The Future franchise has had some long-running mysteries since its beginning practically 9 years in the past, and Future 2 has solely deepened them because it launched. So it’s a tad stunning that, after years of providing extra mysteries than solutions, Bungie determined to drop a large lore bomb on a random Tuesday in the course of Future 2: Season of the Deep.
The brand new cutscene, which seems after the week 5 a part of the “Into the Depths” quest, explains the origins of the sequence’ massive dangerous, The Witness, and even begins unraveling the thriller of The Veil — the MacGuffin gamers chased all through the newest Lightfall enlargement, solely to study nothing about it in the long run. Extra importantly, the cutscene lastly offers gamers some info on what The Traveler — the enormous area orb that has sat in Future’s skyline for practically a decade — truly 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 opens on a gaggle of individuals from the identical alien race that The Witness comes from. Sloane (a long-forgotten NPC) tells the participant about The Witness’ progenitors, and the way they have been struggling alone on their planet. The Traveler, it seems, was buried on their dwelling world all alongside.
After being liberated from the planet, The Traveler blessed The Witness’ folks with a Golden Age, they usually known as it The Gardener. This identify is critical, because it confirms that The Traveler and The Gardener — thought to doubtlessly be two completely different Mild entities for years — are literally one and the identical.
Throughout the cutscene’s depiction of this Golden Age, we see that these folks constructed the ominous Pyramid Ships which have threatened gamers for the reason that ending of Future 2’s Purple Warfare marketing campaign. However after “eons” of prosperity, the folks grew bored with The Traveler’s silence, and demanded that it give them some type of additional steerage. This led the folks to seek for an entity that The Gardener shared a reference to: The Winnower or, as we all know it, The Veil.
That is probably the most important lore revealed within the cutscene. Bungie has lengthy teased gamers in regards to the identities of the prime forces of Mild and Darkness — calling one The Gardner and the opposite The Winnower — and Guardians have spent years speculating who or what they may very well be. Now we all know that The Gardener is The Traveler (a being of pure Mild) and The Winnower is The Veil (the Traveler’s Darkness counterpart).
The Witness’ folks discovered The Veil, and in flip, it taught them in regards to the nature of Mild and Darkish. They found that Mild is able to each creation and destruction. In order that they deemed the Mild to be a power of chaos, saying it wanted to be tamed. The Darkness was their reply to this chaos, because it was formed by “thought and consciousness.”
![A black and white mosaic of The Witness’ people worshiping The Light and The Darkness in Destiny 2](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/OpX0yLhlKo3f6I1Jqx6lpFXjLRQ=/0x0:1920x1080/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1920x1080):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24739022/Destiny_2__Lightfall___WITNESS_ORIGINS_CUTSCENE___1_56_screenshot.png)
Picture: Bungie by way of Redrix on YouTube
Through the use of The Darkness to tame The Mild, The Witness’ folks believed that it may create the proper universe, which they known as The Last Form. That is one other important reveal, because it offers which means to the identify of Future 2’s subsequent enlargement: The Last Form.
Nevertheless, when The Witness’ folks tried to make use of The Veil to tame The Traveler, the orb deserted them. Unable to simply accept that their Last Form would by no means come to be, they used The Darkness to merge themselves — all the remaining members of the species — into The Witness (so named as a result of that they had “witnessed the reality within the darkness”).
Since then, The Witness has chased The Traveler by way of the cosmos in an try to “impose which means on a meaningless universe.” The cutscene ends with a picture of the merged Traveler and Veil, which occurred on the finish of the Lightfall marketing campaign.
In somewhat over three and a half minutes, Bungie defined your complete setup for Future’s Mild and Darkness saga, which is about to finish with The Last Form. And whereas it’s nonetheless at the moment unclear who or what created The Traveler and The Veil (and who is aware of if we’ll ever get these solutions), that is probably the most info we’ve ever gotten on the origins of The Mild, The Darkness, and The Witness.
This cutscene is a welcome style of transparency after Bungie’s overly cryptic Lightfall enlargement. Right here’s hoping that the studio sticks the touchdown in The Last Form, which it should formally reveal on Aug. 22 in its annual Future 2 Showcase.