From The Ashes Of An Old, Old World

From where it came from, within the infinite and dusty shoals of our own universe, we will never know. At the time we never questioned it. For we were too enraptured by the idea that the Traveler (at least that is what we called it) had at last answered a question that had plagued our species since intelligent thought first embraced it.

Are we alone in the universe?

‘No’, the Traveler seemed to say, ‘you are most definitely not alone’. With it its arrival came knowledge. Knowledge of ourselves and our place in the greater scheme of the universe. As infinitesimal as we are, we are still a vital and fascinating species. One prone to exceptional bouts of brilliance as we are of unspeakable moments of violence. In time, we spread our wings and broke free from the bonds of own world. First to our moon; where our new-found knowledge allowed us to build, colonize and at last conquer it. And from such lofty heights we claimed worlds one thought unattainable. Venus. Mars. Beyond. Before we knew it, the kingdom of man had at last been attained, and a new Golden Age had once more swept over us.

But as much as we wish otherwise, even an age must face its inevitable end. For we were about to find out that the Traveler was not the only one who knew about us. And the answer to that timeless question was soon to come back to haunt us once more.

For we were most definitely not alone.

They came at us with fire and sword, these alien interlopers. These war-fed interstellar scavengers. Pushing away the open palm for the closed fist, they took from us in days what took us centuries to build. All our progress. All our dreams. All our hopes. It didn’t matter to them. In their eyes we were, and still are, lesser beings. A species no more important than sheep being led to slaughter. And so they pushed us further and further back until we had but one last city left, a final reminder of an age now gone. A city resting under the shadow of our former teacher.

Here, we at last faced the precipice of extinction. A celestial-wrought Armageddon. We stared down into that inky abyss, prepared ourselves for the inevitable; with eyes shut, we wept for the the lost and did the only thing we could. The only thing left to us at the time. We prayed. A prayer that was, oddly enough, answered. For you see the Traveler had one last gift to give us. One final bit of knowledge to teach us; a debt that we can never truly repay.

Sacrifice.

It gave its life to save us. Those of us that now live in its shadow; in this final city of mankind. More importantly, it gave us a chance. A chance to fight back. To reclaim that what was taken from us. To show these alien usurpers that we are capable of than just moments of brilliant thought. For we are also capable of unspeakable violence. As we push forth from this city nestled under what remains of our greatest protector, standing shoulder to shoulder with our fellow Guardians, we ponder the answer to a question that echoes back to us once more. One that fills us with as much courage as it does dread. For here, in the shattered remnants of our once proud kingdom…….

We are most definitely not alone.

Forging a Destiny

Many would ponder the notion of why a developer would leave behind a franchise that not only helped stabilize a newly minted console contender, but one that also helped Bungie become a household name. While their early years were celebrated by exceptional releases (many, to this day, still remember fondly memories of Myth and Marathon), iit wasn’t until Halo: Combat Evolved first made its debut on the original Xbox in 2001 that Bungie’s fortunes would grow exponentially.

Today the Halo franchise has garnered a multitude of awards, accruing both Bungie and Microsoft over a billion dollars in revenue, and continues to power the Microsoft gaming machines 13 years later. Why then, many wonder, would they leave it all behind and begin anew? Quite simple; they wanted to forge their own path. First as an independent entity, tied down and beholden to no one. And then as a genre-defining developer. So it’s not difficult to see why Bungie, who handed the Halo series over to Microsoft’s own 343Industries, perhaps needed to move away from the familiar and into the unknown. To not only avoid becoming typecast as ‘those Halo guys’ and risk fatiguing their creativity, but the very brand they helped build.

“We’d been with this one IP for a long time… you want to try something different,” explains Bungie’s co-founder and Design Director Jason Jones. “You have ideas….. we’re trying to build a game that we have wanted to play [but currently]  doesn’t exist. I think that’s really the genesis of Destiny. When you look out at the shooter experiences on consoles, there are a lot of great action experiences, but they’re only scratching the surface of cooperative play, aspirational goals, and player-to-player interaction.”

If a measure of a game could be condensed into a single word, then Destiny’s would be Ambition. An ambition difficult to define at the moment, due to the layering of elements predefined by other genres in the gaming videosphere. Is it an RPG? A persistent open world experience? A massive multiplayer? Well, to answer the latter question, Bungie’s own Technical Art Director Ryan Ellis says both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. “MMO is a loaded term,” he explains. “It always puts some mental image in people’s heads about what the game is. Our game is different, and hard to describe, which is why we don’t use the term. But I do think that people who like that sort of thing are going to find things to love [in Destiny].”

Medieval Sci-Fi

As ideas evolve and change before the final product becomes apparent, much like the rough drafting phase most writers go through, so too did Destiny evolve, change and integrate many ideas into one. “This game actually started as a fantasy game,” admits Jones.  “From the very beginning, the candle in the darkness was literally a city with white walls and red roofs and views of sunlight, up on a green hill. It looked amazing. And then it evolved….. because we felt the pure fantasy was missing all these things we loved…. we started with this fantasy city that was beautiful and it evolved through spaceships and space stations into cities, eventually to the Traveler that you see today. That was quite a journey. But the core was all the same, which is that the candle in the darkness.”

From what we know of the story itself, the game begins shortly after the event known as ‘The Collapse’, when several rather nefarious races in our galaxy converge upon our world in pursuit of the Traveler, an entity that passed down its knowledge to us in the time before their arrival, and began to wage war with our species. A war that nearly exterminated us. It wasn’t until the Traveler intervened that we were saved and given a chance to formulate a plan of attack rather than defense. As players begin their journey, from this single starting city, much of our civilization lies in ruin, overgrown and almost reclaimed by mother nature, or the scavengers that sought our destruction.

Scavengers like The Cabal:

Industrial, militaristic, and very imposing physically, the Cabal are heavily armored and very organized. Their society is based on ancient Rome with the lowest tier, the Legionnaires, being the foot soldier or grunt men of their army.

Centurions are the more mobile leaders, able to juke and jive around the battlefield through the use of jump jets. Gladiators, meanwhile, are the heavies. Charging into the fight wielding devastating gatling guns. Occasionally players may come across the lesser known variant known as Psions, who harness the power of their minds to confront enemies and pilot their ships.

Cabal architecture is described as being “dirty and menacing” with oily smoke billowing out and down the sides of numerous chimneys. Players will experience the Cabal in force once they venture onto the red rocky soil of Mars.

The Fallen, on the other hand, used to be a proud an honorable people, but have since denigrated into parasites and scavengers. Once separated into distinct houses, many Fallen still wear and display their sigils indicating their house allegiances. Visually, Fallen resemble arachnids, with multiple eyes and four arms.

Much like the Cabal, they too have a caste society with Dregs being the lowest of them. More outcast to their own species, Dregs are so reviled by the others that they have had two of their arms removed.

Vandals are sword-wielding, gun toting warriors, evoking images of pirates and raiders of old. Captains, on the other hand, coordinate the lesser castes in battle, wearing heavy armors, long flowing capes and are protected by energy shields. Occasionally they’ll enter battle with Shanks, mechanical hovering turrets they’ll use to keep potential threats pinned down to avoid overwhelming or even flanking the Captain.

The Fallen will probably be the first real threat to test new players. Mainly due to the fact that a cadre of Fallen soldiers are said to reside in the ruins of Old Russia; The Cosmodrome and its surrounding area, the city of Kazakhstan and so on.

The Hive fulfill the undead aspect of Destiny. Kept alive for centuries, they prefer to burrow deep into their environments, crafting intricate caverns and gothic-inspired structures. Bungie describes Hive environments as “the closest things to dungeons” in aesthetic appearance that players will experience in the game.

Much like the rest of the alien species, Hive society is caste oriented. Thralls will be the lowest of the order, attacking in mobs usally with nothing more than their own fists. Troopers meanwhile tow most of the war effort, but are occasionally assisted by Knights, large cleaver-wielding menaces who are not afraid of charging into the thick of battle.

Wizards on the other hand prefer to keep their distance, using dark arts to keep themselves floating over the battlefield while they reign devastating spells down upon the players.

Travel deep enough within a Hive’s lair, and you’re apt to meet the most dangerous of their kind; the Ogre. A massive juggernaut of muscle and rage capable of stomping your poor Guardian into the muck, if it can’t vaporize you with its blast of energy beams emanating from its head.

Currently, The Hive have burrowed deep within the crust of our own moon, the machines they use to create their lairs having spewed rock and dust into space. It is a foreboding realm, a tomb world where a thriving, eloquent civilization once lived.

And finally we have the Vex, a sort of quasi-throwback to the classic science fiction machine/cyborg race. Their look harkens back to early science fiction monsters from War of the Worlds or even more recently from Independence Day. Their elongated appendages always end in clawed fingers, no matter how different each caste may be visually.

Bearing names from mythological creatures, the lowest tier are the Goblins, who fight in large packs, intended to serve as cannon fodder until the player runs out of ammo. Then swarm and harass the Guardians until they’re defeated.

Higher up the food chain you’ll meet Hobgoblins, who pack much more firepower and are differentiated by their long barbed tails. Minotaurs meanwhile are larger still; broad shouldered, heavily armored, and considerably taller than their brethren.

Hydras are segmented serpentine warriors, usually floating through the air with each segment of its body outfitted with its own individual turret. Hydras are said to be relentless and difficult to target, corkscrewing through the air while they reign down fire from above.

Oddly, the Harpies are perhaps smaller than most, but are quite capable combatants. They zip in and out of the battle, pausing only open up their armored shell to reveal a writhing mass of filaments before they open fire.

The Vex have a strong foothold on Venus, though their are settlements of their kind on Mars as well, which puts them at odds with the more aggressive Cabal race.

A Rising Sun

With all of these races combating and compounding humanity, it is either by luck or chance that allies come to its defense. Beyond the human race, two other selectable species will be available to players at launch. One is the Awoken, which Bungie is describing as “exotic, beautiful and mysterious” species first encountered during The Collapse. From what’s been leaked by the developer, some strange event happened out in the far reaches, and those who tried to flee the coming calamity were changed, altered and shaped by this event into what we now know them as; The Awoken.

Many now reside within The Reef, a mysterious and still-unknown parcel of the Destiny universe presided over by The Queen. Many Awoken born on Earth are sometimes said to venture out to the Reef, hoping to learn more about their race. Yet those who do and return say they find no special welcome from the reclusive brethren.

Adding to this list of allies are the Exos, sentient war machines developed by humanity during its Golden Age to protect their creators during a now forgotten war. They were rebooted during the Collapse with no memory of their original function.

Exos are said to be so advanced that “nothing short of a Ghost can understand their inner functions.” And while many still prefer to live and work in relative peace with their human counterparts, quite a few have taken up arms once more as recognized Guardians by their human creators.

Carefully, Bungie’s been revealing more and more the story behind the events of Destiny the closer to release it gets. What’s been shown and detailed will set the stage for the overall narrative, one that has been planned, if all things go well, as a trilogy. One that will explore and eventually answer the meaning of what it means to be a Guardian, who or even what The Traveler truly is, and how the war between the Light and the Dark will eventually end. But first, Bungie wants players to familiarize themselves with their current surroundings before opening the world up even further. “There is an overarching storyline to Destiny,” says Technical Director Chris Butcher. “A lot of the story of Destiny is about [the] places you go. What happened on the Moon? Who are the factions and the groups of aliens there? What are they trying to do, and what are you trying to do?”

And that story involves a sense of community, one where the strength of the many is far better than the strength of one. “We have the whole game running at Bungie and we play it pretty regularly, every week or so,” Butcher says. “The thing that’s most exciting to me is when you think you’re playing by yourself and you run around a corner and you see other people in the world – other people you recognize….. People aren’t used to seeing that [in shooters]. That emergent social experience is what’s really exciting to me.”

For now, this is where we will end our tale. Soon enough, when the time is right and the sun rises once more, we shall return and discuss in detail what differentiates one Guardian from another, their strengths and their weaknesses. Perhaps even talk about the perks still left to our Guardians. Like speeder bikes. You really can’t go wrong with those.

But that is a tale of Destiny best left for another day…..

Currently Destiny is slated for a September 9, 2014 release date for the PlayStation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.