[News] With Destiny 2's Beyond Light, The Original Destiny Story Finally Makes Sense

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With Destiny 2's Beyond Light, The Original Destiny Story Finally Makes Sense
Back when Destiny first came out in 2014, one of the things that it most struggled with was telling the story of its vast and strange world. Set in a distant, alien-filled post-apocalypse in which flying robot flashlights resurrect the dead to turn them into immortal superheroes, Destiny packed so much seemingly random stuff into its original campaign that it was truly challenging to follow.

Part of what made Destiny 1 kind of a mess was that while you were being bombarded with all of those worldbuilding elements, Bungie decided to tell about half of one story, toss it out midway, and start another one. And that was all the fault of a weird character who showed up, pointed you at a new threat, famously gave you no explanation, and then disappeared for years: the Exo Stranger.
With Destiny 2's Beyond Light expansion, we've finally seen the return of the Exo Stranger six years later. Along with her return, Bungie is, at long last, taking the time to explain. In fact, there's a whole lot of story baked into Beyond Light--and it all finally fills in the gaps of what happened in Destiny 1. In a big way, Beyond Light just recontextualized everything that has happened in Destiny up to now, upending our understanding of the story. After six years, Destiny 1's story kind of makes sense now.
 

What Happened In Destiny 1
In order to understand what Beyond Light has clarified, you need to know what actually happened in Destiny 1. Not only has it been a while since that game came out, but as mentioned, its story doesn't give you much to go on. It begins with your character getting resurrected by your robot buddy Ghost, turning you into a Guardian for the first time in a place called the Cosmodrome in old Russia. The gist of your job as a Guardian is to fight on behalf of humanity against various alien threats. More specifically, you're meant to stand against a super-powerful entity or race or force called the Darkness, which invaded the solar system centuries earlier to end the age of human prosperity in an event called the Collapse. The Darkness has since left the solar system, but it so devastated everything that Guardians are constantly worried about dealing with it sometime in the future.

Newly (nearly) immortal, you come across the Hive, Destiny's death-worshipping monster enemies, who are hiding in the dark down in the ruins in Russia. They should not be there.

See, the Hive mostly hang out on the moon, which they invaded years in the past. They got a good foothold there, too, creating a vast subterranean tunnel network filled with ritual spaces and temples. Eventually, the Vanguard, the military command structure in charge of Guardians, got the superheroes together in numbers in order to go kick the Hive off the moon.

That counterattack failed spectacularly and a mess of Guardians died, mostly at the hands of Crota, one of the Hive's pantheon of leaders who are effectively immortal living gods. Crota had a sword that could absorb Guardians' Light, the power that makes them immortal, and he used it to massacre a whole bunch of them. Guardians abandoned the moon and quarantined it, leaving the Hive there--until you discover evidence that the Hive are starting to drop "seeders" on Earth that would allow them to start building an invasion force.

So you go to the moon to figure out what the Hive's deal is, where you discover they're performing a ritual that drains the Light from the Traveler, the big robot god that showed up in the solar system centuries earlier, bringing humanity into a Golden Age of discovery and prosperity. All the aliens want to destroy or subjugate the Traveler, and it's from the Traveler that Guardians get their power. You put a stop to some of the Hive's immediate plans, without really knowing the scope of what they're up to. But you also don't really have time to worry about it, because there's something more important happening.

Partway through your time on the moon, you receive a strange message directing you to Venus. Head there, and you're met by the voice on the other end of the radio, belonging to the Exo Stranger. At this point, you're not worried about the Hive anymore--the Stranger tells you about a much worse threat from the time-traveling alien robots known as the Vex. They have a weird home that exists outside of normal space and time called the Black Garden, and in the Garden is a wad of Darkness, called the Heart of the Black Garden. If you don't kill the Heart, whatever the hell it is, uh...bad things will happen. ("I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain," she famously says, later leading to the introduction of a tongue-in-cheek Destiny gun called No Time to Explain.)

So the rest of Destiny is about finding a way into the Black Garden, which takes you across Venus, to the distant Reef (the colonized name for the Asteroid Belt), and to Mars. Eventually, you fight your way into the Black Garden, smash the Vex faction there known as the Sol Divisive, and destroy the gooey Heart. Darkness is stopped, apparently. The day is saved. The Exo Stranger tells you that you did a good job and then vanishes. Six years go by, with more scary alien threats rising, only to be put down by your gun.

It never becomes especially clear what you did in the Black Garden or why it was important, beyond the usual "kill Darkness because it's bad" reasoning. In Beyond Light, however, we've discovered what killing the Heart was all about, and how it was a crucial moment for the entire rest of the Destiny story.
 

The Exo Stranger's Past
The details about the Exo Stranger took years to drip out through Destiny lore. Over time, however, we started to understand that the reason she showed up in Destiny 1 for three minutes to point us at the Black Garden is that she was from the future. Her intervention in the original game's story was an effort to change that future, but it took quite a while for us to find out what, exactly, she was trying to prevent.

Beyond Light fills in a huge part of the Stranger's background. We find out that she's actually Elsie Bray, the granddaughter of famed industrialist Clovis Bray. You'll see Clovis's name all over buildings in Destiny, and his company had a huge presence on Mars. Clovis Bray was responsible for creating Rasputin, the giant AI Warmind that controlled the solar system's defenses, and the Exos, a race of robots with human minds (and one of your three race choices when creating a character).

The Exo program is what we're interested in. Back during the Golden Age (the time before the Darkness invaded), Clovis was struggling to turn humans into Exos, which he was doing in pursuit of immortality. He finally cracked the secret of transferring a human mind into a robot body by utilizing a mixture of Vex technology and "Clarity," Clovis's name for the energy generated by the Darkness.

See, when the Darkness exited the solar system, it left some things behind. On the moon, Clovis Bray scientists discovered a huge black pyramid that also doubled as a spaceship, which turned out to be one of the vessels of the Darkness. The energy coming off the vessel corrupted the scientists, but Clovis received messages from the Darkness directing him to Europa. There, he discovered Clarity Control, a huge Darkness artifact that looks like a statue and which gives off the energy Clovis dubbed Clarity. With it, he was able to solve his Exo problem, while studying and trying to harness Darkness energy. Elsie joined him in his research and eventually became an Exo, saving her life from a degenerative genetic disease that was killing her.

During the Golden Age, Elsie helped fight off a Vex invasion of Europa, one that was made possible by Clovis's research. In doing so, she seemingly gained some pretty extensive knowledge of the time-traveling robots and their capabilities. That'll be handy later.