While the big Destiny 2 “event” yesterday was supposed to be the unlocking of the Izanami Forge, that turned out to be…quite the tedious process, and instead actual excitement was generated by a pair of big story additions to the game, something that is unusual to see to this degree three full months after the launch of the last expansion.
The Dreaming City has been caught on a “curse loop” since Forsaken launched, a three week cycle where we repeat all the same activities in a way that is sort of a clever storytelling explanation for re-grinding content. But one bonus of the curse storyline is that it’s…a storyline. As in, more and more keeps being added to it over time. One significant story component of the curse is a visit to Queen Mara Sov every three weeks in her throne world. Three weeks ago, we saw her meeting with the Awoken Emissary of the Nine. This week? Uh, well, let’s just say this is the biggest story development since Forsaken launched.
Spoilers follow. If you don’t want to know what happens until you find out for yourself, go grind the Blind Well and turn in your offering to go see Mara. If you don’t want to do that (and I wouldn’t blame you), I’ll talk about the cutscene (yes, cutscene!) and show it below.
Mara is not in her throne room, but there’s a holographic object you can interact with there. That will trigger a cutscene that shows a ghost sailing along in the Dreaming City, scanning a dead body and whoops, resurrecting Prince Uldren.
Wait what?
There’s a lot to dissect here:
- This ghost actually has its own lore. It’s a ghost nicknamed “Pulled Pork” by Guardians who have watched it search for its Guardian for ages, since before the battle of the Twilight Gap. They joke that someday it might find the greatest Guardian of all time. This is that same ghost, as it looks exactly how its described in the lore.
- I don’t know why I never realized it, but Uldren was never a Guardian. I sort of assume everyone you meet in Destiny is, unless they make a big deal about not being one like Hawthorne. That means after everything Uldren did, the Traveler somehow chose him to come back to life.
- Guardians are supposed to experience total memory loss of their lives before being Guardians, so even though Uldren is back, he might effectively be an entirely new person and not the villainous a-hole we spent the whole Forsaken campaign hunting down.
- Some fans are speculating about the nature of the “Hunter dare” where somehow Uldren, after killing Cayde and taking his stuff, could become the next Hunter Vanguard. I…somehow doubt this will happen.
Here’s the scene if you want to watch it without Blind Well-ing:
But Uldren coming back to life isn’t the only way the story moved forward this week. Once you unlock this cutscene, you’ll be treated to a new lore entry, a new Dreaming City story that appears to be a message from the long-lost Eris Morn. It’s riddled with weird typos, which I thought was a code, but in fact it’s…something else.
A new level of spoilers follow here, as this entire story has been datamined.
As you eventually learn in this story with future lore cards, this is not Eris, but instead Medusa, a golden age AI trying to impersonate Eris to try to make contact with you, hence all the weird letters in the messages, as your ghost tries to strip away the encryption, and eventually succeeds. She’s supposed to be a great AI mind like Rasputin, only one that collected human knowledge instead of waging war. There’s a theory she might also be an agent or alternate persona of Quira, the Taken Vex Mind. All of this may be leading to the nature of next fall’s big DLC, whatever that is, as it feels like a larger story is brewing.
The point being, it’s pretty amazing that we’re now three months after the launch of Forsaken and I’m still writing thousand word articles about burgeoning story threads. In that sense Destiny really does feel like a living world without yawning periods of dead time, both in timers of content with this annual pass stuff, but also through its storytelling. And it’s pretty great.
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