In Destiny 2, the new expansion “Beyond Light” is coming. The game’s boss, Luke Smith, posed a question before the release: What is the floating thing next to the Exo-Stranger from the reveal trailer? Apparently, Bungie plans to pick up threads that are 6 years old.
This is the scene in question: In the last live stream for Destiny 2, the reveal trailer for “Beyond Light” (Beyond Light), the new Destiny expansion was shown.
We have little more than the trailer to speculate on what to expect in “Beyond Light”.
We already know that a “new power” is invading the Destiny universe. The Pyramid ships of Darkness have landed on the frozen moon of Jupiter, Europa.
The Guardians will face “Eramis”. She was first mentioned in Destiny’s “House of Wolves”. She was one of the prisoners in the Prison of Elders.
The trailer features 3 heroes from Destiny 2’s past:
- Eris Morn – a former Hunter who has become a bit “strange” during a mission against the Hive
- The Drifter – a shady character who spends his time hosting the dubious tournament “Gambit” and who seems to have been playing his game for eternity.
- the Exo-Stranger – a legendary figure from Destiny who never had enough time to explain why she didn’t have time to explain.
These are 3 pretty mysterious figures from Destiny 2. The trailer makes it clear that the Exo Stranger has called the other two to Europa to inspect the Pyramid ships.
Reveal Trailer References Original Destiny Intro
This is what the boss says about the trailer: In a stream following the reveal, the head of Destiny 2, Luke Smith, spoke with streamer DrLupo about the reveal trailer.
He says: The trailer directly follows the end of Destiny 2, the last major event in the game.
At that time, players realized that the Traveler was not dead but was intentionally sleeping, because every action of the Traveler inevitably led to what we now see: the arrival of the Pyramid ships.
For Smith, it was important to connect back to this story with Shadowkeep.
Things like the “Exo Stranger” or “Europa” are deeply rooted in Destiny. The aim for “Beyond Light” was to reach back into Destiny’s past and bring some threads together.
The Darkness in the Trailer
These are the exciting details: Many scenes in the “Beyond Light” trailer mirror the “Mars video” from Destiny 1. That was the intro at the start of the game. Every parallel in the new trailer to the old video is intentional, and the director is the same as back then.
Smith points out that Eris Morn, a character who has previously been “anti-Darkness”, now shows signs in the trailer of having access to “other abilities” – this could be the new power Stasis.
This is not a Ghost – What is it then?
This is the question that Smith raises: The “fish-like” thing floating around the Exo-Stranger is getting a lot of attention. Smith suggests that the thing “is coming out of the Exo-Stranger”:
This object – I know, many questions will arise and I won’t speak too specifically about it, but the Stranger is not forged in the light. The Stranger has no Ghost. […] This is not a Ghost. This is something else. And we’ll leave it at that for now, but this is definitely not a Ghost.
Luke Smith
It is unclear what this fish creature could exactly be, but from the context, it seems plausible that we are already seeing signs in the trailer of what skills characters will receive that engage in some form with the “darkness”, literally venturing “beyond the light”.
With “Beyond Light”, the new 4th element “Stasis” will be introduced into the game. If this power does not come from the Traveler, it could mean that Guardians turn away from the Light, thus losing access to their Ghost and perhaps gaining a creature similar to the Traveler that takes over the functions that the Ghost currently performs.
Destiny Wants to Fix Old Mistakes
This is what it’s about: It is known that the story of Destiny 1 was overturned late in the development process when the writer John Staten left Bungie.
Luke Smith then had to somehow build a coherent story from the materials available: This was a story reboot, as insiders later reported.
The Stranger was originally intended to be an assistant of Osiris. However, since he was cut from the finished story, she was then repurposed by Smith and used in a strange cutscene to advance the plot.
However, the Stranger was not actually anchored in the story and felt like an outsider when she appeared.
In the finished Destiny 1, the Stranger only appeared to explain that she didn’t have time to explain things. Then the plot moved on.
The Stranger became a symbol that Destiny actually doesn’t tell a coherent story, but only pretends to. Now, however, Smith apparently wants to turn a past necessity into a new virtue six years later. The Stranger has remained memorable precisely because she was so mysterious. Now, Bungie apparently wants to tell her story.
There was an internal break in Destiny in 2016. The initially planned head for Destiny 2, CJ Cowan, left. After that, Luke Smith took the helm. He initially wanted to leave behind the open threads from the story that had been carried for years. At that time, he apparently had no idea what to do with the old concepts like “the Darkness”.
But it seems that has changed now. In 2017, Smith still said:
