I remember something about the Mars Curiosity team visiting Bungie awhile back. Imagine if they included her or a monument of sorts on the planet. :)

I was thinking along these lines, too. Maybe get really old school and find some of the Viking probes and whatnot.

There should also be adventures on space stations at Lagrange points, because Lagrange points are sexy.

I think keeping it within our solar system(?) allows them to ground it in conceivable technology, especially since we're looking to send manned missions to Mars within 50 years or so.

I like when science fiction doesn't use the "it's a magic space orb we found that can do whatever" excuse for creating the fantastical technologies. It kind of betrays the core of what science fiction is to me...

I definitely agree. One of my favorite things about Firefly is the fact that they never develop FTL, and it seems to me that is similar in Destiny. Also having it in our solar system makes it a lot cooler because it's something we can actually see (to some degree) in real life! How cool is that!

I like when science fiction doesn't use the "it's a magic space orb we found that can do whatever" excuse for creating the fantastical technologies. It kind of betrays the core of what science fiction is to me...

Agreed, magic space orbs are a horrible idea that should never…

…oh. :p

- No text -

So let's look at the description again.

“The City wants us to recover a piece of Charlemagne, one of the great Warminds of the Golden Age—a vast machine intelligence built by the ancient Powers of Mars. The Cabal do everything they can to try and stop our descent, but we keep pushing, rifles cracking and Traveler energy boiling from our fists until the only thing left standing is us, and the only thing left of the Cabal is the loot they hid in Charlemagne’s vault."

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that Joyeuse will be some element of Charlemagne. Charlemagne itself is presumably a long-dead AI, but perhaps we as players will be able to combine recovered fragments to recreate Joyeuse. It makes sense that we'd have some sort of AI leading and coordinating player efforts, perhaps brought online a ways after the game begins.

I wonder if perhaps we won't see Charlemagne return in some capacity as a villainous AI? I'm not saying this will be Marathon all over again, but Bungie does love sending human AIs off to alien civilizations and seeing how they react. Perhaps the mind behind the Vex (who do TIME TRAVEL, note, perhaps to before Charles Magnus was offline?) is more familiar than we might think.

And then, indeed, what better weapon to stop Charlemagne than his own sword?

Also of interest is the way "The City" is both capitalized and personified. Who is our air traffic controller here? Who assigns missions to us? Is it an AI? Some remnant of the Traveler? Or perhaps just a high council of Guardians?

I am all sorts of eagerly curious.

So, an early childhood obsession with Marathon got me hooked on legendary swords.

There were indeed three mythical blades in the Song of Roland--Durendal (Durandal), Curtana (Cortana), and Joyeuse. Durendal (or Durindana) was wielded by Roland himself in battle, and was known for its endurance. It was lost upon Roland's death at the hands of the Moors, in the climax of the Song of Roland (spoilers!).

Curtana was originally the sword of Tristan, the one who married Iseult, but gained greatest fame as the sword of Ogier the Dane, greatest of Charlemagne's enemies and later one of his dearest allies. The term Curtana is also used to refer to any cut-down sword, most notably the sword of Edward the Confessor, known as the Sword of Mercy.

But we already knew all about Durandal and Cortana. So I've been scrawling "WHERE IS JOYEUSE?" in my notebooks for years, waiting for the third shoe to drop. And instead we get... Charlemagne himself? Now THAT'S interesting. But ah, we note that Charlemagne is only ONE of the great Warminds of old Mars. Perhaps we will yet see Joyeuse? Or perhaps Joyeuse will be a component of Charlemagne?

And what IS Joyeuse? Joyeuse, according to the legend, was the mythical sword of Charlemagne, the Sword of Light. It changed colors many times every day! It was used to behead Ogier's father and then knight Ogier himself as a paladin. It's currently part of the French regalia, but it's arguable whether or not that's the real Joyeuse.

SUFFICE IT TO SAY, I AM VERY EXCITED WE'RE SEEING MORE SWORD-AIS IN DESTINY.

~Duk

After I saw Charlemagne I went on a Wikipedia spree and I was going to post about it here but you mostly beat me to it. I say mostly because it looks to me like what ties this stuff together is the Matter of France. Looking at the related pages there are some interesting names (along with at least one in the list of notable swords).
With the article that was linked yesterday, this is the second time they've mentioned Charlemagne in less than a month of the game being officially publicly known. Given that, the historical significance of its namesake, and how central its namesake is to one of the main things that seems to tie their universes together, I'm theorizing it's a significant element of the game, whether it's a character or more of a plot point or whatever, and I'm theorizing they're using Charlemagne instead of Joyeuse.
There's also the possibility of Almace being tied into all this. They may well have Charlemagne as a red herring and have other relatedly-named things play a bigger role. Then there's the fact that Marathon and Halo reference a mythical weapon that's not a sword and doesn't seem to be related to the Matter of France: Mjolnir... so who can say?

Maybe this is Bungie's third trilogy of trilogies of games about AI's named after famous swords.

Everything Bungie has ever created is a reference to The Song of Roland or a reference to another game that references Song of Roland, man. It's references within references. References all the way down.

Maybe this is Bungie's third trilogy of trilogies of games about AI's named after famous swords.

except Halo turned into way more than 3 games and Destiny is already planned to have 4

Hunter Gather. Gathers other hunters for a big hunt.

I am almost positive that one of the articles from people at the original press event stated that you would only play as humans. I can't find it now, but I did read about 20+ articles between then and now so who knows.

Assuming it did, the question we must ask is whether the person who wrote said article was explicitly told this by Bungie, or whether they assumed it based on having only seen human characters.