The Destiny franchise has had some long-running mysteries since its birth nearly nine years ago Lot 2 she has only deepened since it was released. So it’s a little surprising that after years of providing more mysteries than answers, Bungie decided to drop a massive lore bombshell on a random Tuesday in the middle of history. Lot 2: Season of the deep.
The new cutscene, which comes after the fifth part of the “Into the Depths” quest, explains the origins of the series’ main culprit, The Witness, and even begins to unravel the mystery of The Veil – the MacGuffin players who were most haunted by the recent Lightfall expansion, only to end up learning nothing about it. More importantly, the cutscene finally gives players some insight into what The Traveler – the giant space sphere that’s been sitting on Destiny’s skyline for nearly a decade – actually is.
[Spoiler Warning: This post contains spoilers for a new Destiny 2 cutscene, as well as the end of the Lightfall campaign. If you don’t want to be spoiled, go play the Week 5 part of the “Into the Depths” questline and complete the Lightfall expansion first.]
The cutscene begins with a group of people of the same alien race that The Witness comes from. Sloane (a long-forgotten NPC) tells the player about The Witness’s ancestors and how they suffered alone on their planet. The Traveler, it turns out, had been buried on their homeworld all along.
After being freed from the planet, The Traveler blessed the people of The Witness with a Golden Age, and they named it The Gardener. This name is significant, as it confirms that The Traveler and The Gardener – who for many years were thought to be possibly two different Entities of Light – are actually one and the same.
During the cutscene’s depiction of this Golden Age, we see these people building the ominous Pyramid Ships that players have been using since the end of Lot 2‘s Red War Campaign. But after “eons” of prosperity, the people grew tired of The Traveler’s silence and demanded that it give them some form of further guidance. This led the people to search for an entity that The Gardener had a connection with: The Winnower or, as we know it, The Veil.
This is the main knowledge revealed in the cutscene. Bungie has long teased players about the identities of the main forces of Light and Darkness – one The Gardner and the other The Winnower – and Guardians have speculated for years about who or what they might be. Now we know that The Gardener is The Traveler (a being of pure Light) and The Winnower is The Veil (the counterpart of the Traveler’s Darkness).
The Witnesses found The Veil and in turn taught them about the nature of light and dark. They discovered that Light is capable of both creation and destruction. So they considered the Light a force of chaos and said it had to be tamed. The Darkness was their answer to this chaos, as it was formed by “thought and consciousness.”
Image: Bungie via Redrix on YouTube
By using The Darkness to tame The Light, the people of The Witness believed it could create the perfect universe, which they named The Final Shape. This is another important revelation as it gives meaning to the name of Lot 2‘s next expansion: The final shape.
However, when the people of The Witness tried to use The Veil to tame The Traveler, the orb failed them. Unable to accept that their final form would never come, they used The Darkness to merge themselves – all the remaining members of the species – into The Witness (so called because they had “witnessed the truth in the darkness” ).
Since then, The Witness has pursued The Traveler across the cosmos in an attempt to “impose meaning on a meaningless universe”. The cutscene ends with an image of the Merged Traveler and Veil, which happened at the end of the Lighting campaign.
In just over three and a half minutes, Bungie laid out the whole setup for Destiny’s Light and Darkness saga, which will end with The final shape. And while it’s currently still unclear who or what created The Traveler and The Veil (and who knows if we’ll ever get those answers), this is the most information we’ve ever gotten about the origins of The Light, The Darkness and The Witness.
This cutscene is a welcome taste of transparency after Bungie’s overly cryptic Lighting extension. I hope the studio puts the landing in there The final shapethat it will officially unveil on August 22 in its annual Lot 2 Showcase.