Acclaimed Flop: Forsaken has been widely praised by critics and fans alike, but still fell short of Activision's sales predictions. This is partly due to the fact that it's a paid DLC like Destiny's The Taken King, and one that comes on top of the initial game that had a poor first year debut. Overall, a lot of players weren't willing to repeat Destiny's tumultuous life cycle with Destiny 2.
Actor Allusion: Should the player get the "We Ran Out of Medals" awards in an Iron Banner match, Saladin will blurt out a sadistic "DIE! DIE! DIE!" before cutting out and reminding himself that he's been watching too many matches. Mind you, Saladin is voiced by Keith Ferguson, who also voices Reaper in Overwatch, where he does indeed shout that line upon activating his ultimate.
For the short time he gets to voice Cayde-6 in Forsaken, Nolan North goes happy-go-lucky with the Hunter Vanguard, all while still voicing the more down-to-earth Ghost in the same mission.
Courtenay Taylor, Amanda Holliday's voice actress, adds Empress Caiatl to her repertoire of voices during Season 13, creating a funny instance at the beginning of the "Battlegrounds: Foothold" mission where the Empress gruffly demands that the Guardians do not interfere, only for her to be trolled by Amanda.
Brian T. Delaney voices Clovis Bray I in all appearances, but also voices Rasputin in Season of the Seraph once the latter becomes active and uses an imprint of Clovis's voice to communicate in English.
In response to increased negativity surrounding the stagnation of the Champion mechanic and Match Game, primarily how both have strict loadout requirements to counter them which was anathema to the game's "play your way" mantra), Lightfall was announced to remove Match Game entirely and rework energy shield interactions and champion counters. Shields now have a universal 50% damage penalty against unmatched weapon types (previously it was 90% under Match Game, 10% in playlists), while various subclass and weapon elemental damage buffs and enemy debuffs were given anti-Champion functionality outside of seasonal artifact mods (such as Strand grenade damage can stun Unstoppable Champions). This meant you had to try harder to find a build that couldn't counter anything properly.
There had been a large number of things underlying the game for years that fans were ambivalent towards, but sentiment would grow more and more negative over time due to a lack of communication from Bungie and a lack of follow-through on promises. This reached a real boiling point during year six, where Lightfall was one of the most negatively reviewed expansions in the franchise history and the ongoing seasonal content moving so erratically that pre-orders for The Final Shape were a reported 45% below expectations (which resulted in significant layoffs at Bungie) and needed to be delayed for further development. Bungie knew they had to turn things around and immediately addressed a large number of problems that they had been neglecting.
They started backing off on microtransactions and similar predatory practices. A sloppily put together "Starter Pack" in the store (containing weapons that may only take a couple hours of playtime to get but cost $10) was removed after player backlash. Discounts were then being offered for older DLC, many of which were 75% off. They started offering free Bright Dust (in-game currency for ornamental purchases) weekly. The big thing was to fill the gap in the schedule with the delay of The Final Shape they created a new content drop called "Into the Light" which was free to all players and designed to be newcomer friendly, allowing you to skip the dull new player introductory missions and get straight into the fight with pre-built character subclasses and gear drops bringing you right up to max light level.
With the advent of Sunsetting where the launch of Beyond Light removed locations, missions and placed a level cap on older gear. The promise was to take the old content and bring it back into the game refurbished and up to newer challenges, but other than a handful of returning locations (some of which only for one season and removed again at the end of the year) this was not really followed up on. "Into the Light" was built around bringing back classic older weapons updated for modern gameplay designs, including the famous Mountaintop and Recluse. Two exotic missions in The Whisper and Zero Hour also return and given new difficulties with different mechanics, along with Whisper of the Worm and Outbreak Perfected given new craftable perks you can unlock over multiple completions. The centerpiece event was a much-requested Horde Mode which called Onslaught, an enemy dense game type with defensive attributes and setting up turrets, tripwires and decoys. Another much-requested feature was a raid boss marathon, being able to challenge the Final Boss of any given raid, which they gave in the form of Pantheon.
Sunsetting also involved removing some older Crucible and Gambit maps, which truncated the map rotation pools and lead to greater stagnation. Over several years only three new crucible maps had emerged, one of which was a returning Dreadnaught map from Destiny 1. Bungie then introduced new Crucible maps based on Europa, Neomuna and the terraformed pyramid ship, and brought back some Gambit maps with alterations to the layout.
As "Into the Light" dropped, a new vidoc for The Final Shape was released and introduced a Prismatic subclass, an All Your Powers Combined that broke the fundamental rules of Destiny gameplay. Exotic Armor was also revealed to be in Class Items, which would combine random attributes of any prior exotic armors, creating the first perk-centered armor chase. And also enormous was an entirely new enemy faction called The Dread and the personal army of The Witness. After all of the above and new reveals, player sentiment improved significantly.
Nearly every major supporting character from the first game returns; this includes (but is not limited to) Lance Reddick, Gina Torres, Nathan Fillion, Bill Nighy and Lennie James. All of them are, again, more widely known for their roles on the big screen.
Oded Fehr voices Osiris in the Curse of Osiris DLC. Fehr himself is better known for his movies and TV series roles.
Channel Hop: On PC, after Bungie ended their relationship with Activision-Blizzard, the game hopped from Activision-Blizzard's Battle.Net to Valve's Steam.
Completely Different Title: Lightfall is marketed as either Eclipse or (roughly) End of the Light in non-English countries.
Due to content being loaded into the game ahead of time (prior to Joker's Wild, expansions loaded a week before release, and the expansions themselves tend to have content meant to become available at later dates), quests, lore entries, and items usually meet this fate at the hands of datamining. The pace at which these leaks occur has caused them to be discussed in a very casual manner compared to other communities to the point of wrongfully assuming It Was His Sled, something the developers have vocally condemned on Twitter.
The tenth wish in the Wall of Wishes was reassembled from the game's code before it was spotted in-game.
The cutscene in which Uldren becomes a Guardian was retrieved from the game files several weeks before Mara's court allowed players to view it in-game.
Season 11, which had almost no information about it officially revealed until a mere hour before its release, had part of its roadmap, including images of the season pass armor, the tree of silver wings, and information about the Prophecy dungeon leaked by a Chinese user. What makes this leak particularly interesting is that the leaker decided to call it fake about a day after it was uploaded, leading to a rather surprised audience in the datamining community once the reveal stream showed it was Real After All.
YouTuber WishYaLuckk obtained several bits of information on Beyond Light prematurely which turned out to be accurate in later reveal trailers, such as an Exotic that replaces the Hunter dodge with a Flash Step and a gun named "Duality." Like the Season of Arrivals leak, it was initially hard to take seriously, this time due to him both being blacklisted from collaborating with Bungie in any official capacity and claiming that the game was switching engines from the current one (named "Tiger") to a new one named "Vulcan," which was later proven false by Bungie employees and thus assumed to be a case of Spotting the Thread.
All encounters and a significant portion of the mechanics for the Deep Stone Crypt raid leaked within days of the launch of Beyond Light (the raid itself didn't unlock until November 21st, 2020), both by datamining the associated triumphs (as the first sub-bullet discusses) and by physically breaking into the area using glitches/exploits combined with Advanced Movement Techniques.
After the release of Season of the Splicer, a picture of a Notepad document surfaced on the Internet containing details of story beats and features that shipped with Season of the Worthy and Splicer, while also giving major alleged spoilers for future seasons and events plus what is stated to be the central twists of The Witch Queen. While initially thought to be fake, analysis dated the picture to at least April 23rd, 2021 (Season of the Splicer was announced and released in May), confirming it to be a leak of some nature if not an outright "gigaleak."
After the above leak, another text document and later a grainy picture of unreleased key art further spoiling the plot of The Witch Queen and some more non-story details in Season of the Lost surfaced. Also thought to be fake, the depiction of Savathun in the photo eventually turned out to be a perfect match for a snippet of a cinematic teased by Bungie to advertise the expansion's proper reveal stream on August 24th, 2021. Extra details in the photo also corroborated the twists mentioned in the text document, as a consequence of this, and the severity of the leaks coupled with rumors of even more leaks whose origins border on active corporate espionage and personal vendettas led the greater community to almost unanimously cease discussion of them, even in previously-dedicated spaces.
A developer's Artstation portfolio for Season of the Haunted accidentally spoiled the color of the fifth subclass element and second Darkness element Strand (a Sickly Green Glow), a good while before Lightfall was officially announced and revealed Strand to the public.
The plot of Lightfall and Season of Defiance leaked onto the internet shortly before its release, along with story details describing The Final Shape.
The general outline of Season of the Deep, its sandbox changes, and all weapons appearing in the season were leaked by Ekuegan, a semi-notable streamer who attended a community summit. He was promptly excommunicated from Bungie and restricted from streaming the game as punishment; Bungie would later investigate their previous interactions with him and discover he was also responsible for an unknown number of the previous examples listed here.
The emblem codes associated with the Alternate Reality Game of The Final Shape Collector's Edition leaked several weeks before they were intended to ship to regular consumers.
Creator Backlash: The development team shared they had similar misgivings with the player community when it came to how broken the Stasis powers were in the "Beyond Light" launch. The concept of ice and freezing powers, especially in pvp, was fundamentally at odds with the high mobility run-and-gun style of the game. But with the time crunch and being so far along in development they kept ramping up its powers to fulfill the Power Fantasy. They knew from the beginning they would have to integrate at least three sets of nerfsnote Mostly in pvp because being frozen in combat was actively harming the player experience, the biggest nerf involved only supers able to actually freeze you with melee and grenades only having a slowing effect with no impact on gun performance before bringing it more in step with the other subclasses, which happened about 9 months later.
Dear Negative Reader: An intentionally-Dummied Out entry in "Truth to Power" only appears to dataminers searching the respective files in the game's API. It's a letter to the datamining community from the author Seth J. Dickinson written in-character as Riven, which warns them of how reading Content Leaks can negatively impact a player's experience of a work and lead them to improperly judge unfinished content as final products. The existence of the entry was discovered after rampant speculation occurred due to a datamine leaking both the book and Crow's resurrection, and is clearly an address at the attitudes that went into those reactions.
Development Gag: Reincorporating and referencing unused story beats and items from earlier drafts of Destiny as a series seems to be a recurring thing through the different seasons.
The Exotic Auto Rifle (or more appropriately "Gatling Rifle"), "Sweet Business", was previously going to be name for the "Fourth Horseman" Exotic Shotgun.
The Wardcliff Coil (Originally known as the Dubious Volley) was planned to appear inDestiny, but never materialized. The fandom was ecstatic at the prospect of finally getting to use it.
The IKELOS_HC unlock quest, which involves pulling the weapon from a special Engram within a Warmind chamber on Mars, is likely a Call-Back to a marketing claim from Destiny's pre-alpha stating that Thorn (also a unique hand cannon) could be found in the vault of the Martian Warmind, Charlemagne (who is now Rasputin's submind in the final story draft.)
The Duke Mk. 44 hand cannon is a reference to the gun of the same name from Destiny 1, which was cut from the final release for unknown reasons. Its perk tree also homages the first game by being arranged according to said game's layout (where every other column is a main perk) rather than the current layout (where the main perks take up the second half of the tree.)
Thunderlord originally being obtained from killing a boss in the Cosmodrome at the end of the quest to avenge Master Ives is a reference to the first gameplay reveal of the first Destiny, where a boss is killed in the same location and drops Thunderlord (something that would never happen in the game proper.)
The climax of the "Risk/Reward" quest has the player emerge from a facility in the Cosmodrome into an open field where new players are likely attempting to kill Fallen around the area, during which the player is seemingly prodded into using their gear to awe the newbies - something that evokes the imagery of another segment of Destiny's first gameplay reveal, which features an encounter of similar nature (and which was also, at the very least, very unlikely to occur in the game proper.)
Season of Undying was introduced using a cinematic cutscene that was meant for the original story draft of Destiny 1.
The chassis of Rasputin's original form when he was first constructed is found together with Felwinter's remains in the Seraph Berth on Luna during Season of the Worthy. The room and the old casing are an exact reconstruction of a piece of concept art that was intended to depict his true and current form.
Season of Arrivals ends with Rasputin uploaded into an engram to save his life, with Ana hoping to transfer him to an Exo frame. This references the original draft for his character, who was an Exo that Oryx kidnapped and took to the Dreadnought (at which point it would be revealed that Rasputin was merely possessing them, rather than actually being the Exo.) Season of the Seraph later lampshades this fact, as the first thing Rasputin says when he is transferred to said Exo frame is that it feels familiar.
Uldren's revival as a Guardian eventually leads up to him becoming his previous incarnation from the gameplay reveal mentioned above, the Crow, in Beyond Light. The icon of Season of the Hunt is also the same one printed on his chest armor in the scrapped cutscene depicting him.
In a similar manner, the unused cutscene where Uldren holds the player at gunpoint is heavily implied during the Hawkmoon quest to exist in-universe as a strange vision from the Traveler that neither Uldren (as the Crow) nor the player have a proper explanation for.
As mentioned in Word of God below, the setting of the Presage quest is based on the scrapped Cassini location from the first game, this time more directly than the lore-only First Fleet and in a playable manner.
Stasis was originally conceptualized as a time-based element. This is referenced twice in-game, with Ikora Rey and Chalco Yong noting its affinity for Vex systems in The Witch Queen and Season of the Wish revealing Elsie still believes Stasis is about time, rather than control as Osiris and the Darkness's agents postulate.
Many early Exotics were set up to accept shaders, although it's currently impossible to apply one to the weapon. You can see how a shader would look on a kinetic Exotic by inspecting the Shader with that weapon equipped.
The palettes for the Adept Vow of the Disciple weapons and the Year 4 armor sets from Crucible, Gambit, and Strikes all have matching shaders in the game's code, which go unused for an unknown reason.
Easter Egg: In the Sunken Isles of the European Dead Zone, there's a small island populated by an abnormally toughReaver Vandal and a Shank. This in reference to Destiny 1's "Randal the Vandal", a Reaver Vandal in the Cosmodrome who was unusually tough due to a bug, but became loved by the community.
Executive Meddling: Oh dear - in the lead up to The Final Shape, an enormous amount of poor executive decisions came to light after Bungie was forced to make a large number of layoffs. Among others, the developers admitted to not wanting to include micro transactions, but were overruled.
Cayde-6 is essentially an Audience Surrogate during the "Rally The Troops" trailer - he complains about losing all of his old gear, gives the Big Bad a mundane nickname, and ultimately only manages to rouse the Guardians by promising a lot of new loot.
The 2020 Dawning makes reference to the Fan Nickname for matchmade team members (who are often depicted as either stupid and/or newer to the game), "blueberries," by having actual blueberries be the Trademark Favorite Food of Shaw Han, the person present throughout much of the tutorial quest.
The "Memory of Bruce" Ghost Projection is the actual paw print of a Bungie employee's ferret named Bruce, who died in late 2021.
After Lance Reddick's sudden passing, players would gather by Commander Zavala in the Tower and present an appropriate emote as a vigil (typically involving candles, or a sword and shield evoking an honor guard).
Following the example set by the first game, a large number of features and adventures are not announced in any form either as a trailer or as a press release. This largely manifests in players discovering a secret puzzle to solve or a full-fledged mission to engage with. These missions, by their nature, also have little hand-holding on how to finish the mission. Missions like The Whisper and Zero Hour were identical in having no communication from Bungie but being timed missions you have to complete multiple times to acquire and upgrade the exotic weapons Whisper of the Worm and Outbreak Perfected. The intent seems to be a combination of trying to avoid Trailers Always Spoil and seek to support the community by giving them a niche to cover such hype territory.
Upon the switch to the seasonal model, four mini-expansions every year with a weekly updates, the flaws of this approach started having a detrimental impact on the playerbase. Season of Arrivals, Season of the Haunted, Season of Plunder and Season of the Seraph received zero marketing before the day of their release. The only reason players were able to have a grasp of the contents of those seasons beforehand were due to Content Leaks and one or two lines of Foreshadowing in the prior seasons.note Season of Arrivals is the main exception, as much of the year was hinting towards the payoff for The Stinger of the Red War, with the B-plot of Season of the Worthy affirming the pyramid ships are about to enter the Sol system. This has drawn some criticism among the community as it caters a bit TOO much to the dedicated players who will play whatever is put in front of them and instead of getting excited to play the game the Gameplay and Story Integration leaves them confused rather than immersed. A "State of the Game" announcement shortly before Lightfall addressed this and promised more communication, surprising players by being upfront with the names of the first two of year six Season of Defiance and Season of the Deep (previous comms often left them as "Season of [redacted]").
Missing Episode: With the reveal of the Beyond Light expansion Bungie announced the concept of "sunsetting" content from the game. Major story and game content would be removed (while the gear associated with them would receive a level cap, preventing them from being used for anything besides casual patrols and basic playlist activities). This was apparently done for technical reasons, the game was growing exponentially larger creating added stress on programming and servers, but this has a unique quality in that being an online game means no one is able to play that content anymore.
The launch of the "Beyond Light" expansion resulted in removing all campaigns from the first year including the base game, "Curse of Osiris" and "Warmind," along with Mercury, Mars, Io and Titan. Also removed was the Leviathan and all associated content with it (four raids, the Menagerie, trophy room and a number of story quests), plus the Black Armory and Reckoning gametypes.
The launch of "The Witch Queen" sees the additional removal of the Tangled Shore, Forsaken Campaign, and all associated quests tied to either of them. As a result, all playable story material from the first two years of the game's history is now permanently lost, with only the Dreaming City and Warden of Nothing strike as functional remnants.
The seasonal content that started with year three after "Shadowkeep" was intended from the beginning to have a time limit, as it was meant to tell an ongoing story with group activities that were meant to spice up game types for a few months before rotating it out with the start of the next season and associated game types. There was some controversy over this approach, as it forced heavy grinding to acquire the available gear available for the season and some unexpected player behavior made it near impossible given the 3 month time crunchnote One of the triumphs for Season of the Worthy involved completing the new public event with Warsat Towers involved never failing a charge deployment due to enemies taking over the platform. Since it was a public event in the regular patrol space and not a matchmade activity, actually having enough players to do so was a scattershot. While not impossible to complete the basic activity with friends, you really needed random players to join in to complete the triumph. This triumph was also not available until halfway through the season, when the majority of the playerbase had already burned out on the introductory events of the season. Bungie rectified this with year four seasonal content by not cycling them out with every season, as each season with the associated questlines, game types and gear remained in the game up until the launch of "The Witch Queen" over a year later.
While Lightfall didn't officially sunset any gear or story content, build crafting mods that had been in the game since Shadowkeep were removed. Charged with Light note Mods to build up a charge next to Mods that will make use of that charge to impact gameplay, Elemental Wells note Mods that create dropped elemental affinity pockets of light that boosts ability recharges and Mods that enhance or modify elemental abilities and Warmind Cells note Mods and Warmind themed weapons to create cells and Mods that impact how the Warmind Cells behave were gone, replaced with a more unified Armor Charge system that emulates a number of the perks of those mods but with different functionality.
Nolan North replaces Nathan Fillion as Cayde-6 for his appearance in Forsaken, given the latter actor's schedule prevented him from doing further voicework for Cayde after Destiny 2's launch.
Erika Ishii replaces Jamie Chung as Ana Bray during the Season of the Worthy and Beyond Light, accordingly re-recording all of Ana's Warmind dialogue.
Lauren Cohan did not reprise her role as the Exo Stranger for Beyond Light, with the role instead going to Moira Quirk, who voiced the Emissary of the Nine.
Mara Junot replaces Gina Torres as Ikora starting in Season of the Splicer, for reasons as of yet unknown.
Keith David took up the role of Commander Zavala after the tragic passing of Lance Reddick in 2023.
Fake leaks of future seasons/expansions pop up on an infrequent basis in the community, which have been noted to have a repeated habit of simply being Wild Mass Guessing based on existing lore, under the guise of classified information from Bungie.
Matthew Mercer and Mark Hamill were initially mistaken for the voices of Shin Malphur and Nokris respectively upon their voiced debuts. The credits revealed the former to actually be Crispin Freeman, while Hamill personally disproved the latter. The identity of Nokris's actual VA is currently unknown.
Queer Character, Queer Actor: Non-binary Nimbus is voiced by Marin Miller; according to them, Bungie made a point of seeking out an actor who matched Nimbus' gender identity
Real Life Writes the Plot: The Game Engine used has code that tracks all the way back to Halo: Combat Evolved, a proprietary engine nicknamed "Tiger." It has been reformatted and upgraded over the course of Bungies' Halo and Destiny lifespan but there have been many times where the game developers are looking to do something unique that the engine was never designed to do, and no amount of DLC updates and patches can directly resolve that issue. Comments from Bungie indicated that the existence of Destiny 2 and its Sequel Reset story is in part because they needed a deeper architecture overhaul in order to match their vision of the game, which was not something they accounted for when the first Destiny was released. For Beyond Light the game underwent a process called "sunsetting" where they removed story content and certain environments from the first year of the game, for much of the same reason as it was overtaxing the engine and it was more effective to cut out old content than make sure it worked under a new system. Since Beyond Light each expansion required an entire deletion and installing of the game again, meaning that spiritually Destiny 3, 4 and 5 have in fact occurred on a technical level even if remaining under the Destiny 2 banner.
Retronym: The Year Two DLC was originally named The Black Armory, Jokers Wild and Penumbra, but came with subtitles of Season of the Forge, Season of the Drifter and Season of Opulence as they were not intended to be complete expansions like Year One's Curse of Osiris and Warmind. Year Three DLC was made clearer that this was a more protracted, ongoing story and followed the "Season of X" naming scheme that was originally the subtitles of Year Two.
Shadowkeep was delayed a week from their scheduled release (reasons are unknown, but possible network optimization concerns).
The Witch Queen was announced for November 2021 but later changed to February 2022. This was seen well in advance, allowing Bungie to make a "30th Anniversary" DLC with a new dungeon and 6-player activity along with plenty of Bungie-history themed weapons and ornaments.
The Final Shape was delayed from February 2024 to June 2024. Unlike with The Witch Queen, which had nearly a year to produce the 30th Anniversary pack to fill the gap, this was only announced a few months ahead of time and amid significant layoffs across the entire company. This resulted in some scrambling to not only produce content quickly but tie it into the ongoing story to keep up the hype. The solution was to push up the Guardian Games spring event a few months, and revealed an "Into the Light" free-to-play activity that includes a new horde-style game mode and new weaponry.
Throw It In!: The incredibly silly "Operation Babydog" opening happened completely on accident. Thankfully, Lance Reddick and Gideon Emery managed to keep in character when talking it over, both Corpsing heavily.
Trolling Creator: Taken to meta-levels. Details surrounding the Dreaming City curse in the "Truth to Power" lore book implied that the curse would be lifted if a Guardian reached 999 light and defeat the final boss of the Shattered Throne dungeon Dul Incaru by themselves. In the Shadowkeep expansion, using the technically infinite light level progression with the Seasonal Artifact, one player was able to reach that level and was coached into soloing the Shattered Throne by more seasoned streamers. Once beaten... nothing happened. Bungie released a tweet the following day referencing the accomplishment from an In-Universe perspective, and those familiar with the lore noted that it has a heavy Unreliable Narrator element to it.
According to Jason Schreier, the game underwent a complete reboot in production about sixteen months from release when Luke Smith took over as Game Director. Apparently, many of the current woes that the fandom is expressing (Mainly the Eververse) can be traced back to this decision. For anyone who thinks that this sounds familiar, that's because the exact same thing happened to the first game.
Because of the way the game's development is heavily compartmentalized, feedback response and investment into various aspects of the game's content can fluctuate wildly, leading to hiccups such as Season of Plunder lacking several quality-of-life enhancements for loot introduced in the season prior or bugs taking upwards of several months to address. The company's diversion of resources to the Destiny extended universe, Marathon's reboot, and Matter has also led to the increased deprivation of content for non-paid aspects of the game due to being commercially nonviable, culminating in the complete deprecation of Gambit as a mandatory source of rewards post-Final Shape.
During the Season of the Drifter near the end of Year 2, Activision and Bungie officially parted ways on game development, after having a difficult relationship from the start of the franchise. Rumors imply that Bungie threw a party to celebrate. Year 3 and the release of Shadowkeep was Bungie making the game closer to what they wanted it to be, but the overhaul on PC was massive as they had to switch from the Battle.Net client to Steam.
Massive drops in player engagement after Lightfall (a reported 45% below expected revenue) caused Bungie to lay off a significant number of employees in October 2023, resulting in the release of The Final Shape being pushed back to June 2024. Adding to the issues were that many of those employees had been long time members of Bungie (including Michael Salvatori), which took out a significant chunk of Bungie's in-house institutional knowledge. Further information came out that upper management had been trying to develop other games and were resistant to quality-of-life improvements because it was almost ten years old and slowing down, but when production stalled on the other games the damage to the Destiny player base was causing them to bleed money.
Uncredited Role: While Bungie is fairly transparent about its casting and usually updates the credits list every season, some roles are left as a mystery. Taeko-3 is left uncredited despite talking a lot in the Strike she appears in, while no one can identify Nokris's voice actor during Season of Arrivals.
Urban Legend of Zelda: The 15th wish for the Wall of Wishes has occasionally been subject to this, as the wish itself is as of writing yet to be discovered.note Neither does it exist in-game; both Word of God and datamining have either suggested or outright confirmed this. Note that with 17^20/over 4 septillion possible "codes" for the wall, it would be impossible to ever brute-force a wish. This typically involves Epileptic Trees about subtle visual clues (and in at least one case, advanced math) that eventually turn out to be completely irrelevant.
Coldheart used to be a heat-based weapon, but was immediately changed to ice upon realizing that it contradicted with the weapon's design. By release, it's become an Arc weapon; initial hopes of a new ice damage type being added to the classic trio at release have been dashed.
Sweet Business was initially a pulse rifle with the same function. It was also green before being switched to red.
A large chunk of The Inverted Spire's dialogue was cut from the final release, most likely due to complaints about the unrealistically childish nature of the writing.
Early concept art for Riven's appearance had her taking a much more Taken aesthetic, lacking the eyes and nested maw of her final version and having root-like appendages for limbs.
Early translation quirks suggest Ganymede was considered in place of Io for the main campaign's fourth destination. Nessus was also supposedly originally called "the Myriad."
Datamines over the course of the game's history would frequently bring up a reputation meter for an event called Armsweek along with NPC data for representative Frames belonging to each major weapon foundry, leading to rampant speculation about the introduction of a system similar to Armsday from the first Destiny. Unfortunately, it was eventually determined to be a fragment from an older draft of the game.
Comments by Bungie staff and some datamine details indicate that the Strand subclass originated as a poison or toxic themed subclass, before being heavily revamped into something more esoteric.
According to Datto (who initially described the process using a metaphor of "adding turkeys vs. adding dogs"), the reintroduction of random rolls in Forsaken was almost a compromise, with only the first perk randomly generated and the second remaining fixed like in Year 1. This was quickly changed after a community summit pointed out how ridiculous the idea was relative to the old system's criticism at the time. However, the idea was reincorporated into the Timelost weapons from Vault of Glass years later, which can switch between a fixed roll, a random roll, or a combination of the two's perks at will.
In response to the continued negativity, Bungie's own website forums will be restricted to players who actually have a Destiny account, and Destiny 2 topics will have an extra requirement of having played the game up to reaching the Farm. This effectively locks out anyone who doesn't own the game, even veteran members of the site.
Repeated harassment (including death threats directed at Kevin Yanes for saying Twilight Garrison won't be returning) has caused Bungie developers to reduce communication on upcoming changes to the game. In July 2022, this escalated to suing a 19-year-old streamer for engaging in an organized harassment campaign against the company while also committing numerous other terms-of-service violations.
Robert Brookes, the narrative designer for Bungie, revealed that he's been writing the relationship between Osiris and Saint-14 as genuinely romantic, and that this was the intent since before he began working at Bungie, or held his current position. He noted the private, nuanced nature of the characters and relationship, but felt it was important to state the representation outright in an era where queerbaiting is still common. Their relationship then began to get more of a spotlight, culminating in a cutscene in "Season of Plunder."
On National Coming Out Day 2022, Bungie released a series of wallpapers establishing the sexuality of several other characters:
Seth J. Dickinson, author of the reading material included with the collector's edition of Beyond Light along with some other lore books (notably Truth to Power), very explicitly denied that Clovis Bray I had some form of autism following speculation that the disorder might explain his stranger behaviors, as he felt that given how much the texts elaborate on Clovis's villainy, attributing his more bizarre traits to the spectrum would risk making the harmful association between said villainy and autism.
According to Tom Farnsworth and Shiek Wang, Bungie's creative director and art director respectively, the Glykon (where the Exotic quest Presage takes place) is in fact a Broad Strokes adaptation of the Cassini fleet, a scrapped location for the first game. This wouldn't be the first time Cassini was referenced, though, as the lore-only First Fleet is suggested to be a part of Cassini that Oryx destroyed during the Collapse.
According to the game's narrative team, the reason the Witness was looking for Nezarec's relics in Season of Plunder was for the entirely-pragmatic reason of extracting a source of pure Darkness. The same post also clarifies that given how tiny the relics actually are, his corpse is still mostly in one piece.
Working Title: Beyond Light is referred to as "Stardust" in the metadata for the teasers leading up to its official announcement, and The Witch Queen is referred to as "Nova" in similar teasers. Lightfall was also announced with the intent of the name being a working title that could change later in development.
Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Due to Troubled Production, Destiny from the beginning was wrought with inconsistent storytelling, ill-defined characters and Worldbuilding so vague it lacks any actual clues to understand its meaning. While the first game was able to recover by creating stronger narratives in The Taken King and Rise of Iron, Destiny 2 was when they were able to craft a more solid story arc to drive the gameplay. But rotating writers and story development leads still meant they had to follow up on plot points set-up by other people years in the past. Notably, the Lightfall campaign finally gave some explanation for what the Black Heart in the Black Garden actually is, the same Black Heart guardians destroyed in the main campaign of Destiny 1 nine years prior.
While Matthew Mercer and Crispin Freeman mainly respectively provide the voice for the playable male Human and Awoken Guardians since the first game, they get additional roles in the form of Fikrul and Shin Malphur, respectively.
Brian T. Delaney voices Saint-14 and Clovis Bray, with the latter being contained within Europa's stories and thus not interacting with the former.
For Season of the Splicer, Andrew Morgado provided the voice for Mithrax, now an ally of the Tower with a main role within the season. Morgado would come back in The Witch Queen as the antagonistic Rhulk, Disciple of the Witness.
Dee Bradley Baker mainly voices Variks (a holdover from the first game), but picked up a minor role in The Witch Queen as Savathûn's Worm.
Miscellaneous
Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Todd Haberkorn could not provide lines as the Drifter for the Salvation's Grip mission, so Nolan North filled in per one of the writers' suggestion and was able to mimic Drifter so well they had to tell him to re-record the lines but be intentionally worse.
Bungie has revealed the actual sources of a few weapon and ability sound effects, some of which are distinctly off-the-wall:
Ruinous Effigy is the sound of a Japanese toilet flushing.
Parasite's sounds are taken from a developer's bowl of beef mac-and-cheese.
The Threadrunner's rope dart is a bunch of marbles being dumped into a balloon.
The Lament's chainsaw-like sounds are actually using breast pump noises.
of the first Destiny, where a boss is killed in the same location and drops Thunderlord (something that would never happen in the game proper.)
