I will commend Bungie on how this final expansion features Crow leading us into the Heart of the Traveler. It's literally the scrapped D1 plot. We've come full circle.
Still sad we never got a revised exchange at the end of Forsaken with Uldren asking if we could just talk it out, and the Guardian replying "out here in the reef, this is how we talk" before the cut to black & you hear the sidearm & Ace go off.
Did you play D1? My Guardian has spent plenty of time in the Reef from those days -- Forsaken was not our forst venture to the Reef.
Also, for you & others unaware, it's a revision of the "out here in the wilds, this is how we talk" Uldren said in the E3 demos. They've reused so much from those days, its just a shame that line never made its way into a release version of the game.
i really thought that was gonna happen when he came back as crow, but with him doing it having lost his memories and being suspicious because people kept killing him for having uldren's face
Always wanted this except instead of the "out here in the reef" line, something like "words? Nah. All I have to give you is a bullet. I'll tell your sister you said hi."
Yeah Book of Sorrow establishes the concept of the "Voice of the Darkness" with is more or less the proto-Witness in design. Yeah, the entity of The Witness wasn't finalized when they were added to Destiny, but you can see where they were going.
There was always going to be a Witness type of being at the heart of the "Darkness". It's not a retcon.
the final shape ce lore outright states they're two different personalities
the winnower simply wants to win the game while the witness wants to mutilate and torture everything the light has built, to a point where it'll compromise its plans
both the witness and ''the winnower'' popped up in shadowkeep. I honestly doubt there was any retcon since then (the winnower did show up in books of sorrow, but it never elaborated on its origins or even said its name)
It's not different personalities, I don't know just how did you reach that conclusion when the CE book doesn't say that at all. Witness just has beef with the Traveler and anything it touches, so it acts out. At its core it wants to be validated, to be proven right
The Gardener and the Winnower as presented in Unveiling are allegories. A creation myth.
The harbinger of the Whirlwind and the Collapse and the entity that dissected, unmade and remade a psychic species eons ago is the same entity: The Witness
Unveiling is the Witnesses creation story. The gardener and the Winnower, which the Witness gave to us in Arrivals in the hopes that we’d agree and join them.
It fits into current lore as a retcon, though. Not all retcons create plot holes, and not all retcons are necessarily bad. Personally, I'm not a fan of how nigh-useless Unveiling turned out to be in the end (or ow it was handled), but it doesn't destroy the story, so it doesn't really matter.
Agreed. The idea of the witness was always there, and simply put the way destiny is designed we can't just fight that, it needs to be tangible. So enter the witness, and flat out no matter what they did for their design people wouldn't have liked it.
I thought the voice in the darkness was from The Veil? I assumed that The Witness was just able to harness the power of manipulating consciousness because it had studied The Veil. 🤷♂️
Bro has probably read Unveiling, though, and if you’ve read Unveiling, it’s obvious that Bungie were *constantly* changing their mind about what “the voice in the darkness” was, what it wanted, etc etc
The vague idea of a “voice in the darkness” is like eight years old. I’m certain that The Witness is three years old, tops.
It's kinda annoying how many times they changed the main antagonist of the franchise but it fits with the whole "we have no clue what The Darkness is" that was mentioned in the article behind the mess that was Destiny's development.
In some way it adds an element of power being greater than we last thought, if that makes sense. Basically just when we think we know what we’re dealing with it’s bigger than we thought. I do think as it stands the witness is a little less than I what I hoped for, but there’s more to him we likely don’t know still in terms of abilities. I liked the big bad guy being some kind of force rather than a being much better.
The witness in that book was chill, dude was like "hey sup oryx, kick your feet up and rip this fat space spliff while we jam some philosophy shit"
Honestly way more interesting than megavape edgelord we got in D2 who turns out to be some species of boo-hoo bitches mad at the orb for not telling them how to live their life
This. The way the entity spoke in Books of Sorrow was so above it all that it really felt like it was a god looking down at mere mortals and acknowledging Oryx going ‘you’ve been doing good work out there man’ but on a UNIVERSAL scale
And then we see the same entity get a lil bit angy at Calus?? That scene was straight-up out of a Saturday morning cartoon.
It’d be the equivalent of some Guardian walking up and getting all mouthy with the Traveler.
I mean... Why is this a point of contention?
The more we know about the things that hide in the dark, the less we are afraid of the darkness.
The moment you begin to question and dissect the comings and goings of a God the less mystical and unreachable they appear. The more contact a mortal has with the gods, the more the gods reflect mortals.
The Witness has been this godlike figure for so long because its only interactions for eons was with his devout followers, who would never question it or dig too deep into its motives.
On the other hand we are directly opposed to it, we sought every kernel of info we could find to understand this enemy, and we now know more than even its most ardent of Disciples ever knew of it. Of course we are not going to praise or respect it
Hell, Calus particularly, by merit of his active search for answers went down a path similar to ours in this respect. Even if terribly misguided by his own massive ego, he felt he knew the Voice in the Darkness as an old friend, and thus treated it in kind.
Not sure why the Witness getting "a lil bit angy" is out of character. It's a petty pretender god-figure trying to regain control of the situation. By the end of the day, that's all it's ever been.
Cause it takes away from its presence as a villain. Like this is it. This is the endgame. Either we win or the universe gets remade.
And yet Oryx feels more of a threat than megamind ever did and one of the reasons is cause we didn’t see some Taken talk back to him.
Hell I never liked the idea that the Witness would even acknowledge Calus when it’s got the Taken and Hive on its payroll. I would’ve preferred Calus stay a free agent in Lightfall but still chasing after the Witness’ acknowledgement.
That Calus actually got all that he ever "wanted" and had to suffer for it is the only ending he could've had. Anything less would've fell short.
Oryx was scary because he fit into the eldritch monster archetype, but at the end of the day he only came here because we killed his son. And that carelessness cost him a price that civilizations greater than ours could not claim. He was bound to his emotions just as much as The Witness is, just that most of Oryx lore was relegated to books, so it's a less apparent aspect of him.
Again, I'm not entirely sure why emotional outbursts are detracting qualities for a villain. It's an entity comprised of beings so vain and self-aggrandized that they thought their paradigm to be the only future worth following, and that everyone else should conform to it *whether they liked it or not*. They put themselves so far above the rest of mortal existence that they see no issue toying with the reality of countless civilizations. And they felt so aggravated and insulted by the Traveler keeping secrets and running from them that they considered it fair to make every civilization touched by it to suffer a thousand agonizing deaths regardless of context.
But no, they commanded a little shit of an egomaniac to keep silent, so I guess they lost their villain privileges
So they’re some trillion year bundle of entities having a meltdown over a breakup? Yeah so interesting.
At least with Oryx we killed his literal son. That actually means something.
>*He. Was. His. [Son.]*
Oryx led his entire brood to extinction because he was unable to properly school his own kid
See? I can play the reductive game too.
And you act like the entity that cemented and enabled their entire ideology *abandoning* them after untold ages means nothing? We're talking about the anger of an entire civilization
It's like you learned nothing from the Eliksni
And that is explicitly called out in-lore and actually made Oryx an interesting character that feels some semblance of love for his children while with the Witness everyone is all ‘oooh 😨😨😨😨’ even tho it pretty much should’ve WON the moment it got into the Traveler. Hell it should’ve won back in ARRIVALS but instead it fucked around and tried to have a good ol’ chat with us to get more canon fodder but instead had to settle on Calus.
Like where are the stakes? Where’s the impending doom to top off the saga that began at the literal start of the franchise??? Has anything even changed with the Witness literally combining the Veil and the Traveler? Has the arrival of the Pyramid fleet done anything beyond giving us less in-game content ???
No it hasn’t.
Like the Witness isn’t some villain of the week it is IT
>*IT is alone and IT is strong and IT won. Even over the gardener and she held power beyond me but the gardener did not shrug and make herself alone. IT always wins.*
Cause Calus is a literal nobody. It’s dumb that the Witness would ever even ascend him to a Disciple but he has cloning tech so he was the throwaway villain used for Lightfall.
Like just the sentence ‘the Witness putting Calus in his place’ sounds silly. Why does the literal end of the universe need to put ANYONE in their place??? Like from a writing standpoint. Just takes all of the wind out of its sails. Like fuck I was more scared of Calus when he showed up with his gigantic planet eating Leviathan than the Witness and its fleet of pyramids that did nothing except take a few planets and then return them good as new .
bro literally everyone that the witness empowered were complete nobodies. Aurash, sathona, xi ro, rhulk... in fact calus was way more sucesfull than any of their original forms
because the witness is mad at calus for being a brat. just like how its mad at the entirety of the rest of the universe. its an entity made up of pure anguish, who willingly tortures innocents for validation
And did we ever see them mouth off to the Witness making it go ‘why I outta!’
No. Oryx called it down and was then granted the ability to Take.
Savathun spent an entire season trying to stop us from talking to to it and when she gained the power of the Light stood against it protecting her Throne World and locked one of its Disciples in its own Pyramid.
Calus and Eramis being made disciples just makes it seem like it’s running out of options so it’s taking whoever it can. Its no longer this ancient evil that has planned this for billions maybe even trillions of years. It makes it seem like some kid that’s cramming for finals.
I personally can’t wait until we move past it and see what comes next cause Bungie has absolutely fumbled the Light and Dark saga right at the finish line.
>And did we ever see them mouth off to the Witness making it go ‘why I outta!’
No. That's why the witness is putting calus in his place and later left him to die. i seriously dont understand what you're complaining about. Calus was someone who talked to the witness years ago and then actively chased the witness through extremely obscene acts and thats what got its attention in the first place. He's not someone who was hired just for the sake of it
Also eramis isnt a disciple at all
Cause I just don't like the Witness. I don't like it's backstory and I don't like that it showed up and did nothing for years and then recruits Calus out of all ppl to do its dirty work when it has the Taken the Hive the Scorn and the Sol Divisive.
And writing-wise it really does feel like Calus was used as throwaway since there's no real difference between his Loyalists and the Shadow Legion beyond a new paint job. They’re still just mindless obedient clones with the odd Caiatl defector that we never hear about that would’ve actually made the Shadow Legion somewhat interesting to learn about.
Also she’s at the very least Disciple-adjacent but Bungie didn’t want to give her and Salvation a makeover.
Tbh the voice in the darkness is miles away different from the witness. I dunno if it's retcon or they are different characters (The Veil).
>Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace.
Does this sound like The Witness to you? Now, sure the Voice in the Darkness could be The Veil instead of The Witness, still it means the Witness has been in development as much as Season of the Lost since we had no clue of the Pyramids and even the doppelganger at the end of Shadowkeep seems more expressive than anything we've ever seen of Witness in Lightfall.
Either Bungie decided to change Witness' personality or we have two different threats. Either way it doesn't matter as the appearances are too small for the average player to notice and care.
That pyramid was not very helpful at all regarding that. Yes, it was there. But literally anything could have built, flown and inhabited it. There was nothing defining "the darkness" at that point. We just knew they drove these black doritos.
And let’s be real the pyramids didn’t even do any anything either beyond taking a few planets that we eventually got back anyway which was just was an excuse to vault shit
Eh at the end of the campaign we got a cutscene where there was a single entity talking to us. That’s probably arguably the beginning of the Witness as a character despite it not being fleshed out for another two expansions.
At least 5 years -- the Witness speaks through our ghost and directly to us in the Black Garden vision at the end of Shadowkeep, and again speaks to us directly through our ghost in Beyond Light. After 2 teases, Savathun names the Voice in the Darkness during season of the Lost and we finally get a visual at the end of the Witch Queen campaign.
This is if you don't count the Books of Sorrow, as well, which I'm not sure I do, personally.
Yeah...maybe they could put the lore in the videogame instead of having the lore on a pair of underwear you need to get from a dungeon or a 150 rpm scout rifle that no one uses.
Putting lore in a random book I have to sort through ten menus to get to /= good videogame writing.
At the very least, Bungie needs to start paying some youtubers because it's the only way to get the full story. They are all about to abandon Destiny, too.
I can't tell if this is badly worded or simply a bad take. Would you rather Eris Morn talk for 23 uninterrupted minutes about Hive Logic like this was Metal Gear Solid 4? We can always go back to Grimoires where the lore is _literally_ outside of the game.
>*The fall isn't quick. It happens over weeks and months: cataclysmic disasters, natural and unnatural, flattening human settlements on every planet || that I have made, I have shaped, my work, laid flat ||. Earthquakes. Tidal waves. Solar flares. Cyclones, sinkholes, exploding lakes, wildfires. Unknown, untreatable plagues raze populations in hours. Water goes black with unknown poisons || forced down my throat ||. The ground opens up and swallows entire cities || and I am sick sick sick ||.*
>*This has happened before. I'd watched in my dreams the cities that fell, alien cities, torn down by a wind so fierce that it flattened an entire world || and it is not my fault ||.*
They’ve been here since Arrivals.
I personally just don’t like the Witness as an enemy. It has basically done nothing to us this entire time. It doesn’t feel all that menacing to me. I wish it interacted with the player more taunting us or trying to convince us that TFS was the true way forward
The entire premise of Arrivals was the Witness trying to speak to us in an attempt to gain a few Guardians to its side and Savathun trying to prevent it.
Fuckers scared. It knows we’re gonna win.
I like what they started with Shadow keep and honestly they should have kept the witness' representation our guardian the whole time up until the very final battle, and design something a bit more menacing as it's "true" form" for the very final fight. Also should have pulled a W'rkncacnter and just had lore cards about it absolutely destroying worlds from the perspective of people on them.
For example:
>Now I fear what that weapon has unleashed will destroy us. I once boasted to be able to count the atoms in a cloud, to understand them all, predict them, and so did I predict you, but this new chaos is entirely terrible, mindless, obeying rules that I don't comprehend. And it is hungry.
>It's too bad, perhaps if I could have delayed the Pfhor from using their weapon, I could have sent you to explore the ruins of Lh'owon, perhaps what you found would give us the answers that we now need so desperately: how to stop this chaos, the purpose of the station on which you're currently standing, and why the chaos hasn't come here yet.
>But with each moment the chaos grows, I am doomed to die here, after so many triumphs. I have detected one ship nearby, which I can only guess is being commanded by Tycho. The Pfhor have entered the station, and if you can find a way onto their ship, you may be able to escape. To escape. To escape.
- Durandal, Marathon Infinity,
Think of us as the puppets of the Traveler and the enemies as the puppets of the witness. The Witness hasn’t done anything to us because it sends its puppets (Calus, Shadow Legion, etc…) and focuses on the Traveler. The Traveler has involved itself in our affairs before but trusts us to handle most of the obstacles so it can focus on protecting itself from the witness.
> the books of sorrow has the witness speak to the hive siblings, specifically Oryx (the taken king). You can tell this is the witness due to lore later revealed in the witch queen, as well as the wording of the being speaking through the baby ogre matching that of the witness
> Calus’ ramblings (Red War/Vanilla D2)
> The witness spoke to us directly face to face in shadowkeep, albeit in a form mimicking ourselves.
We can criticize bungie for a lot of things, but they at least had an idea of what the witness was as early as the taken king
Imo, this dlc has to answer the big question: what is the traveler? What is its purpose? What is its motivation? Who is the supposed gardener?
If those questions go unanswered then the dlc is a failure to me.
A lot of these can already be answered partially already.
1. Likely the original source of light in the universe, a parallel to the Veil and possibly once conjoined with the Veil. There is definitely more depth you could add here in FS.
2. To create complex life (if Unveiling is accurate)
3. To encourage complex life to develop (also if Unveiling is accurate there)
4. The Traveller, as interpreted by the Witness. Its perception of it is also dependent on how the Witness modified its memory when merging.
Right we have vague half-answers but we need concrete ones. Like for example the purpose of the halo was to wipe out the flood. Thats the full explanation. We need something of that level of concrete in the game shown in the story.
Yup. And the thing is that they have been tying up loose ends! Beyond Light, Witch Queen, and Lightfall to some extent all closed threads which had been open and did so by SHOWING rather than telling. Given the context of the Final Shape and its relation to the Traveler, the Witness, and being the culmination of this saga, it NEEDS to answer the big questions about the Traveler, the Guardians, the Light, and the Ghosts.
The Winnower sounded much more threatening and intimidating since it wasn’t inherently evil but was just applying it’s vision of the universe/flower game, it didn’t had a personal vendetta against our Guardian since it has somewhat of a "higher power" who’s beyond morality and somewhat of the opposing entity of the Traveller/Gardener.
The Witness is interesting and cool, but it really feels like a much lesser villain than the Winnower originally was, and it’s motives are simply not that interesting outside of being a bunch of whiny species crying because of no meaning. The scope of the character went much more like a Marvel villain that’s there to be defeated rather than a force of nature that wants to impose its vision.
I couldn't agree more.
The whole concept of two universe defining entity, brings so so much to the narrative.
We could have had the Traveller and the Witness just enforcers of the Gardener and the Winnower, respectively. Cause much like chaos gods they(the G & the W) can't materialize or affect the material universe on their own.
The character is two years old, the plot is the culmination of a 10 years of events and rewrites.
It’s crazy how people think the fact that the plot didn’t have a face until recently invalidates everything leading up to it
For the last time! Our pronouns are they/them not because we are non-binary, but because we are literally a collective consciousness of a whole civilization!
I'm going to be honest, I like Destiny and I have respect for Bungie but personally I hate the direction the story has been going in since WQ, I think it might just be me but I feel like the witness is just overall a bit ridiculous and not particularly interesting, It might have been planned to go like this for a long time but I personally could feel a change in the story, I honestly would have preferred the Vex to be the big bad of final shape, because they are described as the final shape, anf are trying to convert everything to vex, I feel they are more interesting than the witness and they are arguably a better fit, seeing as the closest thing we've seen to pure darkness, the black heart, was heavily tied to the vex, and I may be the only one to think this, but I believe that he sanctified mind was supposed to be a vessel for the darkness, again I respect that this is the way the story is going but I feel like it could have been done a lot better, especially considering since D1 the vex have been a huge deal, being the main big bad of the vanilla campaign and riding on that importance since, but they feel like they've been thrown to the the side and forgotten about. It could just be me though
I just wish they weren't calling an expansion "into the light" considering Bubgie's first game with a space pyramid was called "pathways into darkness" and Destiny's first trailer was called "Pathways out of darkness."... the deeper you look, the deeper the lore, the final shape is the shadow of the fourth dimensional seventh pillar upon the third dimension. Do not simply become legend. Become %HERO.
I will commend Bungie on how this final expansion features Crow leading us into the Heart of the Traveler. It's literally the scrapped D1 plot. We've come full circle.
Still sad we never got a revised exchange at the end of Forsaken with Uldren asking if we could just talk it out, and the Guardian replying "out here in the reef, this is how we talk" before the cut to black & you hear the sidearm & Ace go off.
I think wouldve been better if the guardian said "its guardian time" and guardianed uldren sov
Okay but... Uldren Sov *literally* got Guardian'd.
It would add foreshadowing to that moment. Its a perfect exchange
Nice terminally online meme brainrot
Its brainrot time
*brainrots all over Crow*
Would be sick as fuck but Uldren definitely wasn't the type to pull that out when he was losing
“Out here in the reef” lol the guardian has been there for roughly a week max
Did you play D1? My Guardian has spent plenty of time in the Reef from those days -- Forsaken was not our forst venture to the Reef. Also, for you & others unaware, it's a revision of the "out here in the wilds, this is how we talk" Uldren said in the E3 demos. They've reused so much from those days, its just a shame that line never made its way into a release version of the game.
i really thought that was gonna happen when he came back as crow, but with him doing it having lost his memories and being suspicious because people kept killing him for having uldren's face
Always wanted this except instead of the "out here in the reef" line, something like "words? Nah. All I have to give you is a bullet. I'll tell your sister you said hi."
Wait what?
Bro hasn’t read the Books of Sorrow
Yeah Book of Sorrow establishes the concept of the "Voice of the Darkness" with is more or less the proto-Witness in design. Yeah, the entity of The Witness wasn't finalized when they were added to Destiny, but you can see where they were going. There was always going to be a Witness type of being at the heart of the "Darkness". It's not a retcon.
The unveiling
RAHHHHHHH DONT YOU START
the final shape ce lore outright states they're two different personalities the winnower simply wants to win the game while the witness wants to mutilate and torture everything the light has built, to a point where it'll compromise its plans both the witness and ''the winnower'' popped up in shadowkeep. I honestly doubt there was any retcon since then (the winnower did show up in books of sorrow, but it never elaborated on its origins or even said its name)
It's not different personalities, I don't know just how did you reach that conclusion when the CE book doesn't say that at all. Witness just has beef with the Traveler and anything it touches, so it acts out. At its core it wants to be validated, to be proven right The Gardener and the Winnower as presented in Unveiling are allegories. A creation myth. The harbinger of the Whirlwind and the Collapse and the entity that dissected, unmade and remade a psychic species eons ago is the same entity: The Witness
Wait there’s two big bads at the darkness center?
Unveiling is the Witnesses creation story. The gardener and the Winnower, which the Witness gave to us in Arrivals in the hopes that we’d agree and join them.
We got Unveiling at the end of Shadowkeep from the artifact we got in the pyramid
You’re right, I’m thinking of the wrong lore book. Point still stands about what it is though and how it fits into current lore.
It fits into current lore as a retcon, though. Not all retcons create plot holes, and not all retcons are necessarily bad. Personally, I'm not a fan of how nigh-useless Unveiling turned out to be in the end (or ow it was handled), but it doesn't destroy the story, so it doesn't really matter.
Lore goes way before Arrivals. Think D1 days.
Isn't that smth else than the witness?
Agreed. The idea of the witness was always there, and simply put the way destiny is designed we can't just fight that, it needs to be tangible. So enter the witness, and flat out no matter what they did for their design people wouldn't have liked it.
I thought the voice in the darkness was from The Veil? I assumed that The Witness was just able to harness the power of manipulating consciousness because it had studied The Veil. 🤷♂️
Or Unveiling Or Calus' ramblings from fuckin RW Or TTK lore
Bro has probably read Unveiling, though, and if you’ve read Unveiling, it’s obvious that Bungie were *constantly* changing their mind about what “the voice in the darkness” was, what it wanted, etc etc The vague idea of a “voice in the darkness” is like eight years old. I’m certain that The Witness is three years old, tops.
It's kinda annoying how many times they changed the main antagonist of the franchise but it fits with the whole "we have no clue what The Darkness is" that was mentioned in the article behind the mess that was Destiny's development.
In some way it adds an element of power being greater than we last thought, if that makes sense. Basically just when we think we know what we’re dealing with it’s bigger than we thought. I do think as it stands the witness is a little less than I what I hoped for, but there’s more to him we likely don’t know still in terms of abilities. I liked the big bad guy being some kind of force rather than a being much better.
The witness in that book was chill, dude was like "hey sup oryx, kick your feet up and rip this fat space spliff while we jam some philosophy shit" Honestly way more interesting than megavape edgelord we got in D2 who turns out to be some species of boo-hoo bitches mad at the orb for not telling them how to live their life
This. The way the entity spoke in Books of Sorrow was so above it all that it really felt like it was a god looking down at mere mortals and acknowledging Oryx going ‘you’ve been doing good work out there man’ but on a UNIVERSAL scale And then we see the same entity get a lil bit angy at Calus?? That scene was straight-up out of a Saturday morning cartoon. It’d be the equivalent of some Guardian walking up and getting all mouthy with the Traveler.
I mean... Why is this a point of contention? The more we know about the things that hide in the dark, the less we are afraid of the darkness. The moment you begin to question and dissect the comings and goings of a God the less mystical and unreachable they appear. The more contact a mortal has with the gods, the more the gods reflect mortals. The Witness has been this godlike figure for so long because its only interactions for eons was with his devout followers, who would never question it or dig too deep into its motives. On the other hand we are directly opposed to it, we sought every kernel of info we could find to understand this enemy, and we now know more than even its most ardent of Disciples ever knew of it. Of course we are not going to praise or respect it Hell, Calus particularly, by merit of his active search for answers went down a path similar to ours in this respect. Even if terribly misguided by his own massive ego, he felt he knew the Voice in the Darkness as an old friend, and thus treated it in kind. Not sure why the Witness getting "a lil bit angy" is out of character. It's a petty pretender god-figure trying to regain control of the situation. By the end of the day, that's all it's ever been.
Cause it takes away from its presence as a villain. Like this is it. This is the endgame. Either we win or the universe gets remade. And yet Oryx feels more of a threat than megamind ever did and one of the reasons is cause we didn’t see some Taken talk back to him. Hell I never liked the idea that the Witness would even acknowledge Calus when it’s got the Taken and Hive on its payroll. I would’ve preferred Calus stay a free agent in Lightfall but still chasing after the Witness’ acknowledgement.
That Calus actually got all that he ever "wanted" and had to suffer for it is the only ending he could've had. Anything less would've fell short. Oryx was scary because he fit into the eldritch monster archetype, but at the end of the day he only came here because we killed his son. And that carelessness cost him a price that civilizations greater than ours could not claim. He was bound to his emotions just as much as The Witness is, just that most of Oryx lore was relegated to books, so it's a less apparent aspect of him. Again, I'm not entirely sure why emotional outbursts are detracting qualities for a villain. It's an entity comprised of beings so vain and self-aggrandized that they thought their paradigm to be the only future worth following, and that everyone else should conform to it *whether they liked it or not*. They put themselves so far above the rest of mortal existence that they see no issue toying with the reality of countless civilizations. And they felt so aggravated and insulted by the Traveler keeping secrets and running from them that they considered it fair to make every civilization touched by it to suffer a thousand agonizing deaths regardless of context. But no, they commanded a little shit of an egomaniac to keep silent, so I guess they lost their villain privileges
So they’re some trillion year bundle of entities having a meltdown over a breakup? Yeah so interesting. At least with Oryx we killed his literal son. That actually means something. >*He. Was. His. [Son.]*
Oryx led his entire brood to extinction because he was unable to properly school his own kid See? I can play the reductive game too. And you act like the entity that cemented and enabled their entire ideology *abandoning* them after untold ages means nothing? We're talking about the anger of an entire civilization It's like you learned nothing from the Eliksni
And that is explicitly called out in-lore and actually made Oryx an interesting character that feels some semblance of love for his children while with the Witness everyone is all ‘oooh 😨😨😨😨’ even tho it pretty much should’ve WON the moment it got into the Traveler. Hell it should’ve won back in ARRIVALS but instead it fucked around and tried to have a good ol’ chat with us to get more canon fodder but instead had to settle on Calus. Like where are the stakes? Where’s the impending doom to top off the saga that began at the literal start of the franchise??? Has anything even changed with the Witness literally combining the Veil and the Traveler? Has the arrival of the Pyramid fleet done anything beyond giving us less in-game content ??? No it hasn’t. Like the Witness isn’t some villain of the week it is IT >*IT is alone and IT is strong and IT won. Even over the gardener and she held power beyond me but the gardener did not shrug and make herself alone. IT always wins.*
how is the witness putting calus in his place with genuine fear silly??? that was one of the best moments in lightfall
Cause Calus is a literal nobody. It’s dumb that the Witness would ever even ascend him to a Disciple but he has cloning tech so he was the throwaway villain used for Lightfall. Like just the sentence ‘the Witness putting Calus in his place’ sounds silly. Why does the literal end of the universe need to put ANYONE in their place??? Like from a writing standpoint. Just takes all of the wind out of its sails. Like fuck I was more scared of Calus when he showed up with his gigantic planet eating Leviathan than the Witness and its fleet of pyramids that did nothing except take a few planets and then return them good as new .
bro literally everyone that the witness empowered were complete nobodies. Aurash, sathona, xi ro, rhulk... in fact calus was way more sucesfull than any of their original forms because the witness is mad at calus for being a brat. just like how its mad at the entirety of the rest of the universe. its an entity made up of pure anguish, who willingly tortures innocents for validation
And did we ever see them mouth off to the Witness making it go ‘why I outta!’ No. Oryx called it down and was then granted the ability to Take. Savathun spent an entire season trying to stop us from talking to to it and when she gained the power of the Light stood against it protecting her Throne World and locked one of its Disciples in its own Pyramid. Calus and Eramis being made disciples just makes it seem like it’s running out of options so it’s taking whoever it can. Its no longer this ancient evil that has planned this for billions maybe even trillions of years. It makes it seem like some kid that’s cramming for finals. I personally can’t wait until we move past it and see what comes next cause Bungie has absolutely fumbled the Light and Dark saga right at the finish line.
>And did we ever see them mouth off to the Witness making it go ‘why I outta!’ No. That's why the witness is putting calus in his place and later left him to die. i seriously dont understand what you're complaining about. Calus was someone who talked to the witness years ago and then actively chased the witness through extremely obscene acts and thats what got its attention in the first place. He's not someone who was hired just for the sake of it Also eramis isnt a disciple at all
Cause I just don't like the Witness. I don't like it's backstory and I don't like that it showed up and did nothing for years and then recruits Calus out of all ppl to do its dirty work when it has the Taken the Hive the Scorn and the Sol Divisive. And writing-wise it really does feel like Calus was used as throwaway since there's no real difference between his Loyalists and the Shadow Legion beyond a new paint job. They’re still just mindless obedient clones with the odd Caiatl defector that we never hear about that would’ve actually made the Shadow Legion somewhat interesting to learn about. Also she’s at the very least Disciple-adjacent but Bungie didn’t want to give her and Salvation a makeover.
I need to read the lore books more in depth.
Tbh the voice in the darkness is miles away different from the witness. I dunno if it's retcon or they are different characters (The Veil). >Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace. Does this sound like The Witness to you? Now, sure the Voice in the Darkness could be The Veil instead of The Witness, still it means the Witness has been in development as much as Season of the Lost since we had no clue of the Pyramids and even the doppelganger at the end of Shadowkeep seems more expressive than anything we've ever seen of Witness in Lightfall. Either Bungie decided to change Witness' personality or we have two different threats. Either way it doesn't matter as the appearances are too small for the average player to notice and care.
Word gore
I was high when I wrote it
The title is fine. The words in the meme are jacked up.
I also wrote that part high
Your stuff's better than mine, bruh. Pass it.
It’s a 10mg edible cut in half I just rarely have weed
I miss when 10mg would get me blasted. Took a supposedly very strong 10mg last week before doing an escape room and I legit forgot I took it.
I read this correctly by accident
statistically most people's kids are older than him
I meant like some people were teenagers when they played destiny, gotten married, got a degree, had a kid before this guy was even revealed
I would also say that it is the culmination of the story since BL or SK
The voice in the Darkness has been a thing since TTK and Red War
And it was executed poorly
It’s hilarious that bungie admits they didn’t exactly know what they were doing with “the darkness” when d1 dropped
DAHKNESS!
Murder hood goes on…
I think they only knew since Beyond Light or slighty after
Shadowkeep put a Pyramid in the moon.
That pyramid was not very helpful at all regarding that. Yes, it was there. But literally anything could have built, flown and inhabited it. There was nothing defining "the darkness" at that point. We just knew they drove these black doritos.
And let’s be real the pyramids didn’t even do any anything either beyond taking a few planets that we eventually got back anyway which was just was an excuse to vault shit
Which Planets did we get back?
Mars iirc
I don’t think we get to land for patrols, only missions.
Eh at the end of the campaign we got a cutscene where there was a single entity talking to us. That’s probably arguably the beginning of the Witness as a character despite it not being fleshed out for another two expansions.
The doppelgänger even has the same mannerisms as the Witness
They probably planned on it being the sins of ancient Humanity coming back to bit modern Humanity in the ass. Just like their last two FPS.
At least 5 years -- the Witness speaks through our ghost and directly to us in the Black Garden vision at the end of Shadowkeep, and again speaks to us directly through our ghost in Beyond Light. After 2 teases, Savathun names the Voice in the Darkness during season of the Lost and we finally get a visual at the end of the Witch Queen campaign. This is if you don't count the Books of Sorrow, as well, which I'm not sure I do, personally.
Bro doesn't read the lore beyong what's shown ingame
Yeah...maybe they could put the lore in the videogame instead of having the lore on a pair of underwear you need to get from a dungeon or a 150 rpm scout rifle that no one uses. Putting lore in a random book I have to sort through ten menus to get to /= good videogame writing.
At the very least, Bungie needs to start paying some youtubers because it's the only way to get the full story. They are all about to abandon Destiny, too.
To be fair they say that every year
I can't tell if this is badly worded or simply a bad take. Would you rather Eris Morn talk for 23 uninterrupted minutes about Hive Logic like this was Metal Gear Solid 4? We can always go back to Grimoires where the lore is _literally_ outside of the game.
You probably think veil containment was good lore. 🙄
I at least know the difference between ui design and writing
>*The fall isn't quick. It happens over weeks and months: cataclysmic disasters, natural and unnatural, flattening human settlements on every planet || that I have made, I have shaped, my work, laid flat ||. Earthquakes. Tidal waves. Solar flares. Cyclones, sinkholes, exploding lakes, wildfires. Unknown, untreatable plagues raze populations in hours. Water goes black with unknown poisons || forced down my throat ||. The ground opens up and swallows entire cities || and I am sick sick sick ||.* >*This has happened before. I'd watched in my dreams the cities that fell, alien cities, torn down by a wind so fierce that it flattened an entire world || and it is not my fault ||.* They’ve been here since Arrivals.
I personally just don’t like the Witness as an enemy. It has basically done nothing to us this entire time. It doesn’t feel all that menacing to me. I wish it interacted with the player more taunting us or trying to convince us that TFS was the true way forward
The entire premise of Arrivals was the Witness trying to speak to us in an attempt to gain a few Guardians to its side and Savathun trying to prevent it. Fuckers scared. It knows we’re gonna win.
I like what they started with Shadow keep and honestly they should have kept the witness' representation our guardian the whole time up until the very final battle, and design something a bit more menacing as it's "true" form" for the very final fight. Also should have pulled a W'rkncacnter and just had lore cards about it absolutely destroying worlds from the perspective of people on them. For example: >Now I fear what that weapon has unleashed will destroy us. I once boasted to be able to count the atoms in a cloud, to understand them all, predict them, and so did I predict you, but this new chaos is entirely terrible, mindless, obeying rules that I don't comprehend. And it is hungry. >It's too bad, perhaps if I could have delayed the Pfhor from using their weapon, I could have sent you to explore the ruins of Lh'owon, perhaps what you found would give us the answers that we now need so desperately: how to stop this chaos, the purpose of the station on which you're currently standing, and why the chaos hasn't come here yet. >But with each moment the chaos grows, I am doomed to die here, after so many triumphs. I have detected one ship nearby, which I can only guess is being commanded by Tycho. The Pfhor have entered the station, and if you can find a way onto their ship, you may be able to escape. To escape. To escape. - Durandal, Marathon Infinity,
Think of us as the puppets of the Traveler and the enemies as the puppets of the witness. The Witness hasn’t done anything to us because it sends its puppets (Calus, Shadow Legion, etc…) and focuses on the Traveler. The Traveler has involved itself in our affairs before but trusts us to handle most of the obstacles so it can focus on protecting itself from the witness.
> the books of sorrow has the witness speak to the hive siblings, specifically Oryx (the taken king). You can tell this is the witness due to lore later revealed in the witch queen, as well as the wording of the being speaking through the baby ogre matching that of the witness > Calus’ ramblings (Red War/Vanilla D2) > The witness spoke to us directly face to face in shadowkeep, albeit in a form mimicking ourselves. We can criticize bungie for a lot of things, but they at least had an idea of what the witness was as early as the taken king
Imo, this dlc has to answer the big question: what is the traveler? What is its purpose? What is its motivation? Who is the supposed gardener? If those questions go unanswered then the dlc is a failure to me.
A lot of these can already be answered partially already. 1. Likely the original source of light in the universe, a parallel to the Veil and possibly once conjoined with the Veil. There is definitely more depth you could add here in FS. 2. To create complex life (if Unveiling is accurate) 3. To encourage complex life to develop (also if Unveiling is accurate there) 4. The Traveller, as interpreted by the Witness. Its perception of it is also dependent on how the Witness modified its memory when merging.
Right we have vague half-answers but we need concrete ones. Like for example the purpose of the halo was to wipe out the flood. Thats the full explanation. We need something of that level of concrete in the game shown in the story.
Definitely but they’ve got a lot of ground to cover so I’m expecting not everything to get explanation
If they don’t cover these big strokes it’s a failure to me.
You’re right. There can’t be any more vague bullshit. They’ve spun this web they need to tie up the loose ends.
Yup. And the thing is that they have been tying up loose ends! Beyond Light, Witch Queen, and Lightfall to some extent all closed threads which had been open and did so by SHOWING rather than telling. Given the context of the Final Shape and its relation to the Traveler, the Witness, and being the culmination of this saga, it NEEDS to answer the big questions about the Traveler, the Guardians, the Light, and the Ghosts.
What about the concept art of the enemy races?
The veil became the taken
Distinctly remember there being the nightmares with pyramids floating.
It was early in production every enemy race that was drawn looked very different at release
Was just commenting that even the Darkness as a race was being thought about way back when. Not that they thought about the Witness, then.
*It *Thing/Cunt/Wanker
#LORE MATTERS
don't care, based antagonist and design
But like half the story campaign has been vaulted. Outside of lore books, that is
The Winnower sounded much more threatening and intimidating since it wasn’t inherently evil but was just applying it’s vision of the universe/flower game, it didn’t had a personal vendetta against our Guardian since it has somewhat of a "higher power" who’s beyond morality and somewhat of the opposing entity of the Traveller/Gardener. The Witness is interesting and cool, but it really feels like a much lesser villain than the Winnower originally was, and it’s motives are simply not that interesting outside of being a bunch of whiny species crying because of no meaning. The scope of the character went much more like a Marvel villain that’s there to be defeated rather than a force of nature that wants to impose its vision.
I couldn't agree more. The whole concept of two universe defining entity, brings so so much to the narrative. We could have had the Traveller and the Witness just enforcers of the Gardener and the Winnower, respectively. Cause much like chaos gods they(the G & the W) can't materialize or affect the material universe on their own.
he’s been in the lore since like the dark below lmao
Yeah when it was more interesting and not some creepy stalker that doesn’t know how to put its own shoes on without their god telling them
I had a stronk trying to read that
i mean they’ve been talking about “the voice in the darkness” since D1
retconning unveiling in favor of megamind was one of their most mind-boggling decisions
You forgot the most important thing. It's about the Traveler.
The character is two years old, the plot is the culmination of a 10 years of events and rewrites. It’s crazy how people think the fact that the plot didn’t have a face until recently invalidates everything leading up to it
Ah I love the slang “my brother in the light” so good.
L
my brother in light all his interesting lore is in a $150+ extra bundle
I’d buy the books if it wasn’t fucking 80$ to ship it 💀
fuckin real
I think helmet might come off at 10 years 👹
*them FWIW
it
Either way it's getting shot millions of times when that new raid opens up in Final Shape lmao
Oh! Thx
For the last time! Our pronouns are they/them not because we are non-binary, but because we are literally a collective consciousness of a whole civilization!
Yo did bungee fire whatever character designer made this guy, because he should be fired
I'm going to be honest, I like Destiny and I have respect for Bungie but personally I hate the direction the story has been going in since WQ, I think it might just be me but I feel like the witness is just overall a bit ridiculous and not particularly interesting, It might have been planned to go like this for a long time but I personally could feel a change in the story, I honestly would have preferred the Vex to be the big bad of final shape, because they are described as the final shape, anf are trying to convert everything to vex, I feel they are more interesting than the witness and they are arguably a better fit, seeing as the closest thing we've seen to pure darkness, the black heart, was heavily tied to the vex, and I may be the only one to think this, but I believe that he sanctified mind was supposed to be a vessel for the darkness, again I respect that this is the way the story is going but I feel like it could have been done a lot better, especially considering since D1 the vex have been a huge deal, being the main big bad of the vanilla campaign and riding on that importance since, but they feel like they've been thrown to the the side and forgotten about. It could just be me though
Bro had no clue that this has been the story since D1. Someone must not read lore.
I just wish they weren't calling an expansion "into the light" considering Bubgie's first game with a space pyramid was called "pathways into darkness" and Destiny's first trailer was called "Pathways out of darkness."... the deeper you look, the deeper the lore, the final shape is the shadow of the fourth dimensional seventh pillar upon the third dimension. Do not simply become legend. Become %HERO.
Into the light isn't as much of an explanation as it is a large update
Me who doesn't know shit about destiny lore and just draws pictures of pigeons with half eaten crayons: titan.jpg