Like the mad century philosophers of yore, I gouge my eyes out playing Destiny, mouth agape, head dripping and drooling with futures baroque until my ass is on the floor. I’ve had a vision and the vision was videogame neoliberalism, perfected. Guardians make their own fate. We knew what we were getting into from the start yet we plunged nonetheless. This time, maybe, it will be different.

Two years ago, on the icy moon of Europa, Beyond Light orchestrated one of the greatest one-two punch a shooter had ever thrown my way; a game of musical chairs where the chairs are actual orbital shuttles sending you past the stratosphere and the penalty for failure was nuclear annihilation. Take my hand, let's walk out in space.

« La fontaine de jouvence. », Clovis said.

A year ago, Vow of the Disciple had perhaps the most haunting image I've ever seen in Destiny. And it's not even the best part of that raid. Not when you can practice bullet horticulture on the body of a fifteen feet-tall alien after he kicked us out of existence. Not after the Upended. Destiny, in a way, keeps getting smaller as it expands outside the confines of our own solar system - towards a place where the up is down, where dreams are flesh and the waking world becomes a foolish expanse. 60 frames per seconds of pure cornucopia.

Lightfall has for itself the Root of Nightmares raid. Vexcalibur. Some of the most broken, explosive meta-build combinations in the new Strand subclass, using its grapple as a means to punch dudes in the face or marrying its crowd-control venom with Osteo Striga’s submachinegun mania. It's always the same; shoot the orb, grab the buff, watch a million numbers leak through the cracks of the monitor. But what an orb this is. I haven’t even beaten the new raid’s first boss and I’m already sold, devoted almost. It’s a dude, big, Explicator of Planets and whatnot, dragging with its demise the obscure promise that as we move these celestial bodies around a dark planetarium their galactic configuration may actually change, a symmetry to match our damage phases and remake the universe in our image. The main goal of Root of Nightmares is for us to resurrect a famous god of pain just so that we can kill him all over again - its sarcophagus pointing skywards towards this Traveler we’ve called home for a decade and which now lies broken in the middle of our star map. At its best, when things click and lore makes dots connect, Destiny feels terribly simple - circle meeting triangles in our ironsight, obscurity followed by sudden light. A tree of silver wings bloomed, full of loot. My assault rifle explodes and it’s this explosion that invests me in history. A gun is a text is a person and each person is a revelation that happens through repeated touch, the forming of new patterns by building their perfect legend in our minds. That Destiny is so concerned with giving its guns personhood, through their use and the way each tend to inform and shape relationships inside the fiction, probably reflects its tendencies to imagine the feedback loop as something sacred - to grind is to reach God or as Brandon Taylor put it in a series of hilarious tweet about something entirely unrelated:

You can take the Skyfather out of heaven, but you can’t take the desire for a Skyfather out of man. 😤”

Pause.

Y’all be giving Erasmus vibes every single day.

But it’s got me thinking; Destiny as an eternal vacation. Lightfall is far from the best Destiny has ever been in terms of its world feeling like a lived-in place by putting forth unique gameplay propositions (chasing an exotic “whisper” down platforming depths, ragged-riches or treasure of a Leviathan) but it is the most fun I’ve ever had with its gunplay; the build-crafting has been streamlined, dumb-downed even, and in exchange for complexity the moment-to-moment experience feels swifter, allowing for immediate self-expression and, by extension, an easier doorway into Destiny’s true endgame : Building the most fashionable killing machine this side of the Milky Way. But I digress. Now that we’ve entered the realm of absolute omniheroics, that excavated narrative threads are starting to pull together - awkwardly killing-off old characters like the A.I war machine Rasputin while graciously upscaling the larger scale of its kinaesthetics - and the promise of a star-wide power fantasy has essentially been fulfilled it’s easier to realize that Destiny has always been hammering the same point home: We will not go gently into that good night. Dream’s end. If you dig enough inside the Vexcalibur exotic quest unlocked post-campaign the game rewards us with a sight that just made smile; a full-3D visualization of the Veil, this expansion’s incomprehensible McGuffin. There’s been a lot of uproar around the nature of the object in the community but I, for one, loved it. It’s a cyclopean hourglass, mixed soil of Light and Dark containing an abstract representation of the memory of the universe that we find in the campaign by descending deep into the heart of a cybernetic city hidden behind Neptune, inhabited by the ghosts of people who’ve chosen to reside in the wood-wide web when the fighting started. And underneath it - sustaining this phantasm - is the Veil. A purple root of psychedelics - matter and its antithesis merged into one. Destiny’s all in there. This longest of summers is coming to a close and as we approach entropy’s center, the shapes begin to feel more familiar. A pyramid filled with horse figurines. Bones of a whale from an alien moon. An hourglass - a « Veil » under which we once slept - powering the galactic engine, paraphernalia sipping back out of the black hole. All this time sunk into a game who, at the end of the day, is interested in grass and trinklets. That’s where the prestige lies for Bungie. Bringing us back to Earth.

« Once upon a time a Gardener and a Winnower lived together in a garden. »

The best we can do is burn our way out of there.

[Killed by the Architects.]

Reviewed on Apr 03, 2023


3 Comments


11 months ago

I like your funny words, magic man.

3 months ago

I feel like the way you write about Destiny interests me so much more than the way Destiny itself is written.

3 months ago

@_YALP
My goal is to discourage anyone from ever playing it while convincing you it's one of the greatest games in the history of first-person shooters.

@garie
Wait 'til The Final Shape comes around.