Destiny 2 is headed for what could be its biggest story beat ever. The Darkness is coming, and recent updates to the game have made the impending threat more tangible than it’s ever been. If the math is correct, it seems like it could be here by mid-June, right around the time the current Season of the Worthy concludes and Destiny 2’s next season (and final one of this year’s expansion) begins. It’s quite a bit sooner than most people expected the story to take that leap, but it’s got players eagerly anticipating what’s coming next.
For some background, the big “threat” in Destiny has always been the “Darkness,” a force on the edge of the solar system that is largely misunderstood, shrouded in mystery. The end of Destiny 2’s main campaign showed that the Traveler’s energy blast had “awoken” a fleet of pyramid-shaped ships (that the community has come to call the Pyramid ships, and is no canon in-game too). Since then, that narrative point fell largely stagnant. Until the Shadowkeep expansion.
In Shadowkeep, the major reveal was a Pyramid ship that was already here, buried beneath the surface of the Moon. It caused a surge of excitement with the community, but once again, the narrative thread got largely dropped as the ongoing seasons explored other plotlines. And then, last week, the new Rasputin bunker on Io opened. Rasputin and Zavala had a conversation about the impending threat as a holographic map showed Pyramid ships surrounding the solar system. And the 2D light map of the solar system—present in every bunker—began showing flashing red lights on the outer edge, in the shape of pyramids. It sparked conversation about what was coming and a lot of speculation about what might happen this week, but nobody expected this.
Today’s weekly reset didn’t just edge the red Pyramid lights forward a small bit. It propelled them forward a lot, and added six more ships to boot. A full-scale invasion is coming, and by rough calculations from Forbes’ resident Destiny-enthusiast Paul Tassi, we won’t have to wait until the fall expansion for the ships to reach the farthest out playable space, Titan.
Uhhhhh so doing some math here pic.twitter.com/jAk4vBDvJv
— Paul Tassi (@PaulTassi) April 14, 2020
Back when Bungie started talking about Shadowkeep, they hinted that summer would bring a huge event that players wouldn’t want to miss. While reception to the recent seasons has been mixed, there’s no denying that this final season of the year is set to be enormous and explosive, leading into one of the biggest changes to the game with this year’s fall expansion. While it’s a bit surprising that Bungie isn’t saving the Darkness threat for a “Destiny 3” or “next” Destiny—given the drastic changes it’s expected to bring—it’s still rather exciting that the pace of the game’s broader story seems to be picking up quite a bit.
What this all means for the future of Destiny 2 is anyone’s guess yet. Meanwhile, we can keep watching the doomsday clock tick closer to midnight (you can thank both Paul Tassi and my recent binge of Watchmen for that reference) as the fleet of Pyramid ships closes in on our Guardians and we all celebrate with the Guardian Games event next month despite the threat closing in.
[h/t: Forbes]
