Destiny 2 is Frightened of Itself
Let me say upfront that this is a rant, and I am a huge hater, but I’m not trying to chew out any of Destiny 2’s rank-and-file developers here. They are an unquestionably talented and passionate bunch, and care about the game a great deal, as evidenced by the fact they hadn’t all walked the fuck out the Bungie office doors after suffering the consequences of close to a decade of absolutely boneheaded creative decisions by upper management.
Destiny 2’s final entry in ‘Light and Darkness’ narrative arc, The Final Shape, ended in a manner just as confused and anticlimactic as Destiny 2 has been since the decision was made to gut the entire story of the base game plus two years of expansions. The impetus from the top since that embarrassing low-point has been to make Destiny feel more like an ongoing Marvel movie.
The culmination of this is the final mission, dubbed Excision, where 12 players plus every ally they have accrued throughout the last few story expansions pile in for one final standoff against the narrative arc’s ad-hoc antagonist, The Witness. It’s very consciously cribbing from that scene in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame - zero subtlety, just as much noise and spectacle as possible, a crescendo of hypermaximalist superheroic violence.
After whittling down the hitpoint bar of the big bad, who is now REALLY big via the medium of some Power Rangers bullshit, a gnawingly trite cutscene of heroic sacrifice plays out that you’ve seen in 100 different movies before, robbed of any impact at all by the most predictable twist you could possibly imagine. And then? You’re back at your home base, where your leader delivers a melancholy “we won, but at what cost?” monologue, while lighting a Kǒngmíng lantern. Fade scene, roll credits. The culmination of 10 years of plotting. Jesus fuck.
I’m sorry if I sound cynical here, but given Bungie employs a whole team of extremely talented professional writers and artists should I not expect a bit better than the safest, most boilerplate ending possible to a years-long story that people were really invested in? As if almost to rub your nose in it, the narrative thrust for the next major expansion is set up via a post-credits monologue. It’s fucking awful.
Really, I get it. We’re living in an era of pathological aversion to creative risk in the big-budget creative industries. Everything cribs off proven success stories because they have to. It’s all or nothing - you either make more money than God, or you flop, investment dries up and the studio goes bust, everybody is out of a job. The reasons for this trend are clearly far too complex for a peon like myself to understand, and I’m sure has nothing at all to do with CEOs taking home thousands of times more in pay than rank-and-file developers.
Destiny 2 needed to become a vehicle for MCU-style mass-market entertainment in order to sustain itself, this was how it had to be, there is no alternative, neoliberal economics will slowly kill everything you love, nobody can do anything about that and this is just how things are. Now eat your slurry you fucking worm.
Destiny 1 was a game entirely possessed by its sense of self-importance. The core group of Bungie veterans responsible for the creative decision-making in the Halo trilogy and its two spinoffs were high enough on their own fumes to just go to fucking town and make the most pompous, aesthetically ambitious sci-fi game that they could. They unironically described it as a ‘brave new world’. They took classic westerns, Andrei Tarkovsky, Terry Gilliam, Zdzisław Beksiński and Masamune Shirow as creative points of reference. They hired a fucking Beatle to assist in composing the score.
The end result was probably more David Lynch’s Dune than Aejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, as the Unstoppable Force of creative ambition met the Immovable Object of development constraints, and predictably enough, the Immovable Object won. Destiny was, as a result, a very compromised thing. But you know what? I love David Lynch’s Dune and I love Old Destiny precisely for being deeply flawed artifacts of much grander, more ambitious designs.
Years after Paul McCartney got deservedly poked fun at for his awful pomp-rock theme song, after Dinklebot and Moon-Wizards and never having enough time to explain, and Unknown Fallen Houses, these things feel… strangely endearing? They’re the faultlines at the borders where all of the rest of Destiny was crunched into form, reminders of all the naive ambition that went into the part of making the game when the possibilities were vast.
Nearly a decade of reactive course correction in the crucible of live-service software development has more or less scrubbed Destiny 2 clean of this initial character, and in its place we get something much safer, more sterile, because it had to be. The old quirks were simply too big a financial risk to countenance, as would any new creative risk-taking. The Final Shape was a pretty apt title.