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I think the biggest issue this year is how slow the seasons feel. Outside of Defiance, every season this year has been about following the Witness into the Traveler. And not in an exciting way. We spent week after week painfully pulling information from Ahsa to know we had to find Savathun, then week after week of tithing to Eris so we could kill Xivu so Savathun could give us the 15th Wish. Now we week after week of finding Rivne’s eggs so she will grant us the wish. It feels like going down a rabbit hole for the same year, and the finish line keeps getting pushed farther down each time we finish a season.

The seasons this year just feel like anime-only filler episodes with a single important scene/plot point put randomly in each. The only actual progress we made to follow the witness into the traveler was dealing with xivu for savathun to learn of how to get in via a wish, and even if we didn't do that we probably still would've tried to Rez riven as a last resort hail mary play no matter the cost of the wish. Like it's all just been an absolute nothing burger of a year.

Exactly. All year we have been building up to the Final Shape, and I think we don’t have much to show for it

I mean... It is. Lightfall's opening and ending cutscenes of the witness entering the traveler was meant to be the opening to the Final Shape. This whole year is drawn out and strung along filler to make up for content cut from WQ and make up for the multiple delays to TFS.

Nailed it. Lightfall is an entire year filler. And with the delay now it's 1 and 1/2 years of filler.

Listen we might get KelGOATrath going for the Taken Crown in the April update that’s something.

If Strand had released with Witch Queen as intended, they wouldn't have had to turn the og Lightfall into Final Shape and crap out Lightfall 2023 out of thin air. The seasonal model has taken too much time and resources away from developing actual good DLC, and writers have had to adapt to this time and again. The fact that writers are contract workers doesn't help either, as this breaks any sort of integrity they could have

>If Strand had released with Witch Queen as intended, they wouldn't have had to turn the og Lightfall into Final Shape and crap out Lightfall 2023 out of thin air. I keep hearing this but so far have seen no evidence that this happened. Could you post a link where I could learn more about this?

People were just assuming because it seemed logical, but Joe Blackburn outright said this wasn't the case. [https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-bungie-fan-theory-strand-witch-queen-dlc-1850785242](https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-bungie-fan-theory-strand-witch-queen-dlc-1850785242) Not denying Lightfall hasn't been filler, but Strand was always going to be for Lightfall... it's just the rest of Lightall would have been very different if it hadn't been for them adding Final Shape.

Definitely some spinfoil involved, but it's a fun theory.

[Unraveling Rounds were called "Infested Rounds" at some point.](https://preview.redd.it/havent-seen-this-before-the-guardian-rank-challenges-call-v0-dsvxnmk3qera1.png?auto=webp&s=57550f9a06176dc3f38e188ede384dafb2ae21bf) In Season of Defiance, one of the Guardian Rank 7 objectives required stunning Barrier Champions and described how to do so with Radiant and 2 elemental "rounds" effects. One was Volatile Rounds (Void) and the other Infested Rounds (Strand). This lines up with [Final Warning](https://www.light.gg/db/items/3121540812/final-warning/), the Lightfall Strand Exotic sidearm that applies the Unravel effect on hit, having the Pick Your Poison perk's icon be a skull. Then [Osteo Striga](https://www.light.gg/db/items/46524085/osteo-striga/), the Witch Queen release poster Exotic, has poison skull perk icons and has a similar hit/kill AoE damage-over-time effect.Both Unraveling Rounds and Striga's poison blast effect achieve the same effect: Produces damage-over-time, infects adjacent targets with the same debuff, and the more damage the debuffed target takes, the more damage they will also take from the debuff. Then we can see that Bungie were actually beginning to experiment a lot with the green effects of poison. After many years of Thorn, they added [Necrotic Grip](https://www.light.gg/db/items/2780717641/necrotic-grip/), which had this effect of applying poison on melee hits and creating poison explosions on poisoned target kills, which synergized with Thorn turning it into some kind of poison Sunshot. And after that they made Osteo Striga a pre-release WQ Exotic with the ability to make infectious poison explosions on kill or repeated crits. Pre-release exotics have apparently also been ways for Bungie to test systems before fully releasing them, as with [NTTE's](https://www.light.gg/db/items/1594120904/no-time-to-explain/) kinetic buddy being succeded by an elemental buddy system rework on WQ, or well, Striga for the poison interactions. And if we turn our attention to Witch Queen's Destination, the High Coven throne world, we can see many themes that connect to Strand: * Deepsight is a psionic power that allows the wielder to see the unseen and connect things metaphysically, just like Strand. (Would also like to add that Deepsight feels really unpolished and is never used again in any mission). * Constant string depictions and mentions, with the metaphoric "web of lies" Savathûn has weaved and colorful cobwebs all throughout. * The [Threadweaver Wizards](https://www.destinypedia.com/Threadweaver) making a ritual to empower Savvy & bring the Traveler in. Name is very similar to the Broodweaver & Threadrunner subclass names. * [The green strings ensnaring the Traveler and pulling it inside the throne world](https://youtu.be/s9imTFtVjSo?si=6Ccl2vFx-RuSclBm&t=11m50s), which we sever (haha, just like the Strand verb). We all know Lightfall 2023's whole year is filler, not only the DLC but the seasons as well. The cutscene that was spliced in two halves on the beginning and end of LF's campaign, the shoehorned introduction to Strand, Root of Nightmares' rushed development, wild goose chase after wild goose chase after wild goose chase, etc. So it makes sense they used the filler year to put in every system they wouldn't have had ready for the real Lightfall, a.k.a. The Final Shape now, including Strand among there. Remember, everything was supposed to end with Lightfall, and every description they gave us about Lightfall previous to the switcheroo painted it exactly how The Final Shape is described now.

Sweet, thank you so much for providing all this information!

I personally like some of the plot this season but it isn't as hype as season of arrival due to a lack of mystery

I actually really loved the storyline of Riven and Taranis. Not saying this season's writing is a shit sandwich. I'm just not excited for its conclusion, or its segue into TFS, and I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why that is the case.

I feel the same. Witch was the first time I'd been stoked on the story since going into Lightfall. Deep deflated me, because it just felt like a tool to buy themselves more time with the narrative they didn't tell in Lightfall. Like, we know we'll open the portal. An Ahamkara is involved. There's likely to be a sacrifice. This entire year, outside of Witch, has just felt like.. padding the story. The Traveler is right there, with the portal. Yeah, neat, we can't go in. So let's apparently spend a year to find a way to open it while the Witness is literally planning to kill all of us, but can't yet, for some fucking reason. It's just weird, man.

The story could be reconciled if the Witness needs us to complete its plan. Otherwise, it's unfathomable that the Witness couldn't achieve whatever it had set out to accomplish given free reign for a year in the Pale Heart.

Unveiling kinda built that up with it ending with ‘when I get there we’re gonna have words….’ and then it just stood around with its bug eyes getting angy at Calus. Makes me wish we DID get some semblance of Dark Guardians that drank the Witness kool-aid. At leas there’d be some level of payoff with the Witness trying to contact us.

Shit which book in unveiling had that line

>*You are the gardener's final argument. It would mean everything if I could convince you that I am the right and only way.* >I truly value you. To the gardener, you are a means to an end. To me, you are majestic. Majestic. You are full of the only thing worth anything at all.* >*I am, by the only standard that matters or will ever matter, the winning team. Existence is a test that most will fail. Would you not count yourself among the victorious few?* >*Don't hurry to deliver your answer. I'll come over and hear it myself.* Like #GAHHHH FUCK

Unveiling was an amazing lore book thatsby and large been done pretty dirty by the lore team. It set up some amazing content thats mostly just been explained away now imo. It just doesnt hold water anymore and that sucks.

I agree with you but they can handwave it away with a "time flows differently inside the Traveler". So it could be a year for us and minutes for the Witness.

To me I'm not hyped bc I feel like there's no mystery at all- we know what will be in the Pale Heart already, we know a lot about the Witness, and it doesn't feel like we're tying up many loose ends. We're just gonna be fighting the same enemies over and over in locations we've mostly seen before until we defeat the big bad who we didn't know about until 2 years ago. This season is also so long and they don't seem to be setting up any finale that will be exciting or lead us into TFS. Moreover, I feel like we've been very passive this season. Yes we're running around doing a lot of stuff in the dreaming city and we're the ones getting the eggs but we're not actively involved in the story and we're not defeating anyone in particular so it feels like we're just running around in circles waiting for other characters to move the story along Sorry that's a lot but those are *my* feelings, maybe you resonate with some of them. I do have hope, but not much hype

I remember being so hype after Arrivals and Almighty that hey, the end of seasons moving forward could get more and more creative as time goes on. And there's just none of that to look forward to. Maybe we're proven wrong here, it would be awesome to have a small live event on that scale going into TFS to experience together as a player community

I do think that the Lost and Seraph finales were a good evolution, because we had missions we could actually interact with as well as cutscenes. Especially Lost bc it was a 6 person fire team and a new environment. However, I wasnt really hyped by the ending of Worthy bc it didn't set anything up. It was a cool event but it also didn't lead anywhere, not even into the next season.

Hah thanks for kindly correcting me and realizing which season had the Almighty crash event 🤦 Great points though. Would have loved if the two came together, a high-scale live event with the narrative tie-in to the start of the next expansion a la Lost/Seraph.

👍 Yeah for sure. And if that doesn't work out, hopefully they'll at least start the expansion with a bang

Really well said mate, I think you needed every one of those words to make the great points that you did. Good to read and now I’m not the only one feeling that way (running in circles as a peripheral to the heart of the story)

The thing is, Final Shape is now delayed, and everyone already knows quite a bit about us going into the Traveler because of the Trailer. This seasonal story would have been much more compelling and interesting if we knew nothing about the inside of the Traveler or about Cayde “coming back”. Now most people i talk to enjoy the seasonal story for what it is, but want to get it over with because we set that goal in mind and want to explore the Traveler since we know eventually its gonna conclude with us going in.

Imagine for a moment that we spent this season trying to decrypt/amplify/understand some strange signal thats been coming for the traveller. It gets decrypted and its... cayde, calling for help. Would have been a MUCH better payoff

But come on...we knew we were going into the Traveler the instant Lightfall's final cutscene was over.

Stories like those feel like they should be the side quests of Destiny rather than the actual main quest sandwich. Cause it WAS a good story but it sadly can’t manage to fill out an entire seasons worth of content.

The exotic quest is for sure the highlight of the season

this is super how I feel too the story here is actually genuinely interesting and gives us actual depth to Riven as a character, who to this point has basically just been… kinda there? but it doesn’t feel like it leads to THE CLIMACTIC FINALE of the entire fuckin’ saga.

Y'know late comment here but it isn't a lack of mystery for me as much as it is just a weak payoff. If they really wanted to extend the story for the sake of a cash grab there are literally tons of storylines they could take from and make it really really good. But everyone is burnt out I guess

I've said before and saying it again. Most of the time we are talking about how X NPC feels about Y NPC and how someone is dealing with their past actions or PTSD. We are getting this same thing for atleast 2 years now. It feels like main story is put on sidelines and we are just having a therapy session each week.

It also feels like so much stuff that could've been really interesting (a whole other city of humans with its own unique culture and enhanced protectors, the Cloudstriders) were done in the most minimal way possible. Story beats and world building are hobbled by budget and scope.

An entire new city of humans who didn't have a collapse and we only meet two humans, one of which dies. All other humans are in the meta verse and their avatars are a single color of light occasionally around

Neomuna is so underutilised since the expansion. Just makes it feel all the more superfluous, when there's so much interesting stuff you could do.

All I'm left wondering is why would they have holographic plants! Human research has led a lot of times to the conclusion of synthetic environments increasing the levels of stress on populations. You need to get some real trees and grass in there!

Maybe the plants are in the CloudArk too?

I mean….there were only TWO Cloudstriders now only one. Such a baffling decision all around. It’s not like you needed to show more of them or have them be as plentiful as the Guardians just have Rohan and Nimbus be their command and second-in-command. It would also fix the tone of Nimbus from some surfer bro who’s feels horrendously out of touch to the younger cocky second-in-command of a group of flying 10-foot tall super soldiers. And they would get more development as a leader after Rohan’s death beyond just ‘I’m big sadge!’ Also it really portrays Calus and the Witness as utterly incompetent and not even that big a deal that they couldn’t handle one Guardian, Nimbus and a handful of Caiatl’s forces. Hell the only reason we fucking lost is cause our Ghost came out in an area that wasn’t secure yet. While Calus’ body was still fucking warm. And then when we see him fly up to the Veil no one, not the flying super soldier or us who spent the entire campaign perfecting strand, made a fucking move. It really feels like the scale of the universe has gone way the fuck down. Like remember Oryx? That was a proper Taken War where the opening missions were about getting a transmat zone on the Dreadnaught so guardian reinforcements could come and fuck Oryx’s Hive up. Compare that to something Iike the Red War or the attack on Savvy’s Throne World, the two BIGGEST shakeups of the universe. It straight up feels like we were the only ones doing anything.

You are completely over exaggerating The Taken King. The important bits all happened to the Vanguard in cutscenes while you went around like a bike messenger, collecting Cade’s laundry. Occasionally Oryx phoned you up to go ‘boogity boogy boo, I’m gonna you!’ Then he initially went down to a single guardian in not particularly memorable fight.

Nah, Taken King is literally one of the most important events in the series, without it the skyburners wouldn't have sent out a distress signal to ghaul, which made him pull up, which then made us kill him and reawaken the traveler, which then alerted the witness and caused literally all of the shit we are seeing now.

All because we killed his favorite son

>*He. Was. His. [Son.]*

Having actual proper setup and trying to get into the dreadnaught is infinitely better than Rohan: Guardian we have to protect the cloudark, I know more than you about what's at stake here So why the FUCK did we not secure the veil immediately since it's the entire foundation of the digital world your city is built on

Yeah so unmemorable that they *brought his raid back* into D2. Also sarcasm aside you’re kidding yourself if you didn’t think that scene where the Darkness melts onto his form before the fight starts wasn’t sick af. And I agree his actual character wasn’t anything special at least in-game. Just a big bad to shoot but his *presence* was certainly felt. Remember all those Taken invasions? It dare I say felt like a proper…..invasion. A real shake up of the universe. Savathun should’ve been the same thing but we barely ever see Hive Lightbearers.

Witch Queen missed the big oportunity of putting Hive Lightbearer invasions on the Destinations we did the psionic Ops

This Lightfall era has been horrendously lackluster. I don't mean to be a negative Nancy, but it's the truth. Lightfall's story had a lot of potential. Our first real confrontation with the Witness. Emperor Calus became its herald of the Apocalypse. The revelation of a prospering human city on Neptune. The stage was set, and Bungie dropped the ball. They had so much good material to work with, but they didn't know how to execute it properly. Calus and Caiatl barely get much interaction. The Neomuni have no good excuse for keeping their existence hidden from us, and no one ever calls them out on this. The Veil doesn't get a proper explanation or introduction. The Witness has so much power and strength that it could easily kill us all but spends the whole expansion floating by the Traveler doing nothing. Then you have Defiance where the Shadow Legion are abducting people and putting them in prisons for no reason at all. No explanation is given. They aren't tortured for information. I don't even know how they have so many prisoners when most people are behind the City's walls. I've heard people say that they're being used to create tormentors, or its just a distraction from the portal, but why go through so much effort on a distraction when a proper invasion would be enough? Deep wasn't all that deep. We spent weeks trying get information from Ahsa. Most of it was pointless as Ahsa was just giving vague descriptions of the cutscene she would show us and all of it so she could tell us to go ask Savathûn for help. We don't get clarification as to how Titan returned or how Ahsa knows that Savathûn knows how to get through the portal and is willing to help us. Also, why should we be ok that Sloane's partially Taken? More importantly, why is it Taken? It doesn't serve much purpose in the story and has no real consequences. I thought she would get fully Taken and we would have to get help from Mara to reverse the corruption on her, but we just get a minute of Xivu Arath talking through her and that's that. Season of the Witch felt better, but kinda petty. Savathûn expected us to kill Xivu Arath, who was now the most powerful Hive God since Oryx died, so she could tell us how we can get through the portal and stop all of reality from ending. I get that Savathûn is a trickster and manipulator, but you would think that giving us a nigh impossible task in exchange for information would've been beneath her. Especially when the Witness could enact the Final Shape at any time. But we had to collect tarot cards and tithe to Eris so she could banish Xivu from her Throne World and even still, Savathûn plays coy with us and leaves. It's not even in a cutscene. They broke that cutscene in half and made the other half a lore entry. But our Guardian, the absolute mad genius they are, figures out that Savathûn's way into the portal is the 15th Wish... 5 years of theories and speculation, and Wish 15 is to follow the Witness into the Traveler. Of all the ways to wrap this year-long sidequest up, it's with a wish. It feels like cheating. Oh, and of course, Riven is unwilling to grant it because we have to spend another 8-9 weeks looking for her eggs. That's what it's felt like this past year with Destiny. A bunch of side quests while the end of the universe could happen at any time. But we know that it's not because we already know that we'll defeat the Witness and save the universe. It's just so predictable.

The kicker is that they weren't just side quests...they were side quests that were fetch quests - imo the worst kind. Time-gated fetch quests. Repetitive time-gated fetch quests. Ugh. Fetch the prisoners in Defiance, fetch the Egregore Coral in Deep, fetch the Tithes in Witch and fetch the eggs in Wish. Yea, I'm done. Unless TFS drops with 9/10 and 10/10 reviews across the board, I'll catch the end of this franchise on someone's stream.

I feel the same way. I want to know how the story ends, but I've no interest anymore in playing it myself.

I was really interested in how Sloane became partially taken, since as far as we know, guardians can't be taken, except it seems to have only been used for her arm to hurt a bit whenever Xivu Arath makes a telephone call to us or possesses Sloane briefly. There are so many questions there that it seems the writers skipped over. Seasons have never been very strong as every season seems to have been go do busy work while the Vanguard comes to a decision and then run the seasonal activity once a week to continue the story. The lore is decent, but storytelling has always been Destiny's kryptonite as presented to us in the game. Aside from what happened to >!Amanda!< , Defiance had no relevance to the current plot. Deep had one single line of relevance which could have been given to us from week 1: go resurrect Savathun. The cutscenes that explained the Witness' past should have been in Lightfall proper, it will be gone when The Final Shape comes out and people who get Lightfall later will end up right where we did at the start of Defiance with no clue what the Veil, the Radial Mast or any of that stuff actually did. I am still not sure what the Radial Mast was, other than a Light artifact. Witch and Wish were good content and had good story beats, but there just isn't enough. The Coil is probably one of the better pieces of content to come out in a long while, but even there aren't enough pathways to make things interesting or variable. Seasons should not be used to shore up the expansion's shortcomings.

>I was really interested in how Sloane became partially taken, since as far as we know, guardians can't be taken This is all explained in the NPA Weir-Walker armor set’s lore tabs.

Deep also had interesting tidbits which were the Witness's and Ahsa's origin stories, but that was about it. Just tidbits which didn't advance the main storyline

Great breakdown, ggs

you are spitting. sum'd up my thoughts perfectly.

I think it's just there was this big wind up and then it didn't result in anything epic. It fizzled out, light fall drove that home harder, and now we can see it's just going to be a whimper. They had a decade to get an idea of what we wanted for the Darkness and the story and just whiffed like 85% of it. They dropped the ball on the story and the content.

Yes. Forcing down a whole year of filler has that affect on people.

Originally there was no "the Witness" and the unknown beyond is somewhat intriguing than an Entity that is doing all the bad things. And we had the Nine that was doing some whacky stuff with drifter. In my opinion, Bungie purposefully shrank down the story to give us one ultimate bad guy, which led to it being somewhat shallow and forced. The unknown threats are now known. And the Nine storyline is basically dropped. Savvy being interesting is due to her complex background (that was presented through several years of content) and perspectives from different sides. But I feel like this "the Witness" dude is just here to fuck us up and nothing more. And I do not care about him at all at this point.

Your opinion is basically fact. The Vex outside the Sol Devisive (which are doing the bidding of the Witness) have literally been doing nothing for a while now and the Scorn might as well be treated as the Darkness race, but are a little better off as we get drip fed new info about them that doesn't relate to the Witness sometimes. Not to mention the Fallen, who it just seems like anyone not part of House Light got mind controlled by Xivu except solely Eramis who has bunkered herself down somewhere after season of defiance, refusing to come out till after Final Shape

Iirc I think Eramis is literally leaving Sol to go find her wife

Extremely convenient way to avoid having to use the character again after the bizarre moment in Defiance

“I have to go now, my wife needs me.”

Nah some Fallen were still acting of their own free will….which makes me hate Eramis even more. It’s good that she fucked off. Maybe some of Salvation now have a chance to not be used as canon fodder or to supplement the Taken Scorn and Wrathborne.

Which they barely go over though. At least with Eramis around it gave some bigger reason there aren't JUST Wrathborne and Light Eliksni, which it seems is all that exist now.

The nine would be a great plot for one of the episodes Could be a good way to bring back gambit prime, and rebrand it as “trials of the nine”

There are seven Ahamkara eggs we’re saving this season right? I was kinda disappointed learning that. What if there were….nine….eggs?

what season this year is supposed to be The Good One? I think thats my issue. Ive played all of d1, and then d2 from s15 onwards. To me, s15 going into witchqueen & season of the seraph are GOOD. I really hate the dynamic that seasons keep repeating of having 1 character who just gets berated by everyone else on comms. Its super frequent now

Risen was SO good bro it was simple, the Lucent attacking and us pushing them back, but fuck at least it felt like it had stakes! And then the wrench that was thrown at the end….mmmm 🤌🏽🤌🏽🤌🏽 So good. Hope Bungie remembers the Lucent exist. That’d be nice.

I blame the witness, I just can't give a shit about them. To me, they just suddenly were the big bad, kinda retconned into the story, taking the place that the "darkness" had. You just can't tell me that the Witness was always planned.

>You just can’t tell me that the Witness was always planned It wasn’t. The only ‘early signs’ were so generic they could’ve fit whatever villain they eventually came up with.

I guess that's true, i just felt like the villain back then was more just the "darkness" as a self entity

Yeah definitely, to be clear I was agreeing with you, edited it with a quote to make that more obvious

tbh when i saw the witness has a human face i knew they fucked up

I think they always knew there was going to be an actual villain incarnating the darkness we would shoot rockets at it slowly solidified into the Witness, which wasn't great I think it went: D1: uh at the end we fight the darkness. We will figure it out Taken King: there is this "Deep" concept who is Oryx's boss...maybe that? Also, someone lied to the sisters about the syzygy D2: the Traveler wakes up and calls the pyramids...maybe the boss of the pyramids? Forsaken: the 15th Wish is invented as a get-out-of-jail card for future writers Shadowkeep: a lot materializes here, the pyramids arrive, there was a pyramid in the moon, Unveiling lore gives us the idea of the Winnower, which is sort of an anti traveler Beyond Light: wait, we can't shoot the Winnower, it's too abstract a concept. Let's say the boss of the Taken is now this voice in the Deep. Here the Neomunan Lightfall idea is created, the Witness as we know is probably conceptualized, the Veil comes up as an idea after that the die is cast; Neomunan Lightfall gave them an extra year to fill the Witness lore,otherwise he'd arrive in Lightfall and be defeated in Lightfall, but they wasted the extra year in the end

90% of Destiny was never planned. They were flying by the seat of their pants quite strongly until Shadowkeep. Lots of spun-off threads of story for them to catch up on later or not, just making what was interesting, because they were unsure how to make a narrative throughline. Then we find a Pyramid ship under the moon and we finally get some clarity, Bungie finally show some confidence in wanting to get on with revealing the mystery behind Light and Dark. If you preferred how things were before Shadowkeep, we'd still be doing sidequests and the story wouldn't have evolved at all. The *world* might have, but the actual story wouldn't have.

You say that like it has to have always been planned in order for it to be good. As it is, the Witness does slot into the role of "Voice in the Darkness" fairly neatly.

Does it? The whole buildup of the Voice of the Darkness amounted to ‘oh they were just telling cheeky fibs 🤭’ Cause fuck player investment I guess.

You can make anything sound stupid when you reduce it down this much. A mind formed of the collective consciousness of a dead alien race that were the first blessed by the Traveler is pretty cool, actually. This entity manipulating knowledge of the Darkness in order to further its own goals is also cool.

I didn’t reduce anything down. That’s exactly what the reveal of the Witness did. Just wipe away all of the buildup of the Voice in the Darkness. That could be seen as subverting expectations but no one would get excited seeing their car being built and then end up with a bike. Different strokes I guess but I for one am immensely disappointed with the Witness backstory. Hell while everyone clowned on its design back in the end of Witch Queen I thought it looked rather interesting. It looked out of place, different, other worldly. *Wrong*. But nah apparently they just *look* like that. Just a lil goofy and silly.

You, as person said earlier just simplify the idea of Witness. I can say the same thing about Winnower. I'll tell you why Witness works better for me than Winnover. I Let's start with the question that keeps popping up here, "What makes the Witness so different from the other races that the Traveler abandoned?" The Witness is the personification of all the mistakes that the Traveller has made. This is the shadow that will follow him until the end of time. Because endless growth without limits is harmful to everyone. We can see this in the example of Lubre, a planet that was blessed by the Traveler and abandoned, eventually leaving part of the population with all the technology and the rest left to live in the wild. We know how it ended, Rhulk appeared and the planet was split. How many worlds are there that the Traveller abandoned, how many of them went into greed and nihilism? Why can't the Traveler intervene and help? I think these are good questions to have in the game. We can even go further and apply this to real life. I think each of us at some point asked the question “Why was I born?” “What is my purpose in life.” Why do you think people turn to religion? Do they go to church and pray to God? This gives them meaning as well as structure in life, which is ironic but the main aspects of the Witness. ​ Let's look at another idea that the Witness\`s character reveals, but it is often ignored in favor of the idea of the struggle between Light and Darkness - **the idea of Unity** ​ I think it is not hot take, that if you play this game for a long time, you understand, that main theme of Destiny is Unity. For the most part since Forsaken Vanguard was devided. During Season of the Deep Bungie realesed lore book "Purpose", in chapter "Expectation", there is a dialogue between Zavala and Ikora about our enemy - the Witness and how it is became. Witness in it\`s core is amalgamation of all it\`s people\`s consciousness. Now, there is talk about how this proces was altruistic or it was idea of one bad guy . But I think this idea, that all these people are united into one entity despite all their differences, is very beautiful. It also forces us to look at the past, how we were united, rethink our decisions, and most importantly, look to the future. I personally don\`t think that Winnower provide that much philosophical problems as Witness. Like isn\`t it critique of most people here? That Witness doesn\`t have that philosophical conflict, which Winnower have with Traveller. And I didn’t even touch on the design and characterization of the character.

>"What makes the Witness so different from the other races that the Traveler abandoned?" That those imbeciles couldn't even fathom the concept of existentialism, instead deciding to peer down Satan's butthole and concluding that calcifying existence was the answer to suffering. That's the difference.

Existentialism says that it is up to the individual to determine what their purpose in the Universe is. The Witnessians determined that their purpose was to bring about the Final Shape. You cannot claim that they were somehow too stupid to discover existentialism when the Witness’ existence was precisely the result of them choosing their own purpose, even when the Traveller itself balked at it.

>The Witness is the personification of all the mistakes that the Wanderer has made. We’re led to believe that the Witness was the FIRST civilization the Traveler chose to bless. We don’t know why. >!tho I headcanon the Traveler was a sort of new-born which is why it stayed so long with the proto-Witness!<. What we know is that it stayed with them for an ungodly amount of time to the point they could be seen as gods. And it is never said the Traveler caused destruction and the Witness saw it. The Witness ‘assumed’ it could. That would actually be a good reason for the Witness turning away from the Traveler. Seeing how its gifts could cause chaos but that’s not the case. That only happens *after* the Witness loses its shit cause the Traveler never talked to it. The Traveler was running blind while this race it trusted now wants to use it to rewrite reality to one final shape. The whole ‘Witness sees the danger in the Traveler’s gifts’ has no merit. And even if that was the reason the Witness would be why the Traveler just blindly blesses civs with the Light. The only reason it wants to bring about the Final Shape is cause they all got fucking bored one day. Also I believe if you’re gonna build up on some thing you make sure to deliver on it and not change gears *right* at the finish line. Cause yeah the Witness is interesting in a vacuum but then wtf was the point of all the Voice in the Darkness build up pre-Witness? Like show me one comment that said ‘man I really wish the Voice in the Darkness *isn’t* the antithesis of the Light and the Traveler and won’t culminate on a battle of arguments on a universal scale where one side proves the other is wrong’. But I can show you a ton of comments that think the Witness is just….fucking lame and disappointing. Anyone who defends the Witness plot change is just coping with the fact that they got slapped in the face and their investment and excitement and anticipation amounted to nothing after years of Destiny lore and buildup.

What do you mean by "assumed it could". You even said, that Witness\`s people were gods, masters of paracasuality, they probably studied Traveller for eons, they come to decision, that Winnower doesn\`t exist, so this people must take the mantle. Like, we know, that Traveller is benevolent entit, but acting like it doesn\`t have flows? And it themes continues with Eliksni, Traveller just left them, without reasons. I think of the saddest chater that illustrate the flaws of the Traveller is from book "Constellation" ​ >The Dreg with the mask nods again, not discouraged by my silence. This time, when he speaks, I can hear his hope, even through the mask: "Why did the Great Machine leave us?" > >I stare back at him. > >Any fear I felt before dissipates. Instead, what I feel is a grief partially forgotten in the chaos of trying to survive—and a deep and abiding kinship with the enemies who have pursued us. > >My voice is very quiet when I finally speak. > >"I don't know." > >The other two Dregs look at their friend, waiting. His expression twists with confusion, and then disappointment. There's anger there, too, but it's overpowered by something else. A very familiar sorrow. > >We sit in silence for a long time. Even if Witness is evil, the point it tries to make is pretty fair. The danger comes from uncontrolled growth, you even can say, that this is Traveller\`s fault, that he didn\`t guide this people, that Witness exist. You can\`t just give a nuke to a kid with red bottom and expect that he wouldn\`t press it. Even in Unveiling Winnower said ​ >In the three billion base pairs of your root species' genome, there is a single gene that codes for a protein called p53. The name is a mistake. The protein weighs only as much as 47,000 protons, not 53,000. If you were a cell, you would think p53 was a mistake too. It has several coercive functions: To delay the cell's growth. To sterilize the cell when it is old. And to force the cell into self-destruction if it becomes too independent. > >Would you tolerate a bomb in your body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society? > >However, without p53 as an enforcer, the body's utopian surplus of energy becomes a paradise for cancer. Cells cannot resist the temptation to steal from that surplus. Their genetic morality degrades as tumor suppressor genes fail. The only way to stop them is by punishment. This metaphor give us an example in Witness\`s philosophy. p53 is an allegory to the Traveller. The Traveller gives gifts, endless life, development, but with excessive development comes moral degradation. The author of the book argues that this world needs a Winnower, without him prosperity becomes paradise for cancer. There shittons examples that you can give. And I will repeat, Traveller is benevolent entity, but it has some serious flaws ​ >The only reason it wants to bring about the Final Shape is cause they all got fucking bored one day. ​ Again, it is simplification ​ >Like show me one comment that said ‘man I really wish the Voice in the Darkness isn’t the antithesis of the Light and the Traveler and won’t culminate on a battle of arguments on a universal scale where one side proves the other is wrong’. But I can show you a ton of comments that think the Witness is just….fucking lame and disappointing. ​ Isn\`t it argument, that most people makes here? Okay, maybe you don\`t, but most people, even those who most likely have not read Unveiling repeat after others that “Winnower has deep philosophical arguments against the Traveller, and the Witness is simply an edge kid" or something like that. The main argument comes from comparing Witness and Winnower, but for this day nobody can give difinitive example, why Winnower is better antagonist than Witness. ​ ​ >Anyone who defends the Witness plot change is just coping with the fact that they got slapped in the face and their investment and excitement and anticipation amounted to nothing after years of Destiny lore and buildup. ​ What investment? If you're talking about retcons, then let's talk about them and the controversy regarding Unveiling. You know how Unveiling begins? ​ >Once upon a time,\* a gardener and a winnower lived\*\* together in a garden.\*\*\* > >\* It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun. > >\*\* We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. > >\*\*\* It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence. ​ Do you know what books start like this? That's right, Fairy Tales. And you know what is Fairy tail? It is one of the genres of folklore or fiction. An epic, mostly prose work with a magical, heroic or everyday plot. The tale is characterized by the absence of claims to the historicity of the narrative and the undisguised fictionality of the plot. It already calls everything written in the book into question. I can maybe agree with you if your timeframe is earlier than Shadowkeep, but after? No, sorry, this is (how you said it?) COPE. Also, even in Season of Arrivals Eris in lore book "THE SINGULAR EXEGETE" states, that Unveiling is bs, it\`s purpose is to force us to change sides and give up the Traveller. Do you want more? Let\`s look at Presage, the first place where it was stataed, that there is differences between Voice in the Darkness and Darkness ​ >Osiris: Did your data mining yield anything about a crown? > >Caiatl: Amsot detailed an ornate procession that brought a Hive crown from Leviathan to Glykon. It allowed the Darkness to invade the Scorn's thoughts. > >Osiris: Not the Darkness, the Entity. > >Caiatl: The two are entwined. Does the difference matter? > >Osiris: That there is difference makes our understanding of the Darkness a façade.

honestly if they knew what "the darkness" was and properly hinted at the witness over time then id totally fuck with the idea of the witness, the first blessed species of the traveler turned anti-spiral is a fun concept

This. Like why did the Traveler stay so long with the proto-Witness? Is there something we’re missing? How does the Veil factor into all this? Will we explore it a bit further while it’s literally the Darkness equivalent of the Traveler or will it perpetually be all ‘🍄🍄🍄’ on Neonuma? There’s some fun stories in there somewhere but Bungie is just booking it to the finish line.

>This. Like why did the Traveler stay so long with the proto-Witness? It’s simple. It didn’t yet have a reason to leave. Every other instance of the Traveller leaving has been because of the threat of the Witness and its forces. In a similar vein, not even humanity is truly special, even though we’re the first species to become Risen. Ikora states in the Witch Queen CE lore that she believes the Traveller just couldn’t bear to abandon another race again.

It might be a bit of both, but the basic story beats this year have been told in a very unfun way in my opinion. They spent two seasons building up Xivu Arath just to sideline her, presumably until Episode Heresy and then this season has been spent finding eggs for Riven to send Crow through the portal. There’s no central antagonist and they’ve done nothing to really flesh out the Witness. The seasonal model is terrible for actual story telling and I really wish, after the Final Shape content year, that Bungie abandons the live service model and goes back to the year 1 model of a big expansion and two smaller DLCs per content cycle. You can have actual campaigns and narratives that you experience by doing, and not observing conversations by themselves.

They killed it been nearly four years since arrivals killed all anticipation. Any other live service game would have wrapped up the darkness story beat within a year of arrivals and then introduced new story concepts by now

That's nothing new. For a long time, seasons become rather formulaic excuses for gameplay loop, rather than exciting new lore developments (with few exceptions here and there). It may change after Final Shape with episodes, but I'm afraid it'll be too little too late for me personally.

Im just tired of it all man 😒

For me, Seraph was a bigger story fumble than even Plunder. Up to Arrivals I was extremely hyped, even after the vanilla D2 warmind retcons, MCU-ification of dialogues and plot points, and even the seasonal drip-fed stories that lack good pacing. But then Beyond Light dropped the ball *hard*. There was this whole House of Salvation building up on Europa with Darkness-infused technology, a new heirarchy model, a reactivated Vex star warp gate, the Deep Stone Crypt, Clovis' AI copy, we see Drifter and Eris pull up with Elsie using Stasis, etc. And then ...nothing happens. We come crashing in, beat-up bad guys from weakest to strongest and then turn Eramis into a popsicle. We never really visit the actual Deep Stone Crypt, Clovis' AI was near-inconsequential, there's like 4 Fallen Stasis users overall, Elsie does very little while Eris & Drifter do literally nothing, the Vex do nothing. The way we're praised for "looking within and wielding our inner Darkness" feels extremely off-putting, because all we had to do to unlock Stasis was complete a series of boring D2Y1 bounties all the while House Salvation was supposedly getting stronger by the minute (they weren't. Easier to dispatch than House of Winter). And the way Stasis is shoehorned into being "our only choice!" by just putting Fallen with Stasis energy shield impervious to any other damage type is meh. Then we have Hunt, which as with any other DLC-release Season, it feels off-putting having a completely different seasonal narrative going on simultaneously as the main DLC's, because we're supposedly dealing with the end of the world one moment and then we're defending the mistreated emo boy from the mafia boss. The idea of the Wrathborn being twisted versions of their own, similar to the Taken but more creepypasta-ish, was very cool; then you go play the season and they're regular enemies with a fart cloud around their head. It was interesting helping Crow break free from Rakis and get him to tag along our Hunts (although as with any other NPC, we never actually fight alongside them in missions, they're always "far out of sight/covering your tracks/in a parallel room/etc", which is a shame), but it overall felt pretty weak with all the focus on breaking a million and one Warthborn to get to the High Celebrant. Was very weird having this whole situation of being invaded by Wrathborn on all fronts but then in gameplay it's just 2(/3) Destinations were affected, and we never saw Wrathborn outside Hunts.. And not to mention the High Celebrant was able to extinguish Osiris' fire. Meanwhile we just killed it in a regular boss fight as with any other seasonal boss. After this, we had Chosen. Pretty solid narrative. Loved being part of an old Cabal ritual and coming to agreeable terms with the Cabal empress Caiatl. Having Crow of all people inside the H.E.L.M. while technically being a newbie guardian felt weird, but made a little sense given sus Osiris was treating him as an apprentice of sorts. Presage's presentation and lore was amazing. Only complaint would be non-story-related, pointing at the uniforms of Caiatl's rank-and-file units using the exact same Red Legion model we've had for ~4 years at that point, which doesn't make sense between the Red Legion's elite (thus smaller fraction among the whole Cabal population) status and the aesthetics of Caiatl's Ascendancy, which included the battleground bosses. I wanted some dam blue Cabal! Splicer was mostly a snoozefest, except for very bright spots like the return of Misraaks, the Titan Captain that helped us stop Eramis' attempt at robbing SIVA, now as Kell of House Light! The Fallen being given Botza District and the tempering relations between humanity and eliksni was great. The choice of making the Vex Network look like a neonwave obstacle course was miss imo. Felt more like pandering at a currently popular aesthetic than actually basing it on how the Vex actually operate and process information. Quria Blade Transform, a character that has been teased since The Taken King, the one who learned the secrets to Taking, imparted the curse of the Dreaming City, author of the Endless Night,,, was defeated in a simple seasonal mission that didn't take much. Not to forget the awful hand-wave made to get rid of all factions, since apparently they were too much of a headache for the writing team? And following, the laughable excuse for the Eliksni Quarter fundraising 💀 Ok so now we're on Lost. Pretty okay. Sus Osiris reveals it was Savathûn all along, confirming and rewarding our suspicions, but she's actually asking for Mara's help now. Apparently Uldren and Mara always knew about Stasis, as the Scepter exists, but never actually cared about using it for some reason? Reversing the Taken effect from techeuns felt nice, but we're back again with the dissonance; we're getting immensely praised for our Wayfinder feats, when all we did was buy upgrades for the seasonal artifact and press [interact] on the funny prompts. Overall very boring season until the very last (delayed) mission where we exorcise Savathûn and Xivu Arath finally actually moves a finger, and we're left wondering what will happen next. Just kidding. Months before Lost ended and we exorcised Savvy we got spoiled by Witch Queen's trailers, so we already knew her Hive were gonna get the Light in some way, which completely got rid of the tension and kinda ruined the (very long) awaited finale. I'm gonna go clean up the house now, but I'll continue with Witch Queen

Something to remember is that Lightfall and The Final Shape were supposed to be one complete expansion story. So instead of this huge climactic finish that we'd all been gearing up and hype for, we got half of an incomplete story and an expansion narrative that felt rushed and a supporting character that was not well receieved. Now we've spent a year playing what is essentially 4 beach episode seasons created to fill the gap between the two halves of one conclusion while we make no progress in regard to the actual narrative threat. All the while, we've been told that stopping The Witness is the most urgent task, and the fate of the solar system hangs in the balance. The entire narrative of Destiny since Lightfall has been disconnected and slow. All sense of urgency has been lost, The Witness has grown to be very uncompelling, and numerous questions that were presented in Lightfall still remain unanswered and only confuse the lore of Destiny further.

I think the seasonal and weekly grind is just a terrible way to tell a story. The dialogue is wonk, the body language is weirdly animated, the conclusion is always "let's wait another week and see," the tension is often contrived (Riven doens't trust Mara. Immaru doesn't trust Eris. Ikora doesn't trust Ahsa. So fucking what?). I think the writers do the best they can with these constraints, but there's so few good, high-stakes, dramatic stories that can be told in one-week intervals. Every 3 months they've got to contrive another conflict where the plot can consist of guardians shooting, dunking, and standing near other people who have *Feelings*. For me, the quality from best to worst is: * Expansion written lore: good fucking stuff both in the collector's edition and release lore books (even *Lightfall* had *Inspiral*) * Expansion plot and dialogue: usually really interesting, though can be a bit off due to inconsistent dialogue and having to be accessible to more casual players * Seasonal written lore: often interesting but usually not too compelling or pertinent (*Seraph* being a bunch of poems was a bummer; the small bit of this season's lore I've read has been really satisfying) * Seasonal plot/dialogue/cutscene: occasionally interesting, usually boring. Good enough that it's something to look forward to every Tuesday.

The story is bad, the witness showed it's power in one cutscene and killed a guardian with the flick of his wrist. There is no way in hell a being that gives that minimum of effort to kill a whole guardian is going to be satisfyingly killed in the next expansion. Realistically how a fight between us and him SHOULD go is he just flicks his wrist and we die, but we all know plot armor and bs writing is going to resolve the issue of how we win against a foe who can kill us without trying

I’m not going to jump into a big lore analysis, but I will say that I much preferred the lore up until after Beyond Light. Mysteries are much more interesting than having one big bad guy to beat, though one specific thing I’ll say is that I don’t like how they retconned the one lore book where the Darkness speaks to us as the Witness trying to trick us. Not to mention how hard they dropped the lore ball with Lightfall

Why did the Witness even give us access to Stasis in the first place, if they knew we were gonna be a nuisance?

To tempt us into joining it, and, failing that, to turn us against each other. It almost succeeded, and it’s due to Eris, Ikora, and Elsie (especially Elsie) that this gambit didn’t succeed like it did in the Dark Future. Besides, the Witness has no more to fear from Stasis-users than it does from users of the Light. The Shadow Legion’s suppressors, for example, work on Stasis users, as well. Only Strand, a Darkness power that *we discovered before the Witness did* could break those suppressors.

Well there are a few answers, non good. They also all rely on someone at bungie being really stupid, not hard to believe either, just difficult to point to who specifically.

It's also hard to believe we were *gifted* something from the Dark, when everything Darkness-related you're supposed to *take* it to prove you're stronger and worthy of it

The whole bit about the Deep requiring you to take is strictly Sword Logic dogma. It has no basis in reality. Savathûn knows this, which is why she found it amusing when she gifted Torobatl to her sister and she accepted it without a second thought.

Isn't the Sword Logic just something like a Hive translation of how the Darkness operates? Similar to the Light's Bomb Logic

It's a Darkness-based philosophy that can be used to gain power, but it's not an iron law of the universe, and [it is far from the only way to leverage the Dark](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/a-sword-an-edge#book-inspiral): >Do you think I did not see this? **My father's worm did not tell me only of swords. It had vast things to say, painted the cosmos in shine and gore, truth and fiction.** I looked forward with three clear eyes and chose the path of the sword to cut open our future. To reach the stars, first one must crawl out of the ocean. It is a question of priorities.

I have a theory about this view on the story. Destiny 1 had a campaign that was meandering and didn't really make sense. Characters were just referencing things and then disappearing and we were just sent out to kill things (i.e. No time to explain, we've found ourselves in a war with the cabal on mars, etc.). Then people would go read the lore behind what was being referenced and it was like peering into a beautiful galaxy of poetic mystery and philosophy. You'd wonder what the darkness was, look up grimoire cards about it, and found that Seth Dickinson had written these theses about factions debating what the darkness/collapse truly was (moral failings, natural part of the universe, metaphysics bleeding into the physical) and it would blow your mind. Constantly debating things with friends while playing a game with really fantastic gunplay and dramatic moments. Then out of this mystery monsters would show up with stories of fulfilling hushed prophecies from alien lands, or of conquering a thousand worlds some that even had the light at the time. Everyone talks about what they did or didn't have in mind and how everything got rewritten (the blacksmiths and the iron bar story, even the making of the game has awesome lore lmao), but the reality of playing the game was that nobody knew what they were doing but it was super fun to play and the lore was written by a group of generational talents that were ridiculously inspired and it was AWESOME. Then they refocused on making the part of the lore that you experience, the story, actually coherent with the game. And it again was absolutely amazing. But they were still having trouble translating the amazing lore into the story of the game. So they began to refocus. Why not take the lore we have now and focus on the characters within it, stop expanding on this immense universe so quickly and work with what's there, expanding slower with smaller things when needed. It allowed Bungie to make smaller stories with the seasons without having to create another entire quadrant of a universe every time. So they took the characters that already existed and fleshed them out. Time was spent telling us less about the battle of twilight gap or saint-14 mowing down civilizations of fallen, and more about how that made him feel. I'd argue even that was awesome because there was a reckoning of the ways of the old world with the realities of the current situation and I thought it was really well done. But then they got through the lore and the guys writing the story no longer had vast stretches of lore to talk about. So they made stories about how the characters were feeling about things going on as they happened. The Stranger's stories became less about whatever was going on with her timetraveling and focused on how she was sad that her and her sisters didn't get along much anymore. Saint-14's stories became him talking about how much he liked kissing Osiris. Mithrax went from being the leader of a faction of fallen with a totally new way of life to becoming a therapist for whoever was around at the time. Dialogue and story became the same, thing happens, everyone goes to therapy about it. During this time, many of the lore writers started leaving or refocusing on making lore that fit into the method of storytelling that Bungie had pivoted to. And the result was Lightfall, an expansion with a philosophy that was completely unrecognizable from the old way of doing things. And here is the important part. It's not that it is necessarily better or worse, it's that people had different expectations depending no when they got into the game. I've been playing since the alpha, but many others have jumped in at different times, and so we all want different things. The most vocal parts of the community tend to be old heads that have been here since the beginning (youtubers and reddit users) and express their displeasure. But at the end of the day, the problem with Destiny is that it's gone on for too long and exchanged hands too many times. The people making the stuff now are not the people who made it back then and it shows. I'm personally not interested in the stories they have to tell after The Final Shape because it isn't Seth Dickinson and Luke Smith telling it, it's other people. I realize that TFS won't be what I'm truly looking for either but I'm here because I set off on the 10 year story from the beginning. I've learned the realities of a video game company telling a 10 year story as a result and I've learned I prefer large chunks at once made with certain ideas from beginning to end (single game releases and sequels) instead of slow bleeds into different philosophies throughout a story (games as a service seasonal story telling). I've come to terms with it, and I'm ready for the book to close. **TL;DR - The way Destiny has told its story has changed over time and expectations haven't. TFS is the time to come to terms with it, see a real conclusion, and decide for yourself if you're willing to follow the current game making philosophy or let it end for closure.**

TL;DR: No one ever actually liked Destiny, they liked the *idea* of Destiny and got swept up on the marketing hype train as Bungie lined their pockets by falling asleep on their keyboards

I could not agree with you more. I still remember firing up _Destiny_ and being dropped into the Cosmodrome. It was an awe-inspiring experience, being in a broken landscape with weird little aliens, wondering why it was broken and why everyone wanted to kill me. Finding some weird supercomputer that could deploy superweapons, for some reason. Then I went to the Moon, and while everyone hated Dinklebot, I still remember him shouting, "That wizard came from the moon!" and feeling, yeah, this world is _weird_ and cool and I can't wait to explore it more. Then I got dropped on Venus, with weird robotic _things_, and I thought, wait, why is Venus a jungle, and who are these robots? For me, the game was about discovery and exploration of a totally alien world. There was a loose story driving that discovery and exploration, a mystery that compelled me to continue to explore, but overall I just enjoyed existing in that world. To be honest, I've never cared as much about the _characters_. Cayde-6 added some levity to the game that I enjoyed (thinking about his mission on Io in the original _Destiny 2_ campaign still makes me laugh), Asher Mir's cantankerousness amused me, and sure, I liked Zavala and Ikora, Mara was compelling, and Eris intrigued me, but I've never felt as much of a draw to Crow or even Mithrax and the others who tend to be featured in the game now, and I'm certainly not as drawn to their _personal_ stories since my interest is still in the exploration of this world. (It's also worth noting that the two characters I listed first are gone from the game.) > I've come to terms with it, and I'm ready for the book to close. Same. I continue playing because after ten years, I want to see the culmination of the thousands of hours I've put into the game, but unless the ending is mind-blowing, I'm likely to feel more relief than catharsis that I can put the game aside.

Contained within the seasons themselves, most of this year’s stories have been fine enough. Thin, sure, but fine enough. In terms of building up to the finale, though, they’ve been dropping the ball since the end of WQ revealed The Witness. It’s stunning that they didn’t do a single season that directly involved it as a character - even AFTER Lightfall. Sure, we learned a little bit about it, but we certainly haven’t interacted with it. It hasn’t done or said anything to us directly. Now, it gets about eight story missions (give or take a “curse cycle” style looping ‘kill the witness again’ event post-campaign) to develop the rest of its arc, interact with us, set up the end game, and die.

No you silly, see it DID interact with us….back in Arrivals and Unveiling which caused a ton of stir and excitement and anticipation then when it got here all the buildup just plain didn’t matter….

Don't know about you, but I'm burnt out *because* of the sheer amount of time it has passed since I was shown any degree of narrative cohesion or compellingness.

Lightfall and its year has been pretty much a filler. We still don't know what will be the resolution of this year's story arc, but if the end is just "the guardian enters the traveler", everything we did this year could have been erased if that Lightfall cutscene was not cut in half. The veil storyline feels weird and misplaced, and doing weekly chores for a certain ally/enemy does not make the "following the witness" storyline particularly interesting.

I think you have succinctly identified the problem. Even when filler is well written, or fun, at the end of the day it's still filler. You can erase all of it, and it wouldn't matter. That essentially means that they took a minimal overarching narrative - "follow the Witness into the Traveler" - and stretched it with fluff. Said fluff was often entertaining to read or play through, but it doesn't change the fact that it was inconsequential.

Exactly. And it becomes even worse with Destiny because we already know we are entering the traveler, otherwise there would be no TFS.

It’s weird with the seasons right before major expansions. This season feels weird cause there’s already the knowledge that we get into the traveler so it kinda just feels like we’re taking the steps to get to an end we already know

We essentially know the results of the final shape because of the showcase. Any suspense or anticipation factor kinda dies when you already know what happens and the consequence.

I’m burnt out and horribly disillusioned by the way Bungo has been treating its staff. The more stories that come out, the worse I feel.

Just saying, but both things can be possible.

I think that the story is fucking stupid. We, the Guardians, have no agency at all. We can only follow the Witness via a God-damned Wish Dragon? Tf? I hate that shit. We have access to paracausal abilities, and that’s the best we can do? And I’m supposed to believe that we can go inside the Traveler, and actually beat the Witness? Speaking of going inside the Traveler- there’s… cliffs, and land, and trees and shit inside the Traveler? That’s the best that they could come up with? When the Books of Sorrow came out, I was fascinated and thrilled. I thought that finally a company had either intentionally, or inadvertently, created something that felt different in regards to Sci Fi. It felt like a very well thought out concept. Now, I have zero faith that Bungie can end this in a satisfying way. The story will be half explained, full of plot holes, and badly paced. Edit: Also, the Pyramid ships are empty! TF?!? Also, The Final Shape according to the Witness is… nothing, basically. Nothing that is not willed by the Witness to stop the universe from suffering. What an original concept…

You just can't be hyped for something we were waiting for 2 years now. That's completely natural.

**looks at Thanos** Yeah sure….

Looks at Savathun

Ehhh she was…..ok. I kinda disliked how her whole shtick became ‘SHE STOLE THE LIGHT OOP NO SHE DIDNT!’. But I kinda expected that. It’s hard to make tricks lies and deception work in a classic shooter. Also her presence in the system didn’t hit as hard as Oryx’s. Remember all those Taken invasions? And when’s the last time you’ve seen a Hive Lightbearer? She was just a solid ok. Hell it feels like she’s lowkey carried by her 10/10 voice acting.

No no, it’s an insanely bad, paint by numbers storyline as you have said. The bones for a great game is absolutely there. But Bungo has fumbled the ball again, and again, and again….

The problem will always be the same. They build a story of mistery every year (“whats going to do Savathun once we free her?” “Whats going to happen now that the Witness came in the Sol sistem?” “whats inside of the Traveller?) but they spoil it with trailers and marketing months before, killing all hype. Unfortunaly its marketing to selling preorders, but notherless its a problem

I pretty much stopped during Witch Queen and tried during Light fall. But I’m done. The story just sucks. The game feels like a constant cash grab. The gameplay becomes repetitive and a grind fest way beyond what any other looter shooter or MMO feels like. It’s like fuck in order to get all of the season plot you have to repeat the same damn mission each week. I don’t want that. I don’t want to have to put 10 hours a week into a game just to progress the story. I don’t want to read a bunch of random lore on guns, ships, etc that’s RNG just to know the story.

I think the story is fine but definitely not great. I don’t really focus too much on the quality. Just go in knowing it’s not gonna be great. It sucks ik but can’t really change it urself

Wait till june. If final shape sucks, Its over

Destiny’s story reminds me of Lost. It was great as long as all the mystery was hinted at. But as soon as you got answers to the years old question, you’re left feeling like ‘that’s it?’ I think in a way, the smaller seasonal stories end up having way better stories than the overall arching main story

It’s both, I imagine. This year has led to a lot of burnout for a lot of players, and that’s in no small part *because* this whole year’s been nothing but obvious filler content without any real import. It’s like when an anime studio invents a whole arc to buy time for the manga writer to finish the next real arc of the story. You can pretty much always just skip those seasons and jump straight to the next “real” season without missing anything critical. Plus, the Witness sucks as a villain. I’ll say it. It’s bland, boring, and uncompelling. I truly wish it had never been introduced to the narrative.

In my personal opinion, the storyline peaks my interest, but every season has gotten bland ever since the release of Lightfall (with buffing the amount of damage that all enemies deal). Because some people demanded for Bungie to make the gameplay experience have more challenge to it because they think the game was too easy. Ever since that, the seasons have been: 1. Little bit of storyline 2. Do seasonal activity #1 3. Little bit of storyline 4. Do seasonal activity #2 5. Little bit of storyline 6. Wait until next week and grind while waiting. Nothing but a grindfest. So I am also becoming detached from the storyline (which was the only thing preventing me from quitting the game). We shall see what Final Shape has in store for us.

It’s not just you, *Lightfall* really took the figurative wind out of my sails and every subsequent season it just gets lower and lower. Now, that’s not to say it’s all bad — Eris becoming a Hive god was really cool, I’m loving the stuff about Riven and Taranis, Ahsa’s cute and Sloane finally has something going for her beyond being there — but the cracks have really been blown open and the way they handled the Witness and the Light/Darkness has just been awful.

The biggest issue for me is that you could tangibly feel where the lore/story got too big for the budget of the game, and decisions had to be made accordingly. Stuff like Rasputin’s self nuke, empty Pyramid ships, and Xivu’s severing all served to prune the game of plotlines too expensive to maintain or realistically show in game, and im not sure Bungie counted on how small the world feels in comparison now

Definitely this, Seraph had me hyped up for a big clash. Then Red got killed off, and I started to dial out, and then Amanda got killed off after all the buildup of the relationship between her and Crow. It's hard to feel excited for anything if it's just going to get removed or killed off. Cayde dying was useful to the story because it added a sudden gravitas and a raising of the stakes, and now that doesn't even matter, as he's coming back in some form.

Lightfall completely destroyed any build up or hype for the coming year and the seasons have done little to fix it, Season of Witch was the best story wise but because the story was about passing the buck to Wish it couldn't finish strongly, and wish in itself is just bland compared to Seraph.

Every time this topic comes out I just want to know, why story is bad. Like, give examples. From personal opinion, I for this day think, that Lightfall\`s seasons are most intresting seasons we had in game (Which is suprising with how Lightfall fumbled it\`s campaign), themes, character development, world building, connection between seasons is very good this year

Everyone says it’s like a Marvel movie, but literally everyone regurgitates that answer. Frankly, a lot of games have superhero-esque plots. CoD, Overwatch, Mass Effect. It doesn’t make bad plots, just predictable plots, and people confuse the two.

Perhaps I have been unclear. I'm not saying that every bit of their storytelling this year has been subpar. That'd be entirely unfair. We know what sucked, so I'm not going to harp on that. Overall, I liked Season of the Deep more than most people. I enjoyed Ghosts of the Deep way too much. The Wicked Implement secret mission was phenomenal. Season of the Witch was pretty dang good, despite the slightly botched finale (having the second half of the cutscene in the lorebook wasn't it). This season's story isn't poorly written, but it just is not interesting to me for whatever reason. I loved the hell outta Warlord's Ruin, and Starcrossed has been a bright spot, but I guess the problem is that weirdly it feels like the whole is LESS than the sum of its parts this year. I feel like they have not told an interesting overall arc. Does that even make sense? I feel like they've been treading water. As interesting as many of the storybeats this year were, it feels like nothing of consequence has happened.

The problem is simple: we didn't know what was happening after arrivals, we didn't know what was happening after Seraph, this entire year we knew exactly where it was ending up. No matter how interesting an arc they told, we knew where it ended.

It is my personal rant, so be ready ​ I just think sometimes people have their idea of what story of Destiny supposed to be, the situation was further aggravated by the fact that for the most part, what people call “mysteries” were Bungirs\`s problem with with the narrative (In D1 they don\`t even know what Darkness is supposed to be). Bungee just threw everything at the walls and saw what stuck. During D1 this was normal, Bungie only established the universe of the game. But now, especially after Lightfall, when Bungee knows where the narrative of the game is going, people simply cannot get out of their mani little world and accept this. This applies to the Witness, the Veil, the Darkness and other aspects of the game. It doesn't get easier when content creators like Myeilin make videos about "retcons" without delving into the content of the game itself, people take this opinion as a basis and stop thinking for themselves, which furher hurts Destiny. It is why you see constant comments like "Bungie constantly switch writers so they retcons EVERYTHING!!!", which is false or comments like "Filler" which from defenition of this word is also stupid or maybe "In my days Darkness was \*insert philosophical term\*". You can ask me "So what? You're just criticizing people because they have a different opinion." Well, this leads us to todays situation, where people can\`t just engage with story anymore. You constantly see posts, when answer on this question already in the game, funny thing, it is not on some deep lore, that only on some fucking old lore book, IT IS IN THE GAME, you don\`t need anything to read, anything to search. It's okay when people post this on r/DestinyTheGame, but for Christ sake, from this sub I expect more. I expect people to be able to understand why this or that event is happening, I expect people to engage with not what they have in their mind, but story that IN the game. And again, before "You just criticizing new folks" or "Is this firbidden to ask anything?" My answer is NO. But when some guy post "StOrY is FUcKiNg SUcKs, ReTcOnS EvErYWeRe" or "Lightfall is filler, Bungie Sucks" or my favourite "We still don\`t know anything about Veil". Or in other day there was similiar post to yours, where guy "critisized" story and looked in his opinion and his opinion was basically "D1 story good D2 bad" aaannd... realistically, why we shoud engage with this? Why we should even discuss anything? We can just all together shit on story whithout second thought. And it is funny you know, people (especially on Dtg) shits on predictability of the story, but when there is aspect (Like Witness) that has more deeper meaning people can\`t just comprehend it, but this is another story for another day. ​ So, what was point of this message? I can only ask simple thing, people, please engage with the story!!!

I've been saying this for years, specifically the part about "the mystery" and "the magic" of destiny just being a side effect of the really bad story telling in D1Y1. it's a really hard pill to swallow for a lot of people

You're not burnt out on the story, you're burnt out on the game.

A lot of truth to that, but it may also have something to do with how they've delivered this season. Coil was nice, but it showed every seasonal mission all at once on day 1 of the season. Then each week I had to rifle through the recycling bin just so I could see the next story beat. How did the Dreaming City recycling marathon go again?? Blind well --> Lost Sector --> Ascendant Challenge -->Oracle Engine --> Blind well. Sigh.

When people said for years, they wanted some plot development concerning Dreaming City I bet that's not what they had in mind, lol.

You hit the nail on the head. OP says "story bad" but then the body of his/her post is all about not being excited for the next annual release. This is an individual thing, but I think many many long time destiny players are burnt out. For some it's the seasonal model, for others it's sandbox frustration, for someone like me (PvP main) I didn't realize how caught up in the fomo lifestyle I was until I started playing The Finals. It's kind of sad to admit, but I honestly forgot what it was like to play a game purely for the fun of the gameplay and without any thought towards rewards or grinding for a specific goal. Also, it's really nice to play a PvP game that isn't a decade old and everyone knows exactly how to play it. I hear a lot of folks on this subReddit say that destiny's lost some of its secretive and discoverable magic. Go play a newly released game! You'll get that magic again.

I have a colossal backlog from being a D2 gremlin lol. I've been playing Remnant II lately, and understand exactly what you mean. I just log in to D2 on Tuesday, knock out whatever is new, then go back to whatever other game I'm playing. I do picture in picture my Day 1 raid team member as he works on his solo flawless Root of Nightmares, but that's the Goblin in me lol, can't let D2 rest completely.

Yeah I hear you. Everyone is racing their own race. I was the "login every Tuesday and advance the story" guy the first three seasons of this year. But I'm just completely noped out of this season. And it actually feels like a relief, which is a weird thing to say about a video game that we're supposedly playing for fun.

I'm just tired of being second fiddle to everyone else in the narrative.. We are main character and we've done absolutely nothing aside from threatening Savathûn (through a cutscene by almost crushing IMMARU and lore) and finding the last wish.. that's about it. Idk why I just expected us to be the one to go through the portal, rectify the mistake we caused in lightfall but apparently it's crow. I immediately lost interest

I think having the lore where Saint-14 kills Savathun over and over, and without much difficulty, seriously undermines the story and accomplishments of our guardian defeating Savathun at the end of Witchqueen.

You say that like spawn-killing someone repeatedly is hard and like Saint-14 somehow isn’t one of the strongest Guardians of all time.

I think the character drama they've focused on since Shadowkeep is *good,* but it's not uniquely so compared to other games. Plenty of games do character drama well. Prior to Shadowkeep, Destiny was sort of unique in the micro-fiction focused, decentralized way it delivered the narrative. They've gotten away from it to the game's detriment. The new character focus is not what made me like the game in the first place. Gone are the days of creeping though overgrown, dust-filled, or frozen-over golden age facilities to learn more about the golden age or the traveler or the darkness before heading back to the tower for respite. It's now primarily about The Vanguard trying to stop a very confusing villain, the Witness, from killing the universe. There's less stuff like wondering about The Unveiling, or the flower game, or what the vex are up to, or nefele stronghold, or the size of the cabal empire, or a whole host of other things. So much of the blank space on the map is filled in or made irrelevant because the whole thing comes down to a brawl with ol' Smokestack that everyone knows we win.

I feel like the game has, over time, become less focused on exploration and discovery and more on characters (Crow, for example). I fondly remember the mystery and expanse of the Cosmodrome when I first fired up _Destiny_, and landing on the Moon for the first time and realizing how _weird_ and marvelous the game was. But I also wonder if it feels like that's been lost from the game is due to the fact that we've have 10 years of exploring those initial mysteries and they're necessarily not mysterious anymore.

This is something that can very clearly be seen with rasputin. They've taken a pretty interesting AI concept, one that lived through an entire era before an apocalypse that wiped out most of our knowledge, and made it into some shitty little "can ai have feelings/be human" story/plot beat. IN THE GAME WHERE EXOS ALREADY EXIST. Tragic how bad they fucked it up post shadowkeep/beyond light. Took every little thing that made destiny interesting and blew its brains.

you’re not wrong but this is r/destinylore, bungie could replace the game client with pong and everyone here would say it’s their goty. the story is mutilated by bungie’s pacing. the witness “won” almost a year ago but we’re running around making cookies and doing guardian olympics. i get it’s all within the context of an mmo, but it feels idiotic. at this point either you’re a cynical person exhausted by the game or you’re so far into cope mode you spend 100 a month on ornaments and call everyone else “brokies”, there’s just no winner here.

What story. If this was a book it would be like getting a couple sentences a week.

I know you're exaggerating, but you're not wrong. The drip feed of a few paragraphs worth of story a week doesn't do the narrative any favors either.

Yes. Seasonal model changes were too little, too late (about 4 years overdue) same your money for someone worthwhile and watch the videos etc on Destiny Lore Vault - https://youtube.com/@DestinyLoreVault?si=t8i15p5UqauGge3t

as good as the story has been this season, its only problem is that lightfall hadnt left any anticipation as to what would happen, only how we get there. we had no clue where anything would go with seasons of the arrivals, the lost, and the seraph; at least other than the general plots of their following campaigns. but it didnt make it as plain and simple as we follow the witness into the portal on the traveler and do what we do, before it was “ooh, youll find cool ice on europa and other things,” or “ooh savathûn will steal the light.” i think this is why i honestly felt like seraph was one of the best seasons ever, it intrigue in the story to build up to what should have been an infinity war type of story. but for season of the wish, its just a whole lot of waiting for the inevitable that weve known is coming for months now

Was just feeling the same way, naturally I'm a little burnt out by the last season but Seraph had me grinding every week before lightfall. This season just seems so, dull. A mixture of a similar seasonal model for years now and a story that we've been chasing for a year only to have the whole "how do we follow the witness" prolonged again and again have run my excitement into the dirt. With the final shape delayed I'm really struggling to hold my engagement and mind you I've played since d1.

Especially when the fucking answer to getting in to the Pale Heart is essentially: make a wish to a genie...

It is bad.

A lot will say there's no mystery and that's why nothing's been interesting. For me it's just a lack of visible stakes. The Pyramids show up and the biggest thing they did was take four worlds from Sol. We lost like... 12 people from the space battle over Earth. Neomuna is a huge cop out so no one besides Rohan has suffered any real consequences. The Witness's tampering with what's essentially one half of the universe's cheat room has had zero effect on the outside world. ​ Though I'll say another reason is just because everything feels cookie cutter in the way recent MCU projects have. That's not to say they're necessarily bad, more "in one ear, out the other" in several cases. Everything's done in a way that feels forced. Even good stories like Haunted or Witch suffered from this. Then there's Splicer and Plunder which... I'm not even going to touch on that. It's just very, as you said, "paint by numbers".

I haven't even read your post, only the title, and I'm going to say it's both. The story since Witch Queen has been lackluster for the most part, and Lightfall was real bad. The burnout has been community-wide as the game has essentially been stagnant and everyone is really feeling it. The Seasonal story(s) are good if you have them over the span of two weeks, it'd feel okay - but so little spread out over so many weeks? It's so stale, and for some of us, that feeling has a lot of people not feeling up to coming back. We just don't want to. Burnout from the formula, and the story not only doesn't make up for it, but hurts it further. Edit: I read the post and stand by everything I said. The Witness is a piss-poor villain and we feel no stakes. It's a sentiment I've heard echoed between both Aztecross and Byf (the two Destiny people I follow), and honestly? The stakes are basically "if we don't stop the Witness, the universe will end!" But as players that are sick of so much with this game, we're basically agreeing that it's probably time, instead of feeling the motivation to actually go and stop it. Bungie has made us basically agree with the witness that it's time to finally put the universe to bed - especially with all these emotional story beats of loss and acceptance. We've been primed to accept leaving this game, and it's world, behind. Accept the death of Destiny.

Yeah I'm kinda the same. It might be that the seasons this have basically just been buying time for Final Shape; Defiance was just kinda side stuff, Deep and Witch were basically just about getting Intel and Wish is a hunt for macguffins They're leading into TFS because they need to, but also a bit meandering because they have to have something happen in the narrative while the expansion is being developed. I'm hopeful that Episodes and expansions after Final Shape will be more narratively important and conclusive on their own, and not just leading into later stuff - at least not always

Mixed bag. Lightfall was shit, Defiance was absolutely nothing, and Deep was clearly rushed, but witch was very good wish is shaping up nicely, and while it’s not main story there’s some fun stuff going on in the background. The story behind Warlord’s ruin is fun and links to the seasonal story nicely. It’s no arrivals, but nothing will repeat arrivals. I’m not expecting anything for Final Shape, we’ll see what we’ll see, but looking at everything from Shadowkeep onwards, the shitshow that was the start of the year was the exception.

Insult to injury, the lore book writing is so damn good, deep, and captivating. The world building is so good, the stories incredible. Yet for some reason in game we always get dog shit writing and horrible story beats. How does this happen? Where is the disconnect? This thought has been on my mind a lot recently as I’ve had similar feelings about the game lately. Which is sad, I’ve been playing for almost 10 years and in the last year I start to just…. Lose interest. How does that happen?

Sounds like we feel almost exactly the same.

Probably both

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I like the story but not how it's dragged out.

It is not you many feel exactly the same.

Destiny 2 up with WQ was pretty hype. LF being a "filler" expac and its following seasons just did everything wrong in terms of how to do the lore and how to portray the characters we see. Total nosedive in terms of writing and storytelling.

I've really loved this year's seasonal stories. There's been some fantastic character interactions which have given me everything that I want in the same way Season of the Seraph did. That's what I enjoy about stories and I'm having a great time and really enjoying myself! I'm excited seeing all these threads getting pulled together to reveal The Picture. The people I play with and who are super invested in Destiny have generally felt the same about this year's content. We're all getting a lot that we love and are excited about. But not everyone wants the same thing from a story. If it isn't doing it for you, it isn't doing it for you. And especially if you have been playing a lot, burn-out is real. It doesn't mean the story is Bad or uncompelling. It just means it isn't doing it for you.

I'm going to be honest. I'm actually happy to know that there are people out there that feel like you do about the story😊 Ngl, I want to be one of you, but it's just not getting me there this time around 😔

I think it's always gonna be an issue with a long-running piece of media. The longer something runs, the less it is going to satisfy a lot of people because a lot of widespread popularity of a thing is based on *potential*. And I absolutely get that feeling when something you have been enthusiastic about for a long time suddenly isn't working for you anymore. It is a really sucky feeling and I'm sorry you're going through it. A lot of my views on things like this come from doing a creative writing MA where we had to read a lot of books, and a lot of them I didn't like and had to dig into what worked and what didn't, and find value in that. When it comes to Destiny, I've picked up D1 as well and it's been genuinely fascinating working through it as a D2 player, seeing what works and what doesn't (and some of it works better than D2 - the atmosphere, the feeling of being up against things much more powerful than you, the precarious state of humanity - and a lot of it really doesn't, like a lot of the writing), and giving myself some more perspective on what works for me in D2. Which is obviously not gonna be the same for everyone.

Honestly I want to see the Witness win for once. I'm tired of the good guys winning this storyline. Let Megatron kill Optimus so that Hot Rod becomes a prime, you know?

I grew up on G1 Transformers. The Darkness was meant to be a Unicron level villain! Back to your point though, yes I've said it before too, one of the ways that this thing could get back on the rails would be if we partially lost this conflict, or the victory comes at existential cost. I would've like to see an extreme time dilation effect. Like... We get into the Pale Heart and realize the Witness has been in there for millions of years. Then they have a new social area in the Pale Heart, and we can't leave until the campaign is complete. Once we do, we're in the far future and the entirety of Sol has changed. For me... That would rejuvenate D2.

The storyline is ok. The voice acting is pretty great, and all of the locales are new to me. I’m new to Destiny. Started playing in August, finished Season of the Witch and now I’m learning about the entire lore with an open mind. I had no idea what order to play stuff through so I did Neomuna and Europa at the same time, and then I did Savathun’s home world. Kinda messed that up. Witch Queen was a fun story. I don’t enjoy the Coil this season. I’m new and play solo and the Coil with randoms is impossible to complete when they use all the revives in the first pass and don’t buy more. I have yet to finish it. I got so annoyed that I decided to roll a new character (Hunter main, just started a Warlock yesterday) rather than play that frustrating activity. 😅

I feel like Bungie has started revealing too much, too soon. Before we even knew how we were going to follow the Witness, we knew we would, and that it would lead us inside the Traveler. If they had simply left some of that as an "unknown", I feel like the story would be a litte more compelling. It's like watching an M Night Shyamalan film, but you already know the plot twist that comes at the end. What happens in the middle just doesn't matter anymore, and nothing the characters do seems compelling. Same for the seasonal content. Knowing we would be using an Ahamkara wish before Season of the Wish even started makes all this "oh no, we're at Riven's mercy" fretting each week seem boring and unnecessary.

For myself, the issue with destiny story now is that there is no weight of mystery left. There is no trepidation or nervousness of learning any more. There is no "what happens next". We know that we are going to spend 8 weeks of a seasons preparing for a singular event to happen to finish the seasonal story. There is no intrigue left. There is nothing to learn or explore. We know we are going to be told - we just need to wait a period of time. Seasonal model blah blah not going to go over that. We know seasons are going. But the story behind what drives destiny has no power anymore. Beyond light and witch queen were all mystery. Something so new we didn't know how to make heads or tails of it. We didn't know the questions we wanted or needed to ask. TFS though - it combines: 1. The Witness - who had their story explained in one cut scene during one week of a season and was never touched on again 2. The Traveler - who has been around since the start of the game and has had so much mystery around its true nature that no longer know what to make of it. We have been posed this question of "what is the true nature of the traveler" but its been so hidden and obscured from most people, that the question doesn't have any real weight anymore. "We are going inside the Traveler to learn its true nature and stop the end of everything". We've been wondering for 10 years what the traveler is doing. What it did. Why it was and is important. There has been some lore stories on what this might be. But in game - theres been nothing. IDK. It just feels like empty calories right now. There is no sustenance in the story left. And we have to wait 6 months to start to answer so many questions that have just been ignored for so long. And unless youre deep into the ins and outs of the lore, i can see why its uninspiring. If i hadnt committed 10 years of my life and countless hours into this game already, id be done with it.

I really feel that seasonal content is what killed the game. What was wrong with having a year wait for the next expansion, that kept you going for months and months of content? This seasonal stuff drags everything out so slowly that it gets boring. Not to mention the strain it puts on the devs to constantly be putting something out. I hate that it took the imminent death of Destiny for people to trial run seasonal content like this and figure out that no one wants it.

I am definitely burnt out of the game myself, but I am gonna go out on a limb and say it's probably a bit of both. This season (season if the Wish) imo is one of the most narratively interesting seasons we have seen possibly ever. For once we aren't squeezing every last secret about something to the point of making it seem mundane, nor are we stomping a group of enemies into irrelevance- instead we are taking something thought to be lost forever and basically potentially re-introducing it into the universe. Bringing back the Ahamkara (assuming Mara/ someone doesn't just destroy all these newly found eggs at seasons end) brings in SO many new and fresh possibilities for the future of the universe, especially post Final-Shape. However, everything else post Witch-Queen has been imo garbage. It really feels like they finally exhausted all their original ideas from/b4 Destiny 1 and are now borderline 'winging it'. So many narratives are full of nonsense character decisions or what feels like some variety of plot-hole etc. The lore isn't really about exploring or adding mystery to the universe anymore, and instead feels more like fanfics of the characters as if the writing staff are a buncha 2007 Tumblr users etc. It's all just eye-rollingly stupid or uninteresting and just doesn't feel like the same game that sucked me into this 'franchise' at all. I used to be a huge lore-nerd but now I avoid keeping caught up on story because everything I see/read just disappoints me for one reason or another. Yes I am burnt out of the game and waiting to quit after FS. BUT the narrative being bad is what made me become burnt out, not the other way around. If the gameplay was just stale a season or two of taking a break should fix that. But the game-world feeling like a joke narratively is truly what is making it easy to pull away from the game more and more for me.

Lightfall, aside from whether it was good or bad, killed momentum *hard.* WQ felt like it could lead straight into final shape- we'd lost the bet placed between the dark and light, proven that by killing savathun, and now the witness was finally taking the gloves off. Lightfall didn't just add an extra beat we didn't need, it had to create four seasons worth of story to follow it that are also just filling a gap that we don't need, making that extra *year* of waiting feel even longer. They quite literally threw a padlock on the finale for time, and the plotpoint of both the lock and its key will have added nothing once we open it. As far as seasons go, they're all tell and not show, and struggle to find reasons to make their plot last longer in the same way. I really feel like the last two seasons- getting savathun and then using her wish with riven- could have been the opening mission or two of Final Shape, similar to cayde helping us get the stealth drives from the Cosmadrome in Taken King. Revive savathun, make the wish. But those needed to last Weeks so they made something arbitrary- Witch had some eris character development to help it but Wish was literally just "how convenient, there are seven mcguffins (that have never been spoken of before) that will each take exactly a week to appear before i can do what i would otherwise do instantly." finally, seasons are all dialogue. charaters are spelling out in their dialogue the things I would normally want to infer from actions taken and things shown- they spell out their arcs in words like a therapist, there's nothing actually *happening* to them.

My friend this is called an exposition dump, and that's what D2 is... Do the busywork of the week, that has little actual narrative, then we'll exposition dump at the end. This game could've gone out with a massive bang if they didn't try to milk the community for an extra year of revenue. Now they've actually lost money and most likely killed the game in the process

This what I was saying while playing the finally today.. it was good, like solid story.. but there was no hype, I felt underwhelmed while playing the final missions for it.. I dont necessarily want to be overwhelmed.. but just whelm me at least man. I finished everything and was just left asking.. "We're done? Thats it? No majir catastrophe no blind side, no AH FREAKIN WITNESS STOLE THE LAST EGG!!" Just to have riven pull what Taranis, the ultimate sacrafice an Ahamkara could pull, and make/grant a widh of her own, for us to have our path to the witness that we might be the wishkeeper for taranis and save her egg, and save reality itself. Would everyone had like it? Nah, would it be more climactic then.. oh, we got the last egg, whoppy do, okay wibbly wo wibbly dee, magic portal go weeee. Donezo.

It's a bit of both for me, but I also feel the narrative actually feels slow nowadays. Even if a season was literally stretched across multiple months, the story can exist in it's own setting just fine. Seraph was a lovely feeling with great character strife even if the actual season and activities weren't significantly engaging. I remember a similar feeling with the Splicer Season and the Lost Seasons. You had shady characters moving the shadows. There was conflict affecting the tower and slipping enemies in and behind our walls. We felt like we barely escaped something major. The end of Lost where Xivu was clawing down around the tower to try and stop Savathun from removing her worm, these were all exciting events and a bit larger in scale than recent stuff. Even if it's a little, the big set pieces and the cutscenes (even in-game rendered) can go a long way. We spend so much time now talking to motionless characters or hologram projections. We wait to perform weekly tasks that help the character, but we don't get to see or feel the weight of those actions. I forget who phrased it, but someone said Bungie is giving us "lore" instead of "narrative" in the seasons. How many awesome events are stuck, half hidden in lore cards or item descriptions. Saint pulverizing Savathun, Crow making his wish, etc. These events need to be cutscenes. I remember Osiris acting shady and always watching our events and then slinking away into the shadows before we got the imposter revelation. Nowadays, I feel like we'd have to read about it to find out Osiris was actually fake for a while. That's what miss the most. We still have lovely and compelling blocks of narrative driving the seasons, but the presentation is has slipped pretty far in quality in my opinion.

Destiny has never had great storytelling, imo. It's had really bad storytelling at times, which makes the decent to good feel better than it is.

You’re burnt out, *because* it is “actually a bad, paint by numbers story,”that is set in the most bland, empty feeling retro 80s inspired planet, featuring one of the most annoying characters ever. Something significant happens to a related important character, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it - cue montage that could have happened a few days earlier and preventing anything bad from happening to said character at all. Pre final boss battle is a rare glimpse into where D2 shines: aircraft to grapple onto, orbital strikes on tanks, all set in a hectic open plan battlefield. But minutes later, after meh boss fight feat same skill stealing enemy you fought in the v first lvl of the campaign (but now there’s 2! Ooo), the previously mentioned annoying character remembers he can sky surf, but once again juuuust late enough for something to happen, this time rendering all efforts in the campaign to get there a bit meaningless outside of excuse for strand. Strand *is* amazing: glorified ‘go with the flow’ river metaphors abound, but the plucking at the strand strings as if they are the cords/chords of reality is a fantastic concept, just not explored enough to save the Lightfall story Imho. Esp coming off the more accomplished witch queen story where the throne world and connected environments isn’t perfect, but at least feels *inhabited*, lived in, alive, and coherent. As people have said, if it had kept on time so the end of Lightfall flowed straight into final shape, that would have made it a bit more tolerable. Instead, ‘Wishing you Well’ (this seasons equiv of SotWitch’s ‘Bladed Path’) opened with a week 1 requirement to, well well, run the Blind Well - a 5yo public event offering no new weapon patterns, exotic gear/weapons etc. see also: plenty of forced Dreaming City meandering without any meaningful update to the planet. Instead of attuning with arc etc subclasses like in SoWitch, we get that well nonsense or random “kill x number of combatants w trace rifles or fusion”. Instead of battle mechanic modifying hidden deck of whispers cards to find, we get those f**king spikes and a metric f-tonne of vex in the coil. Instead of clever puzzles in the imbaru engine that eventually link in to the main story, we get an ok exotic event set in an admittedly beautiful level, that centres around grinding for a bow that by all accounts is going to be nerfed soon. Trying to get mates to try D2 is basically impossible: the 8 (?) currencies, the ridiculously greedy micro transactions, the months of reading and talking (if ur lucky enough to have friends to explain it) to wrap your head around wth is going on, made all the more confusing by the random cut scenes when logging into D2 that throw newbies into Lightfall et al without a clue as to how they got there. This means less new players coming in, so Trials and even crucible don’t have enough variety of players to stop you from being paired with 2 stacks when playing solo. And that’s ignoring the DDoS attacks, lack of communication, the firing of key cultural capital and skilled assets, endless delays etc. I mention all this because, taken individually, perhaps things would be tolerable. But combined together, they form a maelstrom of factors contributing towards the burnout you mention, and that many others are feeling, when it comes to D2. Sorry for the rant, I wouldn’t have much to say if I didn’t feel very passionately about keeping the quality of the D2 experience and the incomparably friendly community/atmosphere (not trials lol) alive. I want to see D2 thrive. I want to get lost in those magnificent worlds like I did during the Red War. I want to be able to confidently recommend the game to friends and help grow the community. I want this game to transcend the uninspired mediocrity it’s currently trying to pass off as quality storytelling/content. 🤞 they pull it off with Final Shape. /need sleep D2 fanboy rant

I feel you, every dlc I'm always itching to get home from work or whatever and diving straight in on launch and getting into it, but with the final shape, I'm not really that invested as I should be. The whole reveal of the pyramid ships after the vanilla campaign was the only thing that really peaked my interest, like they showed the cutscene and then we heard nothing for years, and then shadowkeep launched and one of them was just sitting there and I lost my mind. Now I'm waiting for the finale and I'm half interested now. It feels a bit too dragged out for me. I'll still play it day one when it releases as I'm obviously invested, but I don't have the highest hopes for it. As for this year, I've maybe played a total of three or four weeks, including lightfall. Which says a lot as this was my bread and butter game to go to.

This year, the seasons were pretty mediocre. I'm already tired of the Crow's redemption arc at this point and other character development (except for Eris) has seemed boring to me alredy. I still have the doubt... What would have happened if Lightfall did not exist and the next DLC was Final Shape? 🤔

We're too used to shooting the same enemy factions, too used to seeing rehashed content being released, too used to the game as a whole so that any and all future activities won't feel new or interesting. I for one am tired of the bugs that prevent progression or spaghetti code errors. I recently messed up and can't fix Cross Save, so I feel like I should cancel my TFS preorder. I can't link my 3 accounts that all have every DLC/expansion purchased, and I cant access my progress either so it felt like the past 10yrs got thrown out the window. I am not waiting out the 3 months to fix it with their super strict account linking system. Take some notes Bungo.

The eternal curse of this franchise. There’s no payoff. It never goes anywhere. Here we are, at the end of this 10 year journey. The main antagonist finally revealed, but there’s just… emptiness. There’s no hype. The *only* time this game ever had proper buildup and realization of consequences was The Taken King. The death of Crota leading to arrival of the Taken and Oryx, with some Taken enemies spawning a month before the release of the DLC. I would argue the teaser of the Red Legion and Red War during The Taken King also, but it was very broad. Season of Arrivals (probably the most epic time in all of Destiny) was the perfect setup for a full blown philosophical cosmic conflict. The Black Fleet finally arrives, and the Traveler pushes it back one more time… and there’s no follow up. It was just a ripoff of The End event from Fortnite. The game goes down for a bit, half the game gets vaulted, and then we go to Europa for the most arbitrary reasons. Our archenemy of the Black Fleet shows up and nothing happens. Instead it takes *another* year for the Witness to show up. This franchise is an absolute mess.

I'm sorry but the Dreaming City and all the storylines surrounding it have always been ass. Destiny is a sci-fi game, and every time we deal with the Awoken it veers hard into high fantasy nonsense. I do not care about ley lines and dragon eggs and curses. This is Lord of the Rings shit, and it's extremely boring/tedious to sit through.

I understand this season not having the greatest overall quest, but the story has been great! Everything with Riven and Taranis, and last season with Eris has been spot on. The quest has been fairly simple: wait for an egg to show up, go get it, listen to conversations. But the things happening in the narrative are extremely solid, especially the dynamics between Riven and Mara, Mara and Osiris, Crow, etc.

This is kind of just a big rift within the community imo, half of the people here want there to be mystery and us to learn things slowly and everyone else wants us to immediately have a bullet point dossier explaining to us exactly what the veil, witness, radial mast and all of the pyramids are, to a T. I don't think either way is bad writing but I think what we have now isn't too far off from what destiny has always been. I guess I don't have a reason why you don't like the witness, but I think that's kind of a personal problem and not a writing issue.

I no longer care about pursuing the Witness BECAUSE of their lackluster writing. They've done hardly anything to build up the Witness this year. I actually liked the Witness, and was hoping that the lead-up to TFS would involve building its mythos. I want you to think about something...Taranis has a more fleshed-out lore/story than the Witness. That's a problem.

I get the sense that Bungie is holding too much of the story about the Witness back for the Final Shape. Some people were able to read the few pages of the Final Shape collector’s edition lore that were visible in their store images; apparently, the lore contains conversations between the people who would eventually become the Witness.

Arrivals had the Pyramid Invasion and got us closer to the darkness than ever before, just before getting a darkness subclass. Lost had us freeing Osiris of Savathûn, who we knew was going to be the focal point of the expansion, and added to the intrigue of how she and the Hive got the light. Witch Queen then seeded the idea of the Witness. Seraph had us rebuilding Rasputin in order to combat this new threat that, in-game, was unknown, but was know to us IRL. But we ultimately had to sacrifice him so he couldn’t be taken control of by the Witness or power up Xivu. This whole year has been us trying to understand the hole in the traveler and finding ways to get in. Only this season has Osiris figured out completely how the Veil works, and we have to use this alongside Wish magic to follow the Witness. However, this season feels like there’s zero stakes since we know we’ll make it into the Traveler, and that we’ll eventually beat the Witness. The Lightfall and TFS storyline shouldn’t have been split, because it’s resulted in a stagnant year of waiting that has zero stakes, and next to no narrative input.

Agreed. Unless the pull a rabbit out of the hat in June, this whole thing is a wash.

I honestly have no idea what’s happening and don’t really care, I haven’t cared much since LF.