Destiny Lore 101
Posted: August 31st, 2017, 12:08
OK, first things first, lets answer what the fuck is up with the big ball.
The Traveler
The big ball is called the Traveler (it's probably worth noting now that a lot of the names in Destiny are just what humans call them, which explains why a lot of the totally alien stuff has surprisingly Earth centric names). The Traveler turned up sometime in our near future, all mysterious like. He used science-magic to terraform basically every planet in the solar system, even ones where the idea of terraforming them makes no rational sense. It’s the old "advanced science indistinguishable from magic" thing. We don’t really know why he did this, as the Big Ball doesn’t talk. Also, somehow, despite not talking to us, he taught us a bunch of advanced science, which propelled humanity into a golden age of peace, colonising the shit out of things, building robot people, generally having a swell time. At some point in all of this we also learnt about a power that comes from the Traveler called Light (think Good Science Magic). Light can do all sorts of sweet things. Other than "he is a big ball of science magic that pushed humanity into a golden age" we really don’t know a whole lot about him. Most humans treat him almost like a god though, because as far as most people know he has done a bunch of nice things for humanity. CONSPIRACY THEORY WARNING: He might secretly be a dick.
Needless to say, the good times didn’t last. Eventually the bad guys turned up. So many fucking bad guys. Theres four bad guy races, and although they are sometimes referred to as the horses of Darkness (because yes, the big bad and enemy of the Light is the Darkness. Of course it is.) it should also be noted that they really don’t like each other, and if you stumble into more than one of the enemy races at once they will probably be shooting each other. The bad guys are as follows:
The Fallen
The Fallen are pretty much space pirate/gypsies. They used to have a golden age all of their own (because of the Traveller) but now everything is pretty shit for them (see above about the Traveller maybe being a dick) so now they want to fuck our shit up in the hope that they will be awesome again, or something. Its not going well for them, as a plan. Sneaky fuckers, some of them are invisible, and they have a load of robot drone things. The biggest drones look a bit like small versions of the Traveller, this is not a coincidence. If you shoot Fallen in the head, their head goes pop and their drugs guff up into the air in a death fart. Which is nice.
The Cabal
Big angry space romans. Look a bit like the nice aliens from the beginning of 5th Element. They are not nice. They take a pretty direct approach to.. well, everything really. There is a reference at one point to them blowing up planets in the way of their armadas rather than going around them. The quite like jetpacks and shields, and look like they are the main bad for D2 (they are the guys who turn up in the intro mission). If you shoot them in the head, their head goes pop and their atmosphere suits guff up into the air in a death fart. Which is nice.
The Vex
Things start getting weird with the Vex. They are time manipulating robots who may have been in our solar system for thousands of years, but also might not have been here for thousands of years for that long. Time travel! They enjoy building sodding huge computer-buildings made mostly of squares, and like to try and erase their enemies from time. Most of their robots are human sized, some are massive. Expect lots of disappearing walls/floors/platforms when fighting them. If you shoot them in the head, they get super angry and hulk out a bit, becoming much faster and charging at you, doing a hell of a lot of damage. Which isnt nice. Shoot them in their glowing bellybutton instead.
The Hive
Kinda insecty, kinda undead, they are Destinys space goths. For some reason humans have decided to name them all with a medieval fantasy theme, so the big hulking hive waving swords around are Knights and the flying dudes in dresses that throw balls of death at you are Wizards, and so on. They are…. Super weird. They are the absolute peak of advanced science = magic, so much so that what they do really might as well be magic. A lot of the end of the first game was focussed around them and their big god leader Oryx, and his son Crota, so you will probably hear references to them. Short version: they were big and bad, they are dead now, because of the good guys. If you shoot them in the head, they die.
The Light
So anyway, the bad guys turned up and everything went to shit. Humanity almost got wiped out, most of the off world colonies are deaded. Just as everything was about to go off bang for good, the Traveller sacrificed himself (OR DID HE? DUN DUN DUN) to make Ghosts, these little AI robot floating cube things which can, amongst other things, find potential guardians. Guardians are what the players are. They are people who have died, but the ghosts can use Light to bring back to life as SUPER COOL WARRIORS. Its an important thing to note that guardians are basically immortal as its really hard to kill ghosts and if a guardian dies the ghost can just bring him back to life again, for ever. This is a neat way for Blizzard to explain some very Computer Game concepts: PvP is actually happening for real in universe as a training thing. Who cares about safety in a live fire exercise if the people involved cant die? It also explains why respawning is restricted in some areas: the ghost needs light to bring you back, so if you are in the depths of some evil Dark fortress it needs to leave to res you. This is an important thing as without it the intro mission on Destiny 2 has no impact at all: Guardians are immortal because of ghosts, ghosts are powered by Light, Light comes from the traveller.
Light also gives guardians super powers, which is a bonus.
So, guardians appeared and stopped the bad aliens fucking us over entirely, but only just. Humans all legged it to under the Traveller (where there was the most Light) and the Titans (I'll get to that) built a bigass wall around the settlement. This became the City, where pretty much all surviving humans and Guardians live. The Tower is there the Guardians chill and organise missions against the bad guys.
Other important events that might be relevant:
The Fallen have attacked the city a couple times. Didn’t work.
The Hive hollowed out the moon and turned it into a Hive hive. It's bad there.
When the Guardians killed Crota, his dad Oryx turned up. He does wibbly holes-in-reality magic that makes regular bad guys into the Taken, which are nastier versions of their normal selves. He ded though, so I don’t know if we will see any more of that.
So, other than history, what else is there…
Classes
Theres three classes, which doesn’t seem much, but each of them has a few subclasses which mix shit up a bit (and you can switch between sub classes at will). There are the Titans (who built the wall). Big, chunky armoured dudes, prefer slowly walking towards the enemy with massive guns. The closest the game has to a Tank (not that it really does the Tank/Healer/DPS thing). There are the Hunters, who like being all agile and fast, and tend to go for snipey type guns or hand cannons (big revolvers). Then there are the Warlocks, which are science wizards.
Engrams
Engrams are what the loot comes in. It’s another example of them making an in universe explanation for very gamey concepts; Engrams are basically highly compressed balls of information that contain the design for stuff. Your Ghost, as well as being a floating cube of exposition and immortality, can use engrams to build things, replicator style. This is how come you can carry around a dozen different weapons in your inventory, and why some bad guys explode like a loot pinata. It isnt that their underpants are stuffed with assault weapons, its that killing them makes the engrams they have… come out? I don’t know, its not a lot better, but at least they are trying.
Sometimes you will find an engram with some mystery loot in, which you need to take back to base and show to a Cryptarch (engram and history nerd), who will "decrypt" it. Usually these are the more shiny things.
Player Races
There are three: Regular human, robot person and blue humans. They probably have other names, I forget. Regular humans hopefully need no explanation, Robot People were made during the golden age and may or may not be humans who stuffed their minds into robobodies (which would at least explain why there are lady robots with roboboobs), and Blue Humans are humans who were not on earth when the darkness turned up, and something about being in deeps space made them go Terribly Mysterious. They are all functionally identical within the game and you will spend 99% of your time in body armour that includes a full face mask, so its not super important what you pick.
Characters that are not spherical
First up are the three top dogs of the Guardians; Zavalla, Ikora and Cayde-6. Zavalla is a Blue Dude Titan, and is sort of in charge, although mostly I think because the other two cant be arsed. Ikora is a human Warlock, and is mostly intellectual with the occasional bursts of blowing things apart with her mind. Cayde-6 is a roboperson Hunter, is voiced by Nathan Fillion and is basically a robot version of all Nathan Fillion characters.
The Speaker is some mysterious priest type dude who apparently talks for the Traveller, although how anyone knows that this is true and he isnt just a loon I have no idea. He mostly just hangs around the Tower and says mysterious things, but people treat him like the Space Pope.
There was a Queen of the blue people, but she may have gone off bang when Oryx turned up, so she might be dead now. She had a brother, who is a smug git. They live out in the asteroid belt, which is full of wrecked space ships from when Earths Age stopped being Golden.
Variks is a Fallen that used to be the Queens adviser. I think he still works for the blue people. The reason for that is that the Fallen work on a "you kill the old boss, you are the new boss" system, and the Queen killed the boss of one of the Fallen houses. Of course, if Oryx has killed the Queen, and the player has killed Oryx….. I don’t think this has occurred to Bungie yet.
Eris Morn used to be a Guardian, but she got stuck on the moon in the middle of the Hive nest there for a long, long time, and has now gone quite wibbly. She says mournful, goth things at you. Cayde takes the piss out of her.
Shaxx is the big guy with a one horned helmet who lets you in his armoury at the start of the D2 intro mission. He is the one who came up with the idea of using PvP as a training system, and gives out rewards like nice guns and armour for doing well in PvP.
Lord Shaladin is the last of the Iron Lords, a group of Guardians from long ago that have a strange, slightly Norse theme going on. He turns up every now and then with some special PvP game modes that you can get fancy armour from, and the Iron Lords were the focus of the last bit of DLC from the last game, where you could go off and kill some nanovirus thing and at the end he would make you an Iron Lord too.
Rasputin. Not the mad russian monk, Rasputin in Destiny is a Warmind. Warminds are… well, they are basically Skynet, if Skynet didn’t go wrong. Rasputin may or may not be slightly dotty, but he is still pretty powerful. For some reason he communicates primarily in untranslated snippets of what sounds like communist russian propaganda, and not great recordings of russian opera. Fan Theory is that Rasputin shot the Traveller up the bum when the Darkness arrived, because the Traveller was about to cheese it. This theory makes a lot of sense.
I think that’s basically everything, shout at me if there is something confusing you that hasn’t been covered by this.
The Traveler
The big ball is called the Traveler (it's probably worth noting now that a lot of the names in Destiny are just what humans call them, which explains why a lot of the totally alien stuff has surprisingly Earth centric names). The Traveler turned up sometime in our near future, all mysterious like. He used science-magic to terraform basically every planet in the solar system, even ones where the idea of terraforming them makes no rational sense. It’s the old "advanced science indistinguishable from magic" thing. We don’t really know why he did this, as the Big Ball doesn’t talk. Also, somehow, despite not talking to us, he taught us a bunch of advanced science, which propelled humanity into a golden age of peace, colonising the shit out of things, building robot people, generally having a swell time. At some point in all of this we also learnt about a power that comes from the Traveler called Light (think Good Science Magic). Light can do all sorts of sweet things. Other than "he is a big ball of science magic that pushed humanity into a golden age" we really don’t know a whole lot about him. Most humans treat him almost like a god though, because as far as most people know he has done a bunch of nice things for humanity. CONSPIRACY THEORY WARNING: He might secretly be a dick.
Needless to say, the good times didn’t last. Eventually the bad guys turned up. So many fucking bad guys. Theres four bad guy races, and although they are sometimes referred to as the horses of Darkness (because yes, the big bad and enemy of the Light is the Darkness. Of course it is.) it should also be noted that they really don’t like each other, and if you stumble into more than one of the enemy races at once they will probably be shooting each other. The bad guys are as follows:
The Fallen
The Fallen are pretty much space pirate/gypsies. They used to have a golden age all of their own (because of the Traveller) but now everything is pretty shit for them (see above about the Traveller maybe being a dick) so now they want to fuck our shit up in the hope that they will be awesome again, or something. Its not going well for them, as a plan. Sneaky fuckers, some of them are invisible, and they have a load of robot drone things. The biggest drones look a bit like small versions of the Traveller, this is not a coincidence. If you shoot Fallen in the head, their head goes pop and their drugs guff up into the air in a death fart. Which is nice.
The Cabal
Big angry space romans. Look a bit like the nice aliens from the beginning of 5th Element. They are not nice. They take a pretty direct approach to.. well, everything really. There is a reference at one point to them blowing up planets in the way of their armadas rather than going around them. The quite like jetpacks and shields, and look like they are the main bad for D2 (they are the guys who turn up in the intro mission). If you shoot them in the head, their head goes pop and their atmosphere suits guff up into the air in a death fart. Which is nice.
The Vex
Things start getting weird with the Vex. They are time manipulating robots who may have been in our solar system for thousands of years, but also might not have been here for thousands of years for that long. Time travel! They enjoy building sodding huge computer-buildings made mostly of squares, and like to try and erase their enemies from time. Most of their robots are human sized, some are massive. Expect lots of disappearing walls/floors/platforms when fighting them. If you shoot them in the head, they get super angry and hulk out a bit, becoming much faster and charging at you, doing a hell of a lot of damage. Which isnt nice. Shoot them in their glowing bellybutton instead.
The Hive
Kinda insecty, kinda undead, they are Destinys space goths. For some reason humans have decided to name them all with a medieval fantasy theme, so the big hulking hive waving swords around are Knights and the flying dudes in dresses that throw balls of death at you are Wizards, and so on. They are…. Super weird. They are the absolute peak of advanced science = magic, so much so that what they do really might as well be magic. A lot of the end of the first game was focussed around them and their big god leader Oryx, and his son Crota, so you will probably hear references to them. Short version: they were big and bad, they are dead now, because of the good guys. If you shoot them in the head, they die.
The Light
So anyway, the bad guys turned up and everything went to shit. Humanity almost got wiped out, most of the off world colonies are deaded. Just as everything was about to go off bang for good, the Traveller sacrificed himself (OR DID HE? DUN DUN DUN) to make Ghosts, these little AI robot floating cube things which can, amongst other things, find potential guardians. Guardians are what the players are. They are people who have died, but the ghosts can use Light to bring back to life as SUPER COOL WARRIORS. Its an important thing to note that guardians are basically immortal as its really hard to kill ghosts and if a guardian dies the ghost can just bring him back to life again, for ever. This is a neat way for Blizzard to explain some very Computer Game concepts: PvP is actually happening for real in universe as a training thing. Who cares about safety in a live fire exercise if the people involved cant die? It also explains why respawning is restricted in some areas: the ghost needs light to bring you back, so if you are in the depths of some evil Dark fortress it needs to leave to res you. This is an important thing as without it the intro mission on Destiny 2 has no impact at all: Guardians are immortal because of ghosts, ghosts are powered by Light, Light comes from the traveller.
Light also gives guardians super powers, which is a bonus.
So, guardians appeared and stopped the bad aliens fucking us over entirely, but only just. Humans all legged it to under the Traveller (where there was the most Light) and the Titans (I'll get to that) built a bigass wall around the settlement. This became the City, where pretty much all surviving humans and Guardians live. The Tower is there the Guardians chill and organise missions against the bad guys.
Other important events that might be relevant:
The Fallen have attacked the city a couple times. Didn’t work.
The Hive hollowed out the moon and turned it into a Hive hive. It's bad there.
When the Guardians killed Crota, his dad Oryx turned up. He does wibbly holes-in-reality magic that makes regular bad guys into the Taken, which are nastier versions of their normal selves. He ded though, so I don’t know if we will see any more of that.
So, other than history, what else is there…
Classes
Theres three classes, which doesn’t seem much, but each of them has a few subclasses which mix shit up a bit (and you can switch between sub classes at will). There are the Titans (who built the wall). Big, chunky armoured dudes, prefer slowly walking towards the enemy with massive guns. The closest the game has to a Tank (not that it really does the Tank/Healer/DPS thing). There are the Hunters, who like being all agile and fast, and tend to go for snipey type guns or hand cannons (big revolvers). Then there are the Warlocks, which are science wizards.
Engrams
Engrams are what the loot comes in. It’s another example of them making an in universe explanation for very gamey concepts; Engrams are basically highly compressed balls of information that contain the design for stuff. Your Ghost, as well as being a floating cube of exposition and immortality, can use engrams to build things, replicator style. This is how come you can carry around a dozen different weapons in your inventory, and why some bad guys explode like a loot pinata. It isnt that their underpants are stuffed with assault weapons, its that killing them makes the engrams they have… come out? I don’t know, its not a lot better, but at least they are trying.
Sometimes you will find an engram with some mystery loot in, which you need to take back to base and show to a Cryptarch (engram and history nerd), who will "decrypt" it. Usually these are the more shiny things.
Player Races
There are three: Regular human, robot person and blue humans. They probably have other names, I forget. Regular humans hopefully need no explanation, Robot People were made during the golden age and may or may not be humans who stuffed their minds into robobodies (which would at least explain why there are lady robots with roboboobs), and Blue Humans are humans who were not on earth when the darkness turned up, and something about being in deeps space made them go Terribly Mysterious. They are all functionally identical within the game and you will spend 99% of your time in body armour that includes a full face mask, so its not super important what you pick.
Characters that are not spherical
First up are the three top dogs of the Guardians; Zavalla, Ikora and Cayde-6. Zavalla is a Blue Dude Titan, and is sort of in charge, although mostly I think because the other two cant be arsed. Ikora is a human Warlock, and is mostly intellectual with the occasional bursts of blowing things apart with her mind. Cayde-6 is a roboperson Hunter, is voiced by Nathan Fillion and is basically a robot version of all Nathan Fillion characters.
The Speaker is some mysterious priest type dude who apparently talks for the Traveller, although how anyone knows that this is true and he isnt just a loon I have no idea. He mostly just hangs around the Tower and says mysterious things, but people treat him like the Space Pope.
There was a Queen of the blue people, but she may have gone off bang when Oryx turned up, so she might be dead now. She had a brother, who is a smug git. They live out in the asteroid belt, which is full of wrecked space ships from when Earths Age stopped being Golden.
Variks is a Fallen that used to be the Queens adviser. I think he still works for the blue people. The reason for that is that the Fallen work on a "you kill the old boss, you are the new boss" system, and the Queen killed the boss of one of the Fallen houses. Of course, if Oryx has killed the Queen, and the player has killed Oryx….. I don’t think this has occurred to Bungie yet.
Eris Morn used to be a Guardian, but she got stuck on the moon in the middle of the Hive nest there for a long, long time, and has now gone quite wibbly. She says mournful, goth things at you. Cayde takes the piss out of her.
Shaxx is the big guy with a one horned helmet who lets you in his armoury at the start of the D2 intro mission. He is the one who came up with the idea of using PvP as a training system, and gives out rewards like nice guns and armour for doing well in PvP.
Lord Shaladin is the last of the Iron Lords, a group of Guardians from long ago that have a strange, slightly Norse theme going on. He turns up every now and then with some special PvP game modes that you can get fancy armour from, and the Iron Lords were the focus of the last bit of DLC from the last game, where you could go off and kill some nanovirus thing and at the end he would make you an Iron Lord too.
Rasputin. Not the mad russian monk, Rasputin in Destiny is a Warmind. Warminds are… well, they are basically Skynet, if Skynet didn’t go wrong. Rasputin may or may not be slightly dotty, but he is still pretty powerful. For some reason he communicates primarily in untranslated snippets of what sounds like communist russian propaganda, and not great recordings of russian opera. Fan Theory is that Rasputin shot the Traveller up the bum when the Darkness arrived, because the Traveller was about to cheese it. This theory makes a lot of sense.
I think that’s basically everything, shout at me if there is something confusing you that hasn’t been covered by this.