In their thesis The Heroes We Never Are: Interpellation, Subjugation, and the Encoded Other in Fantasy CRPGs, narrative designer Axel Hassen Taiari writes, “Can players refuse [to] define the hero on machinic terms and thus reject these dynamics? At best, only briefly.” He continues: “There is no way to complete the Baldur’s Gate series—in other words, to turn the text’s final page—without gradually mythologizing the Ward through power.” Here Taiari was talking about classic, lengthy, and methodical computer role-playing games (CRPGs), games whose foundational texts spanned millions of words and dozens if not hundreds of hours of sustained play. What would happen if a game took that slow process of mythmaking and power accumulation and compressed it, essentially creating a space where the computational hero’s journey took place instantly?
I don’t think Bungie, Inc., the studio that develops the Destiny series, purposely set out to test this hypothesis. But through several public memos from the game’s development team, including a three-part Director’s Cut blog series by then-director Luke Smith, we do get a sense of what Bungie wants out of Destiny 2: an “awesome power fantasy” in a “universe that is going somewhere” that culminates in an “amazing action MMO in a single evolving world that you can play anywhere, anytime with your friends.” In other words, Bungie wants Destiny 2 to be the perfect blend of quick-hit and endlessly replayable live-service gaming mixed with long-term massively multiplayer online game (MMO) richness amid a base of the studio’s lauded first person shooter gameplay.
This has ostensibly been their goal since the original permutation of Destiny, but that game still basically adheres to a regular RPG’s scale of power and progression. With Destiny 2, Bungie has implemented a bevy of mechanical and narrative tweaks to empower new players as quickly as possible and keep existing players in the game for as long as possible. This sensible business strategy for a live-service game has strange implications for the narrative aspects of the game’s more traditional MMORPG side, namely that it makes the player-character Guardians a kind of “Omnihero” whose past, present, and future heroics are all already a given. The result is that the game’s non-player characters and storylines have become a secondary concern.
While critics and players can split hairs endlessly over what makes a game a “pure” example of a given genre, Destiny 2 offers us a look at exactly the opposite: it is a kind of ludic soup that has rewritten its own relationship with power across time and space. By not firmly situating itself in the confines of one genre or another, by smashing together the ephemerality of the live-service with the permanence of the MMO, Destiny 2 is an oddity that creates new rules for how we play with and relate to ideas of the heroic. What kind of ideological concerns arise from this ludic soup? What kind of “legend” are we becoming, anyway?
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Last September, Yussef Cole wrote for this website about Destiny’s live service nature. “It’s in this cyclical, ouroboros dilemma that the shape of the game’s narrative is revealed,” he said. “In spite of all its proper-nouned techno jargon, it is magic which Destiny promises. [… In] reaching for the eternal sublime, your heroes have progressed beyond the ‘banality and ordinariness’ of biological life.”
Reading the Director’s Cut posts—three of which came out in 2019, relative eons ago in terms of Destiny 2 production history—we can see pretty clearly where this “ouroboros dilemma” comes from: throughout each post is the language of “speed” and “efficiency,” values which don’t sound out of place in a corporate strategy meeting, ironically one of the most banal things in the world.
Bungie wants players to interact with as many of their gameplay modes as quickly as possible, and that approach drives many of their design decisions from their New Light expansion onboarding campaign outward. It wants players to reach max power—or close to it—ASAP so they can engage with some of the higher-difficulty material, get better gear and weapons, and feel more powerful, faster. On top of this, the studio wants the game world to feel real, dynamic, “evolving.” Executive Creative Director of Destiny Projects Luke Smith, then simply the game’s director, wrote, “We want playing Destiny to feel like you're playing in a game world with true momentum, a universe that is going somewhere.”
As of 2022 and the release of the game's latest expansion, The Witch Queen, the studio has arguably come closer to realizing this vision than ever before. Players can now log in every week and find that the world and circumstances within it have indeed changed; new characters are available to talk to with new missions and new little chunks of story to go along with them. This week might be an Iron Banner week which means a chance at valuable equipment (or, in Destiny terms, pinnacle loot), or maybe something special is going on in the Trials of Osiris game mode.
Matchmaking with other random Guardians is as easy as it’s ever been, and with The Witch Queen, Bungie even introduced “Legendary mode” to incentivize replaying the campaign on a harder difficulty than other missions. Weapon crafting offers players a chance to customize a bit of their arsenal while the new Glaive weapon types make the game feel more like DOOM. New players can hop into the game, play a tutorial quest line that only takes a couple of hours to finish, and then immediately be able to participate in all player-versus-player (PVP) and player-versus-enemy (PVE) game modes with very few barriers to entry. Welcome to Destiny 2, baby, where the customer is king!
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The end result of this corporate obsession over the customer experience is that there’s very little progression latency—the amount of time between when a new player starts the game and when they reach a point in which every mode that isn’t intentionally super difficult ceases to show even a little bit of resistance to their actions. It isn’t rare for folks to start and finish a new expansion in hours and immediately begin training for the raid, which has had its own set of artificial difficulty handicapping rules (called “Contest Mode”) since 2019.
This puts enormous pressure on the narrative to accommodate the player character, who has in essence become a kind of omnihero: our heroism has been removed from the context of a discrete time or place and just simply is, always has been, and always will be. We don’t have to follow Campbell’s Hero’s Journey or any other typical heroic narrative framework because our exceptionalism is already accounted for by virtue of Destiny's design.
Because the game modes which aren’t pure PVP have to be filled with something, non-playable characters (or NPCs) will wax poetic about our various past and present Great Deeds, explaining through radio chatter how friendly we are with such powerful and consequential people. They ultimately tell us, without saying how or why, that we are the most important Guardian in the world, the fulcrum around which the universe turns, and that is why we just flung ourselves bodily down a Vex hole to stomp Protheon, Modular Mind’s ass for the 700th time. Some players may play the Inverted Spire strike who have never touched the original Destiny 2 base campaign, and thus will never really have the full context for their actions here, but it’s okay: they got pinnacle gear for completing this week’s Vanguard Operations pursuit. Worth it.
But because Destiny 2 is not fully a live-service game, because Destiny 2 has aspirations toward being an “action MMO,” because Destiny 2 has built a reputation on the backs of a narrative team that has not always been fully respected or well-treated even within the context of the studio’s workplace culture, its story, lore, and surrounding world cannot—and shouldn’t—be fully decoupled from the Gameplay Experience. Because we are still inexorably playing in what N. Katherine Hayles, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, through Axel Hassen Taiari, call a “cognitive assemblage,” or “an arrangement of systems, subsystems, and individual actors through which information flows, effecting transformations through the interpretive activities of cognizers operating upon the flows.” Certain information has been encoded in Destiny 2’s text for us to decode, and it’s incumbent on us to understand the effect that information has on our own ideologies. Put way more simply: What is the narrative of Destiny 2, with its wide yet underutilized cast of characters, increasingly complex relationships between factions, and fragmented story arc, doing? Is Destiny 2’s player-character’s omniheroism important? And if so, what effect does that have on how we interact with the notion of the heroic?
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Let’s talk about the Eliksni, also known as the Fallen.
Introduced in Destiny as the first alien species you come across upon being resurrected, the Eliksni are described both as pitiful scavengers and savage murderers in the course of the series narrative. Destiny especially deals with the Eliksni at several points, with the Rise of Iron storyline devoted exclusively to putting down a faction of Eliksni fanatics—the Sacred Splicers—who were scouring the Cosmodrome in search of a Golden Age nanotechnology called SIVA. Your very first interaction with an Eliksni in the whole game involves picking up an ancient Khvostov 7G-07 auto rifle and shooting a Dreg, the lowest rung on the Eliksni hierarchical ladder, in a corridor.
In the context of the original game, you don’t really have any time to question this relationship. Here Destiny was telling you, “this is your enemy: shoot it or die.” Over the course of the next eight years or so, the player’s relationship with the Eliksni would become more complicated. We go from shooting at Eliksni indiscriminately to forging an alliance with one of their social Houses by the summer of 2021. Which is why it’s so strange to play the almost exact same starting mission in Destiny 2: New Light, the onboarding campaign for new players, and go through the exact same set of story beats: resurrect, run into the Cosmodrome, pick up a Khvostov, shoot a Dreg.
In the season of Beyond Light where we allied with Mithrax and his House of Light—“Season of the Splicer”—our Guardian becomes a Sacred Splicer and is introduced to several Eliksni characters across both the in-game plot and its side stories. For example, we meet Mithrax’s daughter, Eido, an aspiring Scribe who records messages for us to find in the Eliksni District, describing intricate and familiarizing bits of Eliksni culture as you find them. When The Witch Queen expansion rolled out, both Eido’s messages and the explorable Eliksni District were removed, a consequence of Destiny 2’s ephemeral content strategy, which has seen chunks of the game, including premium $40 expansions, disappear, allegedly as part of a game engine overhaul. Of course, the mission where you shoot a Dreg 30 seconds after your Ghost wakes you up has survived intact.
What does this tell us about the ideological space Destiny 2 operates in, where context about an alien species that affords us deeply complex, emotionally connective, and, for lack of a better term, humanizing knowledge about them can be seen as ephemeral, but the mission establishing them as our first enemy is vital to the experience of a Guardian’s “first day on the job?”
Destiny 2 is by no means alone in the way it portrays its non-human species; Final Fantasy XIV, for example, has spent roughly a decade reworking its narrative relationship between players and its so-called “beast tribes” after A Realm Reborn. Going back further, Dungeons & Dragons has been criticized for the way it portrays race, gender, sexuality, and even moral alignment, according to Taiari. And going back to the literary roots of modern RPGs, they write, “Many post-Tolkien fantasy tales also contain [...] reductionist constructions of race, identity, and culture which result in all members of a given race sharing identical beliefs and behaviors.” But it’s hard to interpret this particular move as anything but a deliberate choice, one which preserves the omniheroic nature of the Guardian and reinforces a kind of exceptionalism that lives at the core of the game.
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Among the very first pieces of critical writing about videogames that I read—and which inspired me to start engaging with games critically myself—sits a pair 2017 articles from New Normative by freelance critic Nic Reuben. One of those pieces, “Empathy for the Devil: Destiny 2’s Manifest Destiny,” begins like this: “...to have a power fantasy, someone or something needs to be powerless. When power is treated as justification for conquest—you have militarization. When power is said to originate from a divine source, proving the superiority of a certain group or race, you have fascism.”
Ultimately, the world Destiny 2 envisions, despite all of its smaller and less permanent stories which deepen and complicate our viewpoint, puts Guardians on top of a very tall vertical hierarchy—a tower if you will—below which reside other (Lightless) humans, Cabal, Eliksni, Vex, and Hive. As Guardians, we are allowed to use any and all forms of power in our reach—Light, Darkness, Golden Age tech, arcane Hive weaponry—to accomplish our goals and defeat whatever Big Bad is in front of us. Our designated enemies are not afforded this flexibility, and there is no room, ideologically or mechanically, for us to do anything but point … and shoot.
When Eramis tried to give Stasis to her House, we were sent in to demolish her—and use shock and awe tactics on the Eliksni who remained. When it was revealed at the end of The Witch Queen that Savathûn hadn’t actually stolen the Light from the Traveler but instead had become a Lightbearer legitimately (as of right now), Vanguard Commander Zavala was beside himself with anger and no small hint of covetousness, openly questioning why the Traveler would “bless” an enemy as trenchant as Savathûn with its Light. When Crow asks whether the Hive Lightbearers we capture are feeling any pain as a result of being trapped in limbo in the Psisorium, Lord Saladin tells him that “mercy to an enemy cannot come at the cost of mercy for their victims.”
Playing the game as it intends, with its mash of corporate-darling genres clashing and mutating the hero in both predictable and unexpected ways, exposes us to this ideological underpinning of exceptionalism, of Manifest Destiny, of superiority and supremacy. We embody a character who can’t be killed, even more so than regular Guardians. Whose heroic acts are so well-established that we’re famous for them regardless of whether we as players have even experienced them. We might occasionally set up an armistice (that we openly flaunt) or alliance (which gets forgotten a season or two later) with an alien race, but our mere existence in the world of Destiny 2 enforces the ideology of exceptionalism with every strike and public event we take on. This is the legend we are becoming, were always Destined to become: the ultimate embodiment of hegemony.
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Kaile Hultner is never writing about Destiny 2 again. Follow them on Twitter @noescapevg, and read their work about other video games at noescapevg.com.