Everything PC gamers need to know before diving into the Destiny 2 universe.
The first Destiny, we have to say, it was certainly not praised for its storyline when it debuted on PlayStation 4 and XBOX One in September 2014. The MMO shooter from Bungie, in fact, lacked a solid narrative sector, which disappointed that slice of gamers who they were looking for a traditional countryside. Over time, however, the quality of the game began to emerge, first with small elements like the Grimoire cards and later thanks to some good and interesting expansions, in particular The Taken King.
Destiny 2Instead, it is based on a more detailed and diversified approach than its predecessor, undoubtedly aiming higher and improving in all respects. About that:
- here you find our review.
- This guide will help you solve the network problems related to the title on PC.
- And if you don't know which class to choose ...
- … We have curated the subclasses of the Titan for you!
If you are a PC gamer and intend to buy the sequel but have never had the opportunity to play the first chapter, undoubtedly there are several things you need to know in order to be clear to you.
With this guide, therefore, we are going to explain everything you need to know about Guardians, Traveler, robots, time travel and much more, so as to begin the adventure well-versed on October 24th, when the title will land on PC .
The traveler
The extraterrestrial sphere called the Traveler is Destiny's most iconic element as well as its main mystery. Discovered on Mars in the modern era, it cultivated a golden age of technology that allowed humanity to expand into the solar system. The Traveler, however, had an enemy, a mysterious force called theDarkness. The arrival of the Darkness triggered an apocalyptic event known as the Collapse, during which the Traveler is believed to have "sacrificed" himself to save the Earth. For the entire duration of the first chapter it remained suspended motionless and inactive above theLast City, the only place on Earth that the Darkness has not been able to reach.
The nature of the Traveler's intelligence, how it works and what it wants still remains a mystery. It is implied that it may be one Dyson sphere with extradimensional properties and its presence in the history of several other alien races suggests that it is incredibly old and that it has been involved in the elevation of wise races for a very long time. The power of the Traveler is called Luce, but it is simply the name given to it by the civilization that arose on Earth after the Collapse.
The darkness
The nature of the Traveler's rival is unknown and there is no surviving evidence of the Collapse that allows us to understand exactly what it is. It is not a single alien race or perhaps multiple races and its rare manifestations in the game are decidedly abstract: space-time gashes, dark spheres and spots. It is closely associated with the Corrupt and Oryx, the main enemy of the second year of Destiny, even though the latter was a god of the Hive who was granted only a part of the power of the Dark, but not the Dark itself.
Darkness is one of the kinds of things that are not directly explained during the adventure and that can only be guessed by reading a lot of Grimoire cards, so its understanding is not easy especially due to the abstractness of its elements. The simplest way to understand what it is is to know that Darkness is the opposite of the Traveler. The Traveler is a singular point of light, while the Darkness is a vast void. The Traveler is physical, the Darkness is immaterial. The Traveler creates and elevates, the Darkness consumes and evens out. They are eternal opposites and you probably know which side you would rather be on, but their morality is less clear than it initially appears.
Guardians and Ghosts
The protagonists of Destiny are the Guardians of the Tower, superpowered agents of the Traveler armed with weapons, spaceships, propulsion bikes and elemental powers powered by Light. Each Guardian is accompanied by a Ghost, a small flying robot that was created at the time of the Traveler's "death". Ghosts scour the wastelands of the Earth in search of corpses that match specific criteria and which they will then transform into Guardians thanks to their advanced reconstruction technology.
That's right, the Guardians can be seen as an army of "undead" who have no memory of their previous lives and who fight alongside a silent alien god whose ends remain unknown.
The Phantom's "Rebuild" is Destiny's way of explaining respawn with each death, but it's also why the Guardians are so powerful and let's face it, weird. They are living beings but they are not afraid of dying. They kill until they die and then come back to life and continue their work. Ghosts are also used to explain how a Guardian is able to access his equipment: the things you collect are not physical objects but encrypted data that your Ghost is able to "transform" into new weapons or armor components.
The Unknown
Famous for having said the most emblematic and curious phrase of the first chapter, "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain", theUnknown is an enigmatic figure who guides the player along the course of the adventure. More precisely, it is a woman Exo, which is essentially a robot that houses the consciousness of a long-dead human. Probably, this stranger comes from the future as can be easily deduced also from the campaign finale, when he entrusts the player with a rifle made with components that “shouldn't yet exist” called, to stay on the subject, Timeless to Explain. In short, there is always an aura of mystery about everything, but you will get used to it.
The Sleepless
- Sleepless are a breed characterized by blue colored people. Specifically, these are people who attempted to escape from the solar system at the time of the Traveler's death and who were hit by the resulting shock wave. This transformed them into a hybrid of human, traveler and darkness.
While many Sleepless have returned to Earth, others have decided to keep their own civilization called theAtoll. The Atoll is ruled by the Queen Mara Sov, who in the course of the adventure allied herself with the Guardians and the Tower, abandoning her neutral spirit. At the beginning of Destiny's Year Two, she disappeared along with most of the Sleepless who fled during the battle with Oryx.
Rasputin and the war minds
The other enigmatic ally during Destiny's first year was the warhead Rasputin, a sophisticated and powerful AI created by humanity during the Golden Age that preceded the Collapse. The purpose of the war minds is to defend the Solar System, for this reason they were equipped with weapons and satellites (the warsats) capable of hitting enemies from the orbit of the various worlds. One theory holds that when the Darkness attacked Earth, the Traveler attempted to abandon humanity but Rasputin and the other AIs disabled him in order to force him to stay and fight. The Traveler's scars, on the other hand, are visible on the face facing the Earth.
Rasputin's current targets are unknown, but he is thought to be looking for Charlemagne, the war mind of Mars. In Destiny 2, Rasputin will play a bigger role than in the first chapter.
The Fallen
The first of Destiny's two alien races are the Fallen, enemies obsessed with the Traveler enough to inspire you with their technology and organized in a social structure divided into Casati. The story of the Fallen is tragic enough, as this race was elevated and later abandoned by the Traveler when the Darkness destroyed their civilization. The Fallen depend on a substance called Ether to survive, which is a substitute for the Traveler's Light.
Among Destiny's enemies, the Fallen are the most likely to become allies, such as Variks, a Guardian belonging to this race. All attempts by this civilization to reclaim their old glory have failed miserably: the first was when Skolas, an exiled Fallen captain, attempted to unite the Houses against the Queen of the Sleepless, as he was captured and assassinated by the Guardians. The second attempt was when the car Aksis she discovered a powerful nanotechnology called SIVA on Earth and tried to use it to empower herself and her House. Again, Aksis was killed by the Guardians.
The Cabals
The other race in the game are the Cabal, powerful beasts in armor with a military hierarchy reminiscent of the Roman style. This race has been around since the beginning of Destiny but has never been the main threat. It is claimed that the Cabals are fighting a losing war against some external threat, and of course the candidate in this theory is the Dark, but rivaling them for second place are also the Vex.
The Vex
I Vex they are advanced cyborgs built around an organic liquid core that may be sentient, and this is the strangest element about them. They are time travelers who gave rise to vast and abstract structures in the solar system several billion years ago. These represent the confluences in the Vex network, an extradimensional labyrinth that traverses light and space.
In a huge underground complex on Venus named The Vault of Glass, an advanced Vex mind named Atheon he attempted to unite race with the universe, making their creation and eventual triumph inevitable by "writing" the logic of the Vex at the same time. Atheon's defenses included weapons capable of obliterating the Guardians from the real world, although the Vault is a place where multiple realities reside. Atheon was defeated by the Guardians in several of these realities, who fought across three separate timelines to recover an artifact that allowed them to eliminate him.
The Vex mind, therefore, is powerful enough to be able to generate simulated realities and this caused a crisis for the human researchers on Venus when they realized that the Vex unit they captured was simulating the whole reality, therefore these scientists weren't really watching Vex but it was a voluntary simulation of the latter (complicated, right?). Since there was no other way to tell if their reality was "real" or if it was yet another simulation, the researchers tried to enter the Vex network to find out the truth. One theory holds that the Unknown Exo is one such scientist and is "hopping" between Vex-controlled realities (including the one we live in) rather than time-traveling.
The Hive
Although they look like space zombies, that ofHive it is the race with the most complex culture compared to the others. In ancient times, their ancestors had short, precarious lives on destroyed continents suspended in the atmosphere of a gas giant. Frightened by the likely end of their civilization, three princesses commandeered an ancient ship to seek help. They were approached by Leviathan, a servant of the Traveler, but they rejected the passivity to which the race would be subjected and chose to enter the gas giant rather than pursue the search for salvation. There they found the Divinity of Worms, of the larvae servants of the Dark who collaborated with the princesses to create what would become the Hive. A princess, Aurash, it will emerge as Auryx. A few million years of conquest later, Auryx will become Oryx.
The triumph of the Guardians over the demigod of the Hive Crota and, later, on his father Oryx it was possible because they were able to use the Logic of the Sword of the Hive against them. This logic essentially holds that anything that can be defeated should be defeated. By eliminating these gods in their self-created paradise (an alternate reality called the world of the throne), the Guardians have definitively put an end to the unstoppable millennial conquests of Oryx and Crota and, with this, also to the Logic of the Sword dictated by their "empire".
The Corrupt
I Corrupt they are Oryx's army and come from all races, including the Vex. An entity called the Deep gave Oryx the power to create them and they were "perfected" by the Dark. Perhaps due to the influence of Oryx or perhaps due to the influence of the Dark on Oryx, these "modified versions" of Destiny's enemies reflect some elements of the Hive philosophy.
In a sense, the Taken are the Dark version of what the Guardians are to the Traveler. But unlike the latter, who searches for corpses to bring them back to life and create autonomous servants, the Dark transforms what is alive into hordes of "empty, absent" beings. They are literally an existential threat.
Ahamkara, the Nine and Osiris
Although they never appeared directly in the game, the Ahamkara (pictured in the image above) are one of the most enigmatic mysteries in the game and are an extinct race of dragons. You just need to know of their passing existence anyway, nothing else.
I Nineinstead, they are the rulers of space beyond Saturn, the farthest planet reached by the Guardians during the first Destiny. Their identity is unknown, but they interact with the Tower via xur, best known to players as the character who shows up every weekend to sell rare gear. Even about the Nine, however, not much else is known.
Finally, one more name you should know: Osiris. Osiris was a Guardian obsessed with Darkness and, in particular, the Vex, which led to him being exiled from the Tower before vanishing into thin air. His followers hold a named tournament The Trials of Osiris, the toughest PvP challenge of the first chapter. If a team manages to win nine knockout games at once without ever losing, they gain temporary access to the Lighthouse, the base of Osiris on Mercury. There, in a secret location, a human skeleton can be found next to a disabled Vex portal. Fan theory holds that Osiris somehow entered the Vex network and may have a connection with the Unknown.
Destiny doesn't use PvP to tell the story, but the Trials of Osiris are an exception. The number nine occurs repeatedly in association with Osiris, and the concept of probability and improbability is central to the way the Vex perceive the various realities in which they operate. The purpose of the tournament is to spot Guardians who deny the probability, but why this should interest Osiris is another story. Or another game, perhaps.
