A new expansion for Destiny 2 came out this week, and I decided I wanted to write about it a bit before I spend all evening playing. Spoilers for Shadowkeep plot ahead!
Brief synopsis of the plot so far: Good lord there's a lot that's happened. Humanity found the Traveler, a giant mechanical sphere that may or may not have a consciousness, on Mars as we started sending peopled missions to other planets. The Traveler granted us great knowledge and a Golden Age of peace as we expanded and terraformed various places in the solar system. Then the Traveler's ancient enemy, known only as the Darkness, found us. Usually the Traveler flees from the Darkness, but for some reason it stayed with us, though it went dormant. With the Darkness came several enemies, the Fallen, a 4 armed vaguely insectoid race, who once were touched by the Traveler and want it back; the Hive, a three-eyed alien species with a dire philosophy about betterment through the death of others; the Vex, a race of hive-minded machines that can manipulate time; and the Cabal, the Space Marine knock-offs in giant armor, who have an empire elsewhere.
So there was a big war, and humanity mostly lost, but the Darkness either never quite found our system (and only the various aliens did) or was somehow driven off, I'm not clear on that. That's all centuries before the game begins.
We start as a corpse. We are found by a tiny flying machine called a Ghost, which is imbued with the supernatural light of the Traveler. It revives us and regenerates us, as its chosen "Guardian", the name for those gifted with the Traveler's light. Guardians have been fighting a long war against the various aliens since they came into being, but it's been a stalemate. Humanity has been pushed back to a single city protected by the Guardians, but the aliens have made no progress in breaching that.
The first Destiny game is basically a long series of victories after we wake up. We push the Vex back on Venus, the Hive back on the moon, the Fallen back on Earth, the Moon and Venus, the cabal on Mars... at the end the cabal send a message off to... someone. Also, the Hive super boss shows up and tries to kill us all, but we kill him too. (Oryx, basically a Hive god figure)
Destiny 2 begins with the results of that Cabal message: the Red Legion of Cabal show up, attempt to harness the Traveler for themselves and drain our light. We are able to get our powers back (oh, the light gives us the ability to throw fireballs and such. It's a superhero first person shooter in space, basically. Getting back up is your Ghost reviving you constantly. Being a Ghost is probably exhausting...) by finding a shard of the Traveler, and we eventually defeat the Red Legion. We go through some other stuff, like waking the Warmind (giant system wide defense AI) on Mars, finding a legendary guardian named Osiris on Mercury, fighting against the Vex, things like that. Last year, the first major expansion, Forsaken came out. Basically our friend gets killed and we go hunt down his killers. There was less story in the season expansions last year, though lots of lore about the universe. And that brings us (HIGHLY ABRIDGED) to Shadowkeep.
The First Mission:
So this expansion has us traveling back to the moon (Earth's moon) for the first time since Destiny 1. Eris Morn has been investigating something with the Hive on the moon, and seismic activity has the Vanguard on edge so they send us to check it out. We (Aproustian and I do the mission together) teleport down from our ships in the middle of a large excursion of Hive from the Hellmouth, and have to fight our way through to the new Red Keep the Hive have constructed. Zavala mentions that the vanguard have been monitoring the situation. Maybe you should have sent us in earlier Zavala?
Anyway, we fight through to an even larger fight, a massive Hive Shrieker (sort of a floating eye that can close itself under a rocky exoskeleton, that shoots a barrage of void energy at us when we get close) is guarding the next gate, and at least Zavala sees fit to send us some tanks to help out.
We move into the Red Keep itself, full of that creepy Hive architecture we all know from the last game. Very creepy insect hive sort of stuff. We go through fighting these strange red-tinted Hive here. They weren't like that before. They drop glowing red orbs that give an "Unstable Essence" modifier. I'm not sure what it does yet.
The tunnel opens on a very beautiful view of the Earth from the moon... but there are these red hanging figures on a cliff nearby. I saw one come and attack Eris Morn in the opening cutscene. Ominous.
We reach a point where our path is blocked next to a huge black pyramid shaped structure. I'm reminded of the Pyramidion, a Vex construction on Io, but this is the Hive. A blue glowing figure appears. Our Ghost is aghast: "It's Crota! But we killed him!" Which we did in the first game, twice. Once in the real world, and once following him back to his 'Throne World', a sort of extra dimensional anchor for a powerful Hive's soul that lets them be reborn. But here he is, glowing blue. The name over his head says "Nightmare of Crota". Ominous. We do what we always do in new situations as Guardians; we shoot him with bullets. And rockets. And plasma weaponry. He's annoying, sending hordes of the little Thrall after us, and occasionally becoming immune to damage for a time. We get his health bar down to about the 2/3 point when two more "Nightmares" appear, one of Dominus Ghaul (the big bad in the original Destiny 2 campaign) and the Fanatic (one of the nine big bads of the Forsaken expansion from last year). And then we hear Eris Morn, urging us to follow her voice to safety. I'm glad she's still alive after that cutscene.
We duly flee. We find ourselves teleported away to a red room where Eris is monitoring the pyramid. A red figure hovers behind her. She says the pyramid was recently uncovered by the Hive, and it seems to be creating these Nightmare creatures from our own memories. The figure behind her is that of a friend of Eris's from her fireteam who was killed on their failed mission to kill Crota years before. But this phantom has a malice Eris's friend never had.
Ominous.
Anyway, we have a new goal; get inside the pyramid and stop whatever is going on.
Finally it clicks for me that after the first Destiny 2 campaign, when we woke up the Traveler, a pulse of light went far beyond our solar system and reached a fleet of Pyramid shaped vessels in deep space, which my brother in law Bigg Life told us were the original bad guys of Destiny, but that we haven't seen them in game yet. The pyramids may be the Darkness the Traveler fled from for so long, that devastated humanity after the Traveler brought about a golden age.
Ominous.
So that was the first mission. It's great to be back on the moon! And not in a new area, but rather in a slightly reshaped version of the moon we got to be on in Destiny 1, with a few new areas added on to it. Apparently the seismic activity that brought us here in the first place damaged some of the old human structures, because some of the familiar buildings have fallen into the ground a bit. I wonder if I can still jump on top of the super collider thing?
The opening scene and first bit where we fight a bunch of Hive really felt like an invasion, re-establishing the beachhead (moon-head?) we had made last game. Lots of shooting, enemies running everywhere, and because it was a public zone, lots of other players running around killing Hive as well.
So far, I'm having fun! I will possibly post more later, and possibly not. I just felt like writing about Destiny.
No comments:
Post a Comment