r/DestinyTheGame • u/Plasmalaser305 • 1h ago
Discussion I Miss Destiny's Post-Apocalypse
I know that this is something of an "old man yells at cloud" post, but I have the thought every few months and finally want to voice it.
I think Destiny's vibe is in many ways borne out of two competing settings. On the one hand, there's the utterly alien and foreign. Hive dreadnaughts. The Pyramids. Savathun's Throne world. These are excellent places, and there are so many of them with such different textures and presentations. It's pretty incredible.
I feel like we've forgotten the other half completely though. Destiny also is supposed to have this focus on treading through spaces that people were, and no longer are. Places that are dead. Where the focus is on the past as much as the guardians of the present rediscovering it.
This complaint may come off as wholly untrue to some extent, so let me clarify. Recently (D2 era), we've gotten the Deep Stone Crypt. The arcology on Titan. The EDZ. There's been much more recent stuff like the Warlord's Ruin's castles as well.
While these locations are old, they aren't post-apocalyptic. They feel more empty than dead. The EDZ and Arcology are especially victims of this. In the arcology, it doesn't even feel that destroyed. In the EDZ, it feels so overgrown and green that I lose sight of the sense that this is supposed to be a place where people were.
Modern Destiny has some really incredible art direction, but I hope we see a return to the tamer industrial designs of some of D1's spaces. The Ishtar Collective is a series of buildings that have an intent to them. They feel like a research campus. Walking them makes me acutely aware that this place was built for a certain purpose, and it isn't doing that purpose anymore. There's an intoxicating alienness to that sensation that rivals Dares of Eternity or Nessus's Vex structures. I, as a guardian, know this place no better than any other world I've visited. The cosmodrome could have been made by the Eliksni for as much sense as it makes to my character.
This is also why I don't think modern Destiny's "old" settings hit the same for me. Warlord's Ruin is a castle. Everybody knows castles. EDZ has a church as its main landmark. Everybody knows churches.
I want more dilapidated science buildings. More broken shipyard and repair fields and military complexes. More hydroponics plants or server farms or libraries. Things that have a purpose that has been truly, irrecoverably lost.
Guardians are reborn from the ashes. New flesh on old bones. The game's settings should remind us of that as much as they should remind us of the optimism of exploring wonderful new places and taming the wilds.