There’s a scene at the end of Lightfall I’ve been thinking about a lot. After vanquishing Calus beneath the Veil, it seems like the day is won and evil has ꧒been vanquished. Then Ghost, controlled by The Witness, starts floating towards the Veil. Osiris tries to warn us over staticky comms, but before we can react, Ghost starts making the connection, 🐈which we know will mean the end for the Traveler, and likely the fall of humanity. We draw our weapon, and Caiatl pleads with us to fire at Ghost before it’s too late, but we don’t. Nimbus flies in and grabs Ghost, but the connection has already been made. The Witness succeeds, the Traveler is seemingly defeated, and even though no one will say it, it’s all our fault.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lig🐷htfall has some serious naꦫrrative problems, but I like this moment because♋ it points to a big idea that permeates Lightfall’s story. Ghost is our closest ally and the hesitation our character feels towards killing him is warranted, but that’s not the only reason we don’t pull the trigger. Ghost is our connection to the Light. He’s the source of our power and our immortality. To kill him is effectively killing ourselves, and in that moment we aren’t prepared🍌 to make the ultimate sacrifice.
When the Red Legion invaded Sol and captured the Traveler in Destiny 2’s original campaign, Ghaul succeeded in briefly taking our Light from us. As he pummeled our powerless bodies, he delivered one of Destiny’s most famous lines: “You’re not brave, you’ve merely forgotten the fear of d🌟eath”. Since recovering our Light and defeating Ghaul, we’ve occasionally been asked to grapple with reality that we are superpowered, deathless beings, while our enemies and allies are fragile and temporary. Everyone else lives, suffers, and dies, but we don’t.
When Sagira was killed by the High Celebrant and Osiris lost his Light, we had to face the fact that one of our own was now living his final life. Osiris hasn’t been dealing with that reality very well, and throughout the Lightfall campaign it's clear that becoming mortal has affected him deeply. His struggle is reflected in the Cloud Striders, who only have ten year life spans due to all the cybernetic enhancements in their bodies. They are protectors like us, but in many ways they are our opposite. They chose their power, knowing it would shorten their lives, but we were given our power, raised from the dead by it, and now lead deathless lives.
As Ghost floats towards the Veil and we bring him into our sights, Caiatl and Nimbus at our side, their presence gives the scene even more weight. Caiatl pleads with us to take the shot, and we understand that the cost of doing so will make us mortal, just like her. Nimbus is the one who finally acts, and it's impossible to ignore the fact that, as Cloud Strider, he’s already made the sacrifice we were unwilling to make. Just as we did when Ghaul stole our power, Lightfall is asking us to examine the uneven playing field we’re on, and in some ways, take responsibility for the gifts we’ve been given that we might not deserve.
But how can we? The powers we get from the Light, including immortality, are inseparable from Destiny’s gameplay. The entire power fantasy of the game is predicated on the fact that we are superpowered, deathless beings, and there’s no way that can ever be taken away. We lost the Light during the Red War campaign but quickly recovered it because that’s what Destiny’s gameplay demands. There is no Destiny without the Light, so what’s the point of ques♎tioning it? Thematically, it’s an interesting idea to explore, but narratively, it doesn’t feel like there’s anywhere Bungie can actually go with it.
Lightfall immediately proves it, too. The Witness succeeds, creates a portal in the Traveler, and enters it t🌊o do… whatever it is the Witness is doing, and if Zavala and Ikora are right, the Traveler is dead. But, somehow, we still have the Light. We lost our salvation, everything we’ve been fighting for is gone, and yet there seem to be no consequences at all. Eventually we’ll find out what the Witness is doing, eventually we’ll discover why we still have the Light even if the Traveler is ‘gone’, but we’ll never really have to reckon with what it means to be all-powerful in a powerless world. Bungie is leading us to themes that the gameplay simply can’t support.
This is the second big idea that Lightfall fails to pay off. The larger overarching theme of Destiny is one of moral ambiguity. In the early days of Destiny, things were simple. The Traveler was good, the Light w🐽as good, and we were good. Our enemies, by necessity, were bad, and we had a vague concept of the Darkness, which opposed the Light, and was, by it🎃s nature, bad.
But now, things aren’t so black and white. Beyond Light showed us that Light and Dark are neutrಌal forces that can be used for good if we choose, and overtime we’ve bolstered our defenses with people we once considered enemies, like the Eliksni’s House of Light and Caiatl’s Cabal army. In The Witch Queen, we learned that many of our fundamental understandings of the universe were wrong, or at the very least misinformed, when the Traveler bestowed one of our greatest enemies with the Light. Savathun caused a crisis of faith throughout the Vanguard, and by the end of her story we were no longer even sure the Traveler was on our side anymore. The Saga of Light & Dark is so much more complicated than a basic story of good versus evil, and the Witch Queen left us with many questions about our place in the universe, and about what is right and wrong.
Lightfall abandons those themes almost entirely. When the Witness arrives and attacks the Traveler, it is uncritically positioned as the villain. When Calus pursues the Veil on Neptune, he is a bad guy that must be stopped at all costs. Lightfall is a simple story of good versus evil, and it’s hard to imagine it goꦓing any other way. As much as Destiny has tried to explore moral relativity over the last few years, ultimately, it’s a shooty game and we need a bad guy to shoot. The more evil he is, the more fun it will be to shoot him. I wanted to see how Bungie would get around that problem, but Lightfall didn’t even make an attempt.
There is still time to pull it all together, and I’d like to have faith that Bungie wouldn’t have started down this road if it didn’t have a plan for where Destiny would end up. I applaud the ambition, and I know that Bungie must recognize that exploring these deeper themes is what made The Witch Queen resonate with so 🌳man🗹y people, but after Lightfall it’s hard not to feel like these big ideas are just narrative dead ends.