Destiny 2 is coming, and it's bringing a smartass. "His name is Gary!" declares robot gunslinger Cayde-6 in the game's announcement trailer, which went online yesterday to much fanfare. "Or Gil. Glen? Is it ... I dunno. It's something with a G!" This is his rousing speech to the defeated heroes of Bungie's multiplayer alien shooter, his pitch to them to go out and face the big bad who just took over their home base. "Also," he continues, "there will be a ton of loot!" This is what gets the cheers from Cayde's fellow Guardians—and probably from a lot of players as well.
With that line, the trailer calls back to what instantly became the most addictive part of Destiny when the game came out in 2014: the platonic ideal of the grind. Kill baddies, get treasure, upgrade, repeat; the game's flawless shooting mechanics turned that cycle into a pleasure. But while the sequel trailer's focus on that aspect may be red meat for fans, it feels like a missed opportunity—the same one that limited its predecessor to being a good game rather than a truly great one.
When the original Destiny was first announced, its aesthetic was presented as a strange, gripping mixture of high fantasy and the lived-in sci-fi of Bungie's iconic Halo franchise. Heroic space wizards wield powers given by a mysterious supergod trapped in a brilliant white orb, wearing shining armor that's as much medieval majesty as space-faring survivalism—and all of it set against a backdrop of space-race nostalgia. But then the game itself came out, and the weirder parts of the world had been sanded down to almost nothing. The narrative, which hinted at eccentricities and mysteries far beyond the scope of play, was almost nonexistent, raising questions it didn't seem to understand, let alone want to answer. All its best eccentricities were pushed to an online-only set of logs and short stories called The Grimoire, a lexicon of well-written and original genre ideas that would have been fascinating to see in the game itself.
For instance: Destiny players, did you know that the final raid—the most complicated gameplay challenge in the whole game—takes place in a pocket dimension designed to protect the Big Bad's soul, designed according to his will using godlike powers he earned through worshiping the very concept of death? That's wild, right? But the game doesn't tell you anything about it. To find out, you have to dig through the Grimoire, putting together clues from a literal epic poem—sections of which you can only unlock online after gathering certain obscure in-game collectibles. The most interesting thing about the game was an afterthought, trapped in a morass of "transmedia" confusion.
The Grimoire is full of stuff like this. Like the idea that the Vex, a race of time-travelling alien machines you fight in-game, are religious not because of faith, but as a strategy. At some point in their history, apparently, they decided that religious devotion was the most efficient way to operate as a collective. Imagine a game that integrated these big, wacky sci-fi ideas into its texture, instead of forcing them onto the sidelines where no one except obsessives and games journalists are ever going to see them. This might be *Destiny'*s biggest problem. It offers you a world primed to capture your imagination, and then reduces it to its most basic mechanical conceits. Which is exactly why the reveal trailer is so frustrating: It's Nathan Fillion (who voices Cayde-6), yelling about shooting dudes and getting treasure.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad about Nathan Fillion yelling, and the trailer gives us some good stuff, too. The art style is as impressive as always, and the promise of a destabilized Destiny, pulling players away from the comfort and stability of its sterile hub, is a really exciting one. But this trailer signals an image of Destiny 2 as just a bigger, better version of the more conventional creature its predecessor became—more monsters, more loot, a few good jokes, while ignoring the so many ways that it could be more than that. For starters, it could include the writing that got pushed in the Grimoire into the main plot. It could make exploration of the solar system and its mysteries more key to the gameplay, giving the player a way to learn about things like the Vex's time-skipping techno religion in a way that's directly tied to the explicit goals of the game. It could find a place that balances the fun playfulness of the trailer's tone with a renewed interest in the bizarre and grand ideas hanging out under the surface.
When Destiny 2 comes out in September, it'll have a chance to fulfill the strange, creative promises the original made but never followed through on. I have high hopes; Bungie has made some of my favorite games of all time over the years. But the reveal trailer, as fun as it is, doesn't do that potential justice. I mean, how am I supposed to care about fighting the bad guy when Cayde doesn't even know his name?
