
The extraterrestrial sphere called the Traveler is Destiny's most iconic prototype and also its central mystery. Discovered on Mars in the modernistic era, it cultivated a golden age of technology that allowed humanity to spread throughout the solar system. The Traveler had an enemy, all the same—an equally-mysterious forcefulness called the Darkness. The arrival of the Darkness triggered an apocalyptic issue known as the Collapse, during which the Traveler is believed to have 'sacrificed itself' to save the Earth. For the duration of the beginning game's life it has hung motionless and unresponsive in a higher place The Concluding City, the only place on World that the Darkness has been unable to achieve.
The nature of the Traveler's intelligence, how it works and what it wants are nonetheless a mystery. It's heavily implied that it may be a Dyson Sphere with extra-dimensional properties, and its involvement in the history of several other conflicting races—we'll get to those in a flake—suggests that it is incredibly quondam and has been involved in the elevation of sapient races for a very long time.
The power of the Traveler is chosen Light, just this is the simply the name granted to it by the culture that has risen up on Earth later on the Collapse. The Traveler is not, necessarily, skilful. Information technology is implied in the first game that the Traveler may elevate species to protect it from the Darkness, not the other way around—and that information technology's 'cede' might not have been equally clear-cut as information technology first appears.
The Darkness
The nature of the Traveler'southward enemy is unknown, and no records from the Collapse survive to let u.s. know exactly what it is. It's not a unmarried alien race or even a collection of races, and it'south rare manifestations in-game are highly abstruse: rips in spacetime, dark spheres, patches of… well, darkness. It is closely associated with the Taken and by extension Oryx, the chief villain of Destiny'southward second year—but even in that case, Oryx was a Hive god granted a measure of the Darkness' power, not the Darkness itself.
Getting your head around the Darkness means grappling with Destiny'southward near abstract sci-fi elements—information technology's the sort of matter that is intuited past reading lots of grimoire cards, not explained to you lot directly in the course of your guns-and-barrack adventure. The easiest mode to understand information technology is that the Darkness is the reverse of the Traveler. The Traveler is a singular bespeak of low-cal—the Darkness is a vast void. The Traveler is concrete, the Darkness is immaterial. The Traveler creates and elevates, the Darkness consumes and homogenises. They are eternally opposed, and you probably know which side you lot'd rather be on, but the morality of each is less clear-cutting than information technology initially appears.
Guardians and Ghosts
Case in point: you lot. The protagonists of Destiny are Guardians of the Tower, super-powered agents of the Traveler kitted out with guns, starships, speeder bikes, and elemental powers fueled by Light. Each Guardian is paired with a Ghost, a floating robot that was created at the moment of the Traveler's 'death'. Ghosts scour the wastelands of Earth looking for corpses that friction match specific criteria, which they and then reconstruct using advanced fabrication technology every bit Guardians. That'south right! Guardians are an army of the undead with no memory of their prior lives, fighting on behalf of a silent alien god whose ultimate objectives are unknown.
'Reconstruction' by a Ghost is how Destiny explains away your many deaths and respawns, but it's also key to why Guardians are so powerful and, well, then weird. They're living things simply they don't care most dying. They kill until they die and then they come back to go along killing. Bungie have toyed with this idea over the class of the first game'southward life, indicating how terrifying Guardians are to aliens who fright death in a way that players never have to—and how strange these manic, suicidal god-warriors expect to the regular people who inhabit the Last City.
Ghosts are also used to explain a Guardian'due south access to gear: the things yous collect aren't physical items but encrypted data that your Ghost can employ to fabricate new weapons or pieces of armour for you. This is how Destiny 2 seems to be explaining its soft reset: when the Traveler and the Tower are attacked, that data is lost. You lot'll notice that nobody in the reveal trailer has a Ghost. That'due south non a expert sign.
The Exo Stranger
Famous for uttering the kickoff game's best and worst and about emblematic line, "I don't take fourth dimension to explain why I don't have time to explain", the Exo Stranger is an enigmatic figure who guides the player (sort of) throughout the course of the initial campaign. She'due south an Exo, a robot housing the consciousness of a long-dead human. She is also probably from the future.
The Exo Stranger phases in and out of existence and on several occasions is heard having a conversation with an unseen partner who, it'south heavily implied, is in a future timeline—and may even be yous. At the culmination of the campaign she grants the actor a rifle fabricated using parts that "shouldn't notwithstanding be", and that rifle has a counterpart—aptly called 'No Time To Explain'—that seems to be the aforementioned rifle, subsequently in its own timeline. Information technology's engraved with the give-and-take 'soon'. Welcome to Destiny. Become used to this kind of thing.
Awoken
The Awoken are blue people. More than specifically, they are people who were attempting to flee the solar system at the time of the Traveler's decease, and who were defenseless in the resulting shockwave while their flotilla was passing through the asteroid belt. This transformed them into a hybrid of human being, Traveler, and Darkness—which essentially amounts to being blue, and weird.
While lots of Awoken returned to Globe—including actor-character Awoken—others maintain their own civilisation called the Reef in the asteroid belt. The Reef is (or was) ruled by Queen Mara Sov, initially a neutral party just who was drawn into an alliance with the Guardians and the Tower over the course of Destiny's kickoff year. She vanished along with about of the Awoken fleet during a space boxing with the Hive god Oryx at the beginning of year two.
Rasputin and the Warminds
Your other enigmatic marry during the starting time year of Destiny was Rasputin, a 'warmind' AI created by humanity during the gold age that preceded the Plummet. Each warmind distributes its fundamental intelligence through underground defensive complexes and networks of WMD-equipped orbital satellites. They're very, very powerful, and Rasputin is believed to exist the final.
Rasputin calls on the role player to defend him at several times throughout the campaign simply otherwise doesn't seem to trust Guardians very much. Warmind-related grimoire cards hint at a mysterious protocol called Midnight Exigent that was executed at the moment of the Plummet. The persistent theory is that when the Darkness attacked Earth, the Traveler attempted to carelessness humanity but Rasputin and the other warminds disabled it to force information technology to stay and fight—that the Traveler'due south 'cede' wasn't willing. The Traveler's scars are on its World-facing side, later all.
Rasputin'southward current objectives aren't known, just information technology's suggested that he's looking for Mars' warmind, Charlemagne. Charlemagne's Vault was the name of a raid cut from the first game, and Rasputin himself is rumoured to play a bigger role in Destiny 2.
The Fallen
The first of Destiny's two Darkness-fleeing conflicting races are the Fallen, scavengers with a strict social construction built around Houses. They're obsessed with the Traveler and mimic information technology in their own applied science, specially Servitors—spherical droids that, in some cases, are worshipped every bit machine gods.
The Fallen's case is, in reality, rather tragic. They are a race that was elevated and subsequently abandoned by the Traveler when the Darkness (which they know as 'The Whirlwind') destroyed their culture. They've been chasing it e'er since. Every Fallen depends on a substance called Ether—a substitute for the Traveler'south Low-cal—to survive.
Of Destiny's villains, the Fallen are the nearly probable to become allies—ane Guardian-aligned Fallen, Variks, already exists. Both of their attempts to repossess their former celebrity have failed spectacularly. The beginning was when an exiled Fallen chieftain called Skolas, caput of the House of Wolves, attempted to unify the fractured houses confronting the Awoken Queen. He was imprisoned and murdered by Guardians for fun and prizes. The 2nd was when a auto priest called Aksis discovered a powerful nanotechnology chosen SIVA (related to the Warminds) on Earth and tried to utilize it to empower himself and his House. He was hunted down and murdered past Guardians for fun and prizes.
The Conduce
Destiny's other fugitive race are the Cabal, hulking warriors in power armour that occupy a Roman-style military hierarchy. The Cabal take had a presence in Destiny since the beginning, but they've never been the main threat—information technology's suggested that their forces in the solar arrangement are just a scouting party for the truthful Cabal Empire. If their prominence in the Destiny two trailer is anything to go past, the sequel begins at the moment the beginning real Conduce threat appears. This was teased in The Taken King, where i Cabal-centric mission path concluded with the discovery of a Cabal distress signal, pinging 'something' out in the far reaches of space.
Information technology is suggested that the Cabal themselves are fighting a losing state of war against an external threat. The obvious candidate is the Darkness itself, but contesting for second place are the Vex.
The Vex
The Vex are advanced cyborgs congenital around an organic liquid core that may even exist sentient, and that's the least weird thing about them. Showtime up: they're fourth dimension travellers that have congenital vast, abstract structures around the solar system—some billions of years old. These represent confluences of the Vex network, an extradimensional maze that spans time and infinite. Vex organise themselves into collectives aimed at fulfilling a specific purpose, with some devoted entirely to religious worship of the Darkness itself.
In a huge underground complex on Venus called The Vault of Glass, an avant-garde Vex heed called Atheon attempted to merge the Vex with the universe, making their creation and eventual triumph inevitable by 'writing' Vex logic into time itself. Atheon'south defenses included ontological weapons that could erase Guardians from reality, although the Vault itself is a place where multiple realities brush up confronting each other. In several such realities, Atheon was defeated by Guardians who fought through iii separate timelines to think an artifact, crafted by a time-lost Guardian, that could temporarily demark Atheon to causal reality so that he could be shot to pieces. This is one of the ways that Destiny plays with the notion that all of your attempts at the raid—even the ones that failed—are 'canon', because all realities exist at in one case in the Vault of Drinking glass.
This theme goes much deeper with the Vex. Each Vex mind is powerful enough to generate fully-simulated realities within itself, which caused a crunch for human being researchers on Venus when they realised that a Vex unit of measurement they had captured was simulating them observing it. With no mode to plant whether their own reality was 'real' or another Vex simulation, they tried to enter the Vex network to make up one's mind the truth. One theory suggests that the Exo Stranger is one of those original scientists, and that instead of travelling through fourth dimension she is hopping between Vex-controlled pocket realities—including the one we live in.
The Hive
Although they await similar space zombies, the Hive have the most circuitous culture of whatever of Destiny's aliens. In the ancient past their ancestors lived short, precarious lives on shattered continents suspended in the temper of a gas giant. Fearing the destruction of their civilisation, iii princesses commandeered an ancient ship to seek help. They were approached past a servant of the Traveler called the Leviathan, but rejected the passivity that it advocated and chose to dive into the gas giant instead in search of assist. There they found the Worm Gods, larval servants of the Darkness itself that bonded with the princesses to create what would become the Hive. One princess, Aurash, would emerge as Auryx. A few million years of Lovecraftian space conquest subsequently and Auryx would become Oryx.
There is a lot to empathize near the Hive—so much then that they could easily take upward the entirety of this guide. Here's the curt version: they see life itself—and particularly the Traveler—as an abomination that defies the natural country of the universe, which is death. 'Natural states' are important to them, as it is by interim in accordance to their nature that each individual Hive feeds the worm that lives within them—although each worm's ultimate hunger is for Light itself. Past their nature, the Hive must always consume because the alternative is existence consumed. This culminates in a philosophy called the Sword Logic, which essentially states that annihilation that tin can exist defeated should be defeated.
The triumph of the Guardians over the Hive demigod Crota and, subsequently, his father Oryx, was possible because Guardians are uniquely capable of using the Hive'due south own Sword Logic confronting them. By hunting each god down inside its own self-created haven (an alternate reality called a throne world) and defeating them there, the Guardians 'disproved' Crota and Oryx past bringing a millennia-spanning unbroken run of conquests to an end. As soon every bit Crota and Oryx ceased to be victors, the Sword Logic dictated that they ceased to be.
Told you Destiny was complicated.
The Taken
The Taken are the army of Oryx, a force above and across what Hive gods usually field. Taken forces are comprised of all of the other races—including the Vex—'perfected' by the Darkness and returned to the universe as eerie black silhouettes that look like holes in reality. The ability to create Taken was granted to Oryx past an entity chosen the Deep, which is as close equally Destiny has got to personifying the Darkness itself.
Perhaps because of Oryx's influence, or peradventure because of the Darkness' influence on Oryx, these 'changed' versions of Destiny's villains reflect elements of Hive philosophy—particularly the equivalence of perfection and death. In a sense, they're the Darkness' version of what the Traveler does to the Guardians: but where the Traveler takes dead things and creates autonomous living servants, the Darkness takes the living and returns a horde comprised of homogenous 'absences'. They are literally an existential threat.
The deeper cuts: Ahamkara, the Nine, and Osiris
Although they've never appeared in the game directly, the Ahamkara—pictured above in early on concept art—are i of Destiny'south most enigmatic mysteries. They're an extinct (ish) race of wish-fulfilling dragons, which might sound out of place in a space opera until you consider that 'wishes'—attempting to decide reality through thought—is the linking theme that binds all of Destiny's about powerful elements, from the Traveler to the Vex to the gods of the Hive.
Certain pieces of gear sport fossilized Ahamkara bones, and these are said to cause visual and auditory hallucinations—oftentimes whispered passages that end in the phrase 'oh bearer mine'. Their voice communication patterns, in fact, are like to a few well-subconscious passages describing the Worm Gods—suggesting a connection between the ii.
The Nine, meanwhile, are the rulers of space beyond Saturn—the farthest planet that Guardians reached during the span of the start game. Their identity is unknown—theories range from lost Warminds to a 'viral language'—but they collaborate with the Tower through Xur, too known as that guy who shows up on weekends to sell rare gear. A few easter-egg missions out in the earth hint at the Nine's broader involvement, only and then far they're a gun whose trigger hasn't even so been pulled.
Finally, one more name you should know: Osiris. Osiris was a Guardian whose obsession with the Darkness—and, in particular, the Vex—led to him being exiled from the Tower before vanishing. His adherents run a tournament called the Trials of Osiris, the outset game's toughest PvP claiming. If a squad can win nine elimination games in a row without dropping a single set, they get temporary access to The Lighthouse—Osiris' base on Mercury. There, in a hidden area, a man skeleton can be found next to a disabled Vex gateway. Given that Osiris' followers describe him as both 'alive and dead', the fan theory goes that Osiris somehow entered the Vex network and may have a connection to the Exo Stranger.
Destiny doesn't use PvP to advance its story very oftentimes, but the Trials of Osiris are an exception. The number nine occurs repeatedly in association with Osiris, and the notion of probability and improbability is central to the style the Vex perceive the various realities that they operate across. The tournament acts as a manner to place Guardians who defy probability: simply why this would be of interest to Osiris, and what the purpose of those Guardians might later on be, is a story for another time. Or another game, apparently.
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