Overall (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Saturday, July 22, 2017, 08:48 (2680 days ago) @ Avateur

Yet somehow the Cabal are the very first, after all this time, to just say to themselves, hey selves, let's go wreck what's left of Earth and capture the Traveler. And so they just woosh in and do it. Those walls weren't impressive at all. A lot of this seems to outright defy the entire believability of how we made it to this point even pre-D1, as I stated above.

No. They are the second. The Fallen tried the same thing at the Battle of Twilight Gap. And if the House of Wolves hadn’t been stopped by the Awoken... well:

The transmission was broadcasted on all Fallen frequencies. Lacking, at the time, the ability to crack Fallen encryptions, the Master of Crows could discern only that the Fallen Houses were all talking to each other. That was a thing that had never happened before.

Then the Techeuns looked Earthward—and saw the Fallen there becoming bolder. Tactics suggested they were planning a massive attack. We had no interplanetary arrays—no way to warn Earth. We thought we would be able to do nothing but watch.

But then the Wolves arrived from the Jovians. Their army was hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions strong: a dark wave that washed over the Reef, rushing toward the Earth. As soon as we saw them it was clear that if the Wolves reached Earth, the City would fall.

The difference between the Fallen and the Cabal is that the Cabal appear to be an empire still in its prime instead of the remnants of a Golden Age civilization that had been torn apart and forced to flee to the stars to escape extinction. That, and the Cabal obviously came better prepared to deal with threat of unkillable Guardians.

That said, I do agree we should know much more about the City we are protecting (and abandoning or losing?!) than we do. Same for the Speaker that Ikora Rey is so upset and concerned about. The Zavala’s Prelude trailer is easily the best bit of scene setting we have, but we should have had much more than that. It’s super unfortunate that we don’t.

On the third hand, while Homecoming doesn’t fill in that story gap completely, it is inarguably a better mission than just about anything in Destiny 1. Things are happening. The battle over the City is amazing and terrifying to look at. (Watch the Cabal cruisers rain gun or missile fire down on sections of the City! Watch the fun little loops of Guardian jumpships dogfighting with Cabal fighters / transports.) The interactions between the skybox and the game space is significant (what with the command ship launching the attack pods and missiles into the play space.) and we don’t just hear the Vangard over the comm, we get to see each of them fighting near us.

At some point, Destiny is “just” a FPS. In the same way I don’t look back at the opening mission of Halo 2 and complain that I never set foot on Earth in Halo, so I don’t have any motivation to defend it, it’s pretty silly to claim a lack of motivation or concern, as some have. It would take at least another good five minute cutscene to even begin to explore the full significance of the City and at that point we’d be at 10 minutes before even giving control to the player.

Also, I think this first mission is going to be a bit more important story wise than Destiny 1’s first mission was. I think they are setting up the journeys of each of the Vanguard with some of the dialog. Zavala says something along the lines of “the Traveler can wait, we must get the civilians to safety” while Ikora is all about protecting the Traveler and Clyde-6 is his impulsive self and wants to kill the guy responsible first and ask questions later. From what little we’ve seen, Zavala will be off on Titan trying to rally Humanity’s forces to take back the City, Ikora is off at Io investigating the last place the Traveler touched before it came to Earth, and Cayde-6 foolishly gets trapped on Nessus while hunting Cabal. If the major story beats really do call back to this first mission, it will be a major step forward for Destiny.