[News] Destiny: The Story So Far

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Destiny is known for having a somewhat confusing plot, so if you're a returning player coming back to Destiny 2's Beyond Light expansion, you might be fuzzy on the details--and if you're new, it might be really intimidating to jump into. Either way, don't worry; from vanilla Destiny and Destiny 2 through each expansion, we've covered everything you need to know about the story so far.

Here we've outlined the main beats of your Guardian's story, leaving out a lot of superfluous details and information from the Grimoire and lore books, so you can get the basics down before starting Destiny 2: Beyond Light.

 

Now Playing: Destiny Lore You Should Know Before Playing Destiny 2

Prologue

Long before the events of the game was the Golden Age, when mankind discovered the Traveler. The gigantic, spherical entity terraformed planets throughout the solar system, though its true nature--sentient being, vessel, deity, or something else entirely--is unknown. Its discovery launched humanity into an era of prosperity, as it allowed them to colonize other planets. Top scientists founded the Ishtar Academy on Venus, while a genius industrialist named Clovis Bray founded a corporation by the same name on Mars, eventually developing Exos, machines with human consciousness. The many technological advancements during this time came from Clovis Bray, including that of powerful AI called Warminds charged with maintaining humanity's interplanetary defenses, one of which remained through Destiny's present day: Rasputin.

One day, a dangerous but relatively unknown enemy of the Traveler known as the Darkness approached Earth, destroying nearly everything in its path and wreaking havoc upon what humanity had created. This is referred to throughout Destiny as the Collapse. The Traveler sacrificed itself to save humanity, using its Light to drive the Darkness away. After the Collapse, the Traveler remained hovering dormant over Earth, but even in its dormant state, it created Ghosts--small, floating AI robots imbued with its power. Ghosts scattered through the solar system, resurrecting a few chosen dead and gifting them the Light. These superpowered people had no recollection of their past lives, in the Dark Age following the collapse, many became warlords, fighting each other and the groups of angry, hostile aliens who had appeared during that time in search of the Traveler.

But some of the Risen, as those with the Light became known, fought to help those less powerful than them. A group calling themselves the Iron Lords fought back the other warlords, sometimes even destroying them outright. They banded together with some other Risen heroes to found a huge walled stronghold called the Last City, beneath the Traveler, where survivors could congregate and live peacefully, protected. Over time, the Risen who protected the City took on a new name: Guardians.

Over the centuries, the city thrived, but faced threats and attacks. It was besieged on more than one occasion by the Fallen, a scavenger race that had once been visited by the Traveler, much as humanity was, and seemingly abandoned by it to suffer through its own version of the Collapse, the Whirlwind. The Fallen scrounge across what's left of Earth, posing a major threat to any people who survive in the wilderness.

 

Year One

Much of vanilla--also known as Year One--Destiny's story consists of setup for things to come.

At the beginning, you're a Guardian who has been dead for some time and is then revived by a Ghost. You wake in the Cosmodrome, an ancient spaceport in Old Russia, Earth. Like other Guardians, you can wield the power of the Traveler's Light. Your mission is to fight past the Fallen here and activate an old jump ship, which you can use to escape to the Last City.

Once at the Tower, you learn about the Vanguard, the Guardian military hierarchy that protects the City. It consists of Commander Zavala, Cayde-6, and Ikora Rey, who represent each of the three playable classes (Titan, Hunter, and Warlock, respectively). You also learn of the Traveler through someone called The Speaker, a representative of the Traveler who helps to guide Guardians. Your job as a Guardian is to help protect the Last City from any threats, and while you're free to do as you wish, you're more or less under the Vanguard's command.

You return to Old Russia to recover a drive for your ship that will allow you to travel to other planets in the solar system. While there, you encounter the Hive, an old species that worships death. The Hive presence on Earth is somewhat frightening, you discover. Some years past, the Hive attacked the Moon, creating structures and catacombs deep beneath its surface. Guardians mounted a major offensive to drive the Hive back and retake the Moon, but failed miserably and suffered enormous casualties. Since then, the Vanguard has declared the Moon off-limits--so the Hive showing up on Earth suggests they might be preparing an invasion.

You fight past the Fallen and the Hive and open an Array that gives you access to more technology and information. Through this you discover the Warmind Rasputin, thought to be long-dead.

 

You protect Rasputin from the Fallen and head to the Moon in search of the last Guardian that had gone there, in order to figure out what the Hive have been up to. In the process, you wake up the Hive (again). In the process, you meet an Exo known as the Stranger who tells you to meet her on Venus if you survive the Moon. Your adventure on the Moon helps you to slow the Hive's plans, but without fully uncovering them.

On Venus, you learn about a complex, highly intelligent, time-traveling machine race called the Vex. The Exo Stranger shows up after you push back the Vex in the Ishtar Academy (but her story is largely nonsensical, so don't worry about it too much). What's important is that the Stranger warns you about the Vex, who are the biggest threat you're facing right now.

From here you travel to the Reef, a sovereign collection of space trash and asteroids, which are home to the Awoken. These are the third race in Destiny after humans and Exos, who were created during the Collapse when the Traveler's Light converged with the energy of the Darkness. That energy hit a ship of humans leaving the solar system in a huge colony ship, fundamentally altering them. On the Reef, you meet the Awoken Queen, Mara Sov, and her brother Prince Uldren. You also learn that the Fallen who make their home there--the only Fallen in the game who aren't your enemies, since they serve the Queen--belong to a sect called House of Wolves. The Wolves tried to take over the Reef at some point in the past, but Mara and the Awoken put down the attack, imprisoning the leaders of the Wolves in their asteroid jail, the Prison of Elders. Some of the Fallen, including an adviser to the queen called Variks, were allowed to stay out of the prison if they pledged their fealty to the Awoken.

With the queen's help, you learn what the Exo Stranger was warning you about: the Vex's origin point, a place that exists out of time and space called the Black Garden. The Heart of the Black Garden is a chunk of the Darkness, and left unchecked, it could destroy the Traveler. The queen offers to help you get into the Black Garden, but you'll need to head to Mars to retrieve a specific piece of a powerful Vex robot.

So it's on to Mars, home of the warmongering rhino-like race known as the Cabal, who have turned the planet into a beachhead for their invasion of the solar system. You fight your way across the planet to find a Vex Gatelord to claim its eye. With that, the Awoken show you how to open the way to the Black Garden so you can destroy the Garden's Heart and save the Traveler.

At the end of vanilla Destiny, The Stranger gifts you with her weapon, The Stranger's Rifle, and says she'll be in touch. It'll be years before you hear from her again, though.

 

 

Destiny's original Raid, the Vault of Glass, involves an area where Vex have control over time and space. In the Vault of Glass, all timelines converge--there you find corpses of people who are long dead, but because reality is bent here, parts of them and their memories still exist. The Raid involves the battle and then defeat of Atheon, who is said to be the point where all of space-time converges.

 

Expansion 1: The Dark Below

After you've destroyed the Black Garden's heart, a former Guardian named Eris Morn arrives in the Tower.

Lurking below the surface of the Moon is Crota, a Hive prince and the son of Oryx, the Hive's god-king. Crota is the reason the Guardian counterattack on the Moon failed all those years ago--he wields the power to destroy the Guardians' Light, and used it to murder thousands. After that battle, Eris Morn and five other Guardians delved beneath the Moon as part of a plan to destroy Crota, but one by one, they were all killed. Eris lost her Ghost, and thus her immunity, but survived for years in the darkness of the Hive caves, only to be changed and twisted by their power.

Eris asks you for help to deal with Crota once and for all--his followers are working to bring about his return. (Like other Hive gods, Crota is effectively immortal thanks to his connection to the Ascendant Plane, which allows him to protect and hide his soul even when his body is destroyed.) You defeat his disciple Omnigul, a Hive Wizard, before destroying Crota's essence and stopping the attempted resurrection.

In the Crota's End Raid, you summon, fight, and defeat Crota himself, finally avenging Eris's fireteam.

 

Expansion 2: House of Wolves

Remember the Reef and its queen? The Fallen House of Wolves had served Queen Mara Sov for years after she defeated them, but that changes in Destiny's second expansion. Skolas, a Fallen captain, is attempting to unite the fragmented Fallen sects under one House to become the legendary Kell of Kells, or king of kings. Under his command, the House of Wolves betrays Mara Sov. Only Variks of House Judgment remains loyal to the queen.

Petra Venj, the queen's emissary, enlists your help as repayment for the favor the Awoken did you in helping you get into the Black Garden. Your job is to hunt down Skolas and prevent the formation of a united Fallen front against the Reef. You head to Venus, where he is studying Vex technology, to find him. You capture him alive and send him to the Prison of Elders, and later can head there and defeat him again for some reason.

 

Expansion 3: The Taken King

The Taken King expansion is widely regarded as the high point of Destiny's storytelling. The writing feels more cohesive, it strikes the right tone, and the characters have more presence than in previous iterations.

The expansion sees the arrival of a new Hive adversary: Oryx, the Taken King, father of Crota, and God-King of the Hive. He arrives in the solar system looking to take revenge on the Guardians for the death of his son, Crota. He rolls into the rings of Saturn on his enormous ship, the Dreadnaught, which comes equipped with weapons of mass destruction. Mara Sov, Prince Uldren, and the Awoken fleet engage the Hive near Saturn, but they're wiped out by the Dreadnaught's weapon.

All over the solar system, Oryx's army begins to appear. They're the Taken--members of other enemy races that Oryx controls and distorts by sending them into and back out of another dimension. The Taken resemble shadowy versions of existing enemies, but they move as if they're glitching in and out of reality.

 

Oryx's arrival is what Eris Morn has been preparing for, and she and Cayde-6 work together to dispatch you to the Dreadnaught. When you arrive, you find the Cabal are already there, responding to Oryx "taking" their soldiers, but they're in a losing battle--they try to retreat from the Dreadnaught and even send a distress call that reaches outside the solar system. After your initial foray onto the Dreadnaught, you're sent to recover special cloaking tech from Cayde-6 that will help you reboard the ship, where you disable its weapon and, after several more missions, take down Oryx.

But Oryx only retreats--you defeat him fully in the Raid, King's Fall. Defeating a Hive God isn't without consequences, though.

 

Expansion 4: Rise of Iron

The final expansion of Destiny fills in some of the story of the Iron Lords, the group of precursor Guardians from back during the Dark Age after the Collapse. In the present, we find out that the Fallen House of Devils started looking in Old Russia for something that could give them an edge against Guardians. There they found SIVA, a Golden Age nanotechnology created by Clovis Bray with the ability to make the Fallen more powerful. Those who use it are called Splicers.

 

Lord Saladin, the last of the Iron Lords (and the guy who runs the Iron Banner tournament in the Tower), calls on you to investigate and secure the Iron Temple, which is under attack by a rebuilt Sepiks Prime (an enemy you fought for the first time in a Year One Strike). There you learn of the Fallen Splicers and enter the vault where they are replicating SIVA in order to stop the spread.

Saladin sends you to the Plaguelands, a formerly closed-off section of Old Russia, where SIVA is on the loose. You fight to defeat the SIVA Splicers, but you also discover that the Iron Lords were killed by Rasputin. The Warmind seemingly misinterpreted the Iron Lords as enemies and unleashed SIVA on them, and they sacrificed themselves to keep it contained.

In the Wrath of the Machine Raid, you finally defeat the Splicers and their leaders. The Plaguelands are quarantined by the Vanguard to keep SIVA from spreading, and it remains there to this day, as far as we know.

 

Destiny 2

That brings us to Destiny 2. The sequel begins two years after the events of the original. Remember those Cabal who sent a distress call during their battles with the Hive on the Dreadnaught? Someone responded: Ghaul, the leader of the Cabal, and his army, the Red Legion. Ghaul manages to sneak-attack the Vanguard and ravages the Tower, then deploys a special net that allows him to capture the Traveler's Light. Suddenly, all Guardians lose their Light, and with it, their immortality and powers. The attack is devastating, but you survive--if barely--and escape the Last City.

Key characters from what we've seen so far include the Vanguard (Zavala, Cayde-6, and Ikora) and shipwright Amanda Holliday, who were little more than quest-givers and gear merchants in the first game. Check out the full Homecoming story mission to see how they've taken center stage.

Destiny 2 launches on PS4 and Xbox One on September 6, followed by a PC release on October 24.