Vex: Time Traveling Robots.

Recently, the question of why we all call the Vex "time traveling robots" came up and I didn't have a great answer. The only two data points I could find were a potentially vague quote from Chris Barrett from a Gameinformer interview last December where he said of the Vex:

They might time travel or come from another distant time. Where they came from or when they came from is inscrutable.

The second data point was much more recent. One of the pieces of exclusive PS4 content is the Manifold piece or pieces of armor that would help Warlocks "brave the pocket worlds buried in the nameless depths trapped beyond space and time."

Oddly, as I was writing up my Looking Back article I kept coming across DBOers referencing the Vex's supposed time travel capabilities. We had contest winning Haiku, we had very early April 2013 fan fiction, and there were just various comments where people had apparent knowledge of the Vex's time traveling status all throughout the forum. But where did it all come from? We are generally an outstanding and very detail oriented community. Did we all just make up "time traveling robots"?

No, no we didn't. It took a small amount of poking around but I've (re)discovered two additional very good sources:

1. The earlier of the two sources is a Feb, 2013 IGN Concept Art Analysis video in which Ryan McCaffery talks about each of the few early pieces of Destiny concept art. He speculates on each piece, but was also apparently in contact with Bungie around this time as he delivers direct quotes from them at least twice. At about 10:40 he gets to the Vex Postcard Image that was briefly talked about at GDC2013 and says:

They are described as quote, 'time traveling robots’ by Bungie.

2. About a month later kapowaz gave a quick summary of the Edge Magazine's April 2013 Destiny Feature. In one of his bullet points he said, summarizing from Edge:

The Vex are time-travelling robots from the future (I know some speculation has been that they're from the past, but I've never personally been sold on this).

We now have four sources spread from Feb, 2013 to Aug, 2014 all linking the Vex to time travel. Two of those sources were direct quotations from Bungie. One was from a gaming magazine that was provided with Destiny information by Bungie. And one was a description of armor that had the mythic scifi feel that is associated with Destiny.

I've always thought I'd be that much better of a lore person if I'd bother to write down my sources. Well, I now consider these sources suitably written down. :)

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2. About a month later kapowaz gave a quick summary of the Edge Magazine's April 2013 Destiny Feature. In one of his bullet points he said, summarizing from Edge:

The Vex are time-travelling robots from the future (I know some speculation has been that they're from the past, but I've never personally been sold on this).

I don't know what the statute of limitations is concerning magazine scans here now, but I could dig up the issue and share the exact quote here for context. I can't actually remember how much of that line was me paraphrasing and how much was interpretation (although I'd like to think I would have mostly just quoted it). I'll dig it up, anyway, and the powers that he can decide if it's ok to post here.

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Without any perceptible change, players will cross into other people’s worlds and find themselves fighting common enemies. Those enemies are as varied as the universe Bungie has created. The Fallen are a race of Mad Maxian pirates, the Vex are time-travelling robots, the Cabal are rhino-sized brutes, while the ‘space zombies’ are mindless and numerous, and will get a better name soon.

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The actual rule is that we won't post anything that's still on newsstands.

HBO had a magazine article archive - scans that were put up after the issue was no longer on the shelves. We stopped collecting them because we had one problem (EGM sent us a C&D about a year after the last article of theirs went up), and decided it wasn't worth the headache.

One page of an article that came out a year ago is well within the guidelines. :)

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I don't know what the statute of limitations is concerning magazine scans here now …

I've uploaded a bunch of screenshots to imgur which may or may not be considered verboten given that this is from an 18-month old issue and there is vastly more info in the public domain now. Lots of details stand out for me given what we now know, including:

Europa was a human colony, but we abandoned it when the invaders struck. Like every map in the game, Europa is subject to daylight, darkness and the ravages of a persistent weather system
Characters are faceless, defined by their armour and equipment
The Citadel is Destiny at its most visually abstract. Home to the Vex – time-travelling robots from the future – it's a mess of gravity-defying geometry reaching far above the clouds
A derelict ship in the rings of Saturn becomes one of Destiny's dungeons as humanity attempts to reclaim relics from the past

…the quote about Europa accompanies that concept art we've previously seen that shows an icy landscape, with an outpost buried deep in snow drifts. So; both Europa and a derelict in orbit of Saturn were originally destinations we were going to visit, but have subsequently been cut. Something to look forward to in Destiny 2, perhaps?

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[*]A derelict ship in the rings of Saturn becomes one of Destiny's dungeons as humanity attempts to reclaim relics from the past
[/list]

… a derelict in orbit of Saturn were originally destinations we were going to visit, but have subsequently been cut. Something to look forward to in Destiny 2, perhaps?

Is that not the Reef? This is exactly what I had been assuming all this time

Also, I'm hoping that just because we don't have an "explore" mode in an area, it doesn't mean we can't have a one-off mission there (like for Europa)

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… a derelict in orbit of Saturn were originally destinations we were going to visit, but have subsequently been cut. Something to look forward to in Destiny 2, perhaps?

Is that not the Reef? This is exactly what I had been assuming all this time

That's possible, or this may have been merged with the concept of The Reef. I'd been assuming that it was a location within the Asteroid Belt, but I can't find out where I picked that up from. Googling around, I found this page that suggests it's on Saturn, but again, doesn't cite where it gets that from.

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That's possible, or this may have been merged with the concept of The Reef. I'd been assuming that it was a location within the Asteroid Belt, but I can't find out where I picked that up from. Googling around, I found this page that suggests it's on Saturn, but again, doesn't cite where it gets that from.

Perhaps you mixed up the Asteroid Belt with Saturn's rings in your head?

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Perhaps you mixed up the Asteroid Belt with Saturn's rings in your head?

Nah, I was definitely thinking of the asteroid belt, given that we do go to Mars, so I thought of it as being connected (given that the asteroid belt is in orbit beyond Mars).

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That's possible, or this may have been merged with the concept of The Reef.

You could be right about that. It seems to have definitely been a distinct location at one point.

Compare this concept piece

with this.

The Reef, as we've seen, is still very close to how it was concepted.

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I'm pretty sure that Bungie originally described them as time travelling robots in the 2013 GDC presentation by Joseph Staten and Christopher Barrett called "Brave New World: Bungie’s New IP". I'd have to watch it again to be sure though. It's probably worth watching again know that we know more about Destiny to see what kinds of things might be more relevant.

Brave New World: Bungie's New IP (Youtube)

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I just re-watched the whole thing... The refer to the Vex as "futuristic robots" but didn't say the words "time-traveling".

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One of the comments that suck out to me in the video was about some of the legendary armor glowing or having "horns". I always assumed that meant physical horns, but I think the glowing projections we saw on the legendary titan helmet were probably more in line with what they meant.

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Heh. That's what we need. Guardians going around annoying the crap out of each other with Legendary vuvuzelas :)

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Heh. That's what we need. Guardians going around annoying the crap out of each other with Legendary vuvuzelas :)

I think he means these kinds of horns:

The crucible guy had a horn on his helmet. I hope we do have something like that.

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Like these?

Large image: 2340 × 4160

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I want something like this.
[image]

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Forgot about that one altogether.

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I want something like this.

Yes, please.

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I was thinking more like this:
[image]

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I'm going to assume they meant both types when they were referring to horns. Physical and light. They all fit the description.

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Good work. I checked the GDC 2013 presentation, where we first got substantial information on Destiny (and how! I had forgotten how much they said), because I was almost certain that was where the "time-traveling robots" quote first came from, I even thought I could hear Joe Staten saying it, but I checked every section that seemed relevant and it wasn't there or I couldn't find it, and I gave up after that because the next step would've been searching the forum and I have a tendency to while away an afternoon or evening reading old posts when I do that.
So yeah, good on you for finding the sources. I still say it's questionable, and I've thought so since that analysis was first mentioned. Describing them as "time-traveling robots" and seemingly nothing more seemed to me like an encapsulation or summary of what they wanted to get across and have these beings feel like, and the Chris Barrett Game Informer quote seems to back that up, along with what Joe Staten did say at GDC 2013, about them feeling like ancient robots and I think mentioning they were mysterious.
Edit: The wording from the Edge article says this to me too, they give a description of a few words for each race.
Well, that and what I brought up before, it has potential to mess up the plot and the significance of things, and it seems spoilery to tell us and not let us find out. That would be a cool surprise, wouldn't it, to find out they time-traveled, with no hints beforehand? Now that can't happen.
Double edit: or not...

The Citadel is Destiny at its most visually abstract. Home to the Vex – time-travelling robots from the future – it's a mess of gravity-defying geometry reaching far above the clouds

that seems specific...

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Vex: Time Traveling Robots. (Destiny)